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You love your father
but he is intoxicated with bravado.
He has a mouth that will not
stop moving and always detours
when it approaches anything
resembling the truth.
He and he alone
knows the name
of the mastermind
behind the JFK assassination.
He told the story
at least ten times
and at least nine times,
the name changed.
It was a guy named Barry.
A high class hooker named Henrietta.
A midget with a limp
who called himself
Clark Gable
or
Guido, the Governor of Guam
...
Everyone else in the family
laughs behind his back
but kowtows to his face
because Daddy is wealthy,
in an elephantine way.
It would be stupid
to get written out
of his will.
For every dollar he saved,
he added another digit.
At the age of eight,
he saved $10 then $200
and then $3000
but only had $3
in the bank.
But now,
he was a bona fide billionaire.
He measured his wealth
—and ego—
with one billion digits.
Everyone laughed at him
except you:
the one he named
after himself.
He has secretly given you
"allowances" that will guarantee
you never need to do
an honest day's work.
(Despite the fact that,
within your family
honesty is
an alien concept.)
Yet you genuinely
love the old goat
because there was never
a day or an hour
or a minute
when he did not
have time
for Junior.
Secret time
for Junior
but no secret time
for any of your
seven siblings
or the four mothers
who birthed them.
The one who isn't
your mother
is the only one
who hasn't seduced you
or vice versa.
When laughter resonates
from your social circles
because of something
your father said or did,
an arrow pierces your heart.
You get violent and arrested
but of course, Daddy knows
whose palms to grease
and all records
of your arrest
disappear.
When the same laughter
resonates within the social circles
of your seven siblings,
that laughter gets multiplied
by those seven siblings.
That you have genuine feelings
about your father
or about anything
separates you from
all of the siblings.
It also separates you
from all of their mothers.
Finally,
for your twenty-eighth birthday,
you get yourself a megaphone,
wrapped in aluminum foil.
At your birthday party,
with fifty members
of your family present
—including too many cute cousins—
your father, as always, was motor-mouthing.
His gobblydegook
drowned out all present
except for the only one
who bears the exact same name.
You shout into the megaphone
Shut the F**k up,
Daddy Dearest.
And he did exactly that.
Never again did he speak
above a whisper.
Never again did he speak
anything that was fabricated.
Never again did your siblings
ignore honest or genuine feelings.
The same is true
for the mothers
who begat them.
Never again does your father
lie, cheat or steal or inspire
behind his back
hilarity.
All because you did
what any genuine son
would do for a genuinely
crazy father.
...
Not now, not in 2020
nor 2024 nor 2028
but at a later date,
if you decide to seek
the highest office
in this land
you will get
my vote.
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Footnotes
To believe that the revelations of Donald Trump Jr.
are indefensible is to admit having zero understanding
about family dynamics.
The next GoFather/Trump page is
here
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