My Dinner with Donald, part two
By Bob Gaydos
Dinner with Trump? No words.
It was a good question. An excellent question, actually: “What would you say to him if you did have dinner with him?”
The “him” in this case would be Donald Trump. The notion of having dinner with him was the subject of a recent column I wrote regarding an email (actually several) from Trump inviting me to enter a lottery for a chance to have dinner with him. One lucky person will win! Just donate!
Ultimately, I didn’t donate and then killed all the emails and wrote a column about what a unique experience it would be to have dinner with a former president, especially this recently indicted and convicted and still under investigation former president. But then, what would I, a mere retired journalist, possibly say to Trump, I asked jokingly, “Pass the ketchup?”
The moderator of a Facebook site to which I belong and where I had posted the column (The Thom Hartmann Bloggers Group) approved the post and then called me on it in the comments section. “What would you say?”
I hate when they do that. Make you get all serious about stuff. But, I thought, it’s a legit question. So I’ve given it some thought.
Knowing what a narcissist Trump is, there’s always the basic question to ask a prominent person: Who was the biggest influence on your life?
But I probably wouldn’t want to hear about his racist, slumlord father or his old friend and thug-of-a-lawyer Roy Cohn. Not dinner talk.
Family? “How’s Baron? When’s the last time you saw him? Does he play any sports? How do you feel about Ivanka losing interest in politics? Wasn’t that something how the woman in the changing room at Bergdorf Goodman looked so much like your second wife, Marla, in that photograph?”
Scratch family.
Sports? “How come that hotshot football player, Herschel Walker, whom you signed to play for the New Jersey Generals in the doomed-to-fail USFL when they wouldn’t let you have a team in the NFL, lost, despite your support, when he ran for the Senate in Georgia?”
No.
I finally decided the only question I really wanted to ask Trump was, “What did Putin say when it was just the two of you in that room together with no one taking notes and you came out looking like someone who had just been blackmailed over incriminating photos and he was smiling like he had just swallowed the canary?”
I also figured he’d never answer.
Umm, “How do you live with yourself?”
He wouldn’t understand.
Ultimately, I decided there could be no dinner talk with Donald Trump because from what I’ve seen, he doesn’t have conversations. He talks at you. He makes pronouncements. He tosses out gratuitous insults. He comments on how much he knows about so many things. He makes stuff up. He doesn’t understand a lot of stuff. He has no sense of humor. For some reason, he likes to show off old maps he found lying around the White House. If you’re an attractive, young female, he’ll put his hand on your thigh and slide it as far as possible because he can because, as he’s said, he’s a celebrity.
And then there’s this: He has, by extension, called me, an ink-stained wretch of a newspaperman, “the enemy of the people.”
“Pass the ketchup,” it is.
rjgaydos@gmail.com
Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.
Tags: Bob Gaydos, dinner, email, Facebook, Georgia, Herschel Walker, Ivanka, Newspapers, NFL, president, Putin, Roy Cohn, Thom Hartmann, trump
