CSI: American Carnage (Wednesday, August 14, 2019)
WASHINGTON – It is late and the Executive Lounge is quiet but for the sound of crunching cheesy gorditas, ordered the previous week from the Mexican place in Arlington that you can drive your car into and has the good night hours. Hector went. Donald is lying on the recliner, gordita in one hand, remote in the other. Stephen, wearing his lederhosen and argyles, has fallen asleep in the Queen Anne side chair. Donald pulls his wrapper tighter. Stevie, he says, Stevie! Dammit, this is a very interesting part. These guys in Monaca. I told em I’d build the fucking plant. I told em we’d get the chemicals flowing and the steel. And that’s what I did, you know, they could see it, because we were there, in the building, with the half-done stuff and more stuff undone, okay, and I told them I’m a builder. That’s what I do. Stephen wakes up and says, Absolutely. Absolutely. They are all with you. Who would be with anyone else? They look around. It’s obvious. Donald says, Okay, yeah. Here is the part I was telling you about, the one where we show them what we’ve done and how their whole world has changed. Donald punches the remote and watches himself in Monaca, standing at a podium in front of the fleshy faced white guys wearing the yellow jacket things that they wear at the building sites. Donald, in a pretty good suit, tells them in one of his best whiney little-boy voices, We need steel. We’ll say, Listen, China, could you do us a favor? We need help. All our steel mills are closed. Oh, damn it. Could you send us some steel, please? We don’t make steel anymore. Well, we make it now. And I’ll tell you what: Those steel mills – U.S. Steel and all of them, all of them – they’re expanding all over the place. (Applause.) New mills. New expansions. We hadn’t have, we didn’t have a new mill built in 30 years, and now we have many of them going up. Many car plants. They’re coming in from Japan. I told Prime Minister Abe, great guy, I said, Listen, we have a massive deficit with Japan. They send thousands and thousands, millions, of cars. We send them wheat. Wheat. That’s not a good deal. And they don’t even want our wheat. They do it because they want us to at least feel that we’re okay. You know, they do it to make us feel good. Well we feel good now, and the cars, stuffed with wheat, are piling up. And the plants are moving. Our roads are full. Waves of grain. Waves of grain. The guys dressed in the yellow jacket things break into applause. Donald holds the podium with both hands and looks around. He says, Waves of grain. More applause. Donald pauses the teevee. You see what I did there, Stevie. Stephen says, You told them that they were sitting in a building that you were building and a lot of them were getting jobs in your new steel and car plants everywhere around the country, and the farmers still get the wheat. Win, win, and win. Donald says, That’s right. And we are getting the wheat back at below cost, thanks to the great tariffs, which they may not like in Hong Kong, where the people are angry with the government trying to take us down. That’s okay. They are believing what we are seeing and what we are saying, which is the goal. That’s what I am doing, Stevie, and I know how to do it. I am bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves. .– Wednesday, August 14, 2019