President | Sadie Hasler

Trump – the Human

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Sadie Hasler

I wonder what the first week of being the new President is like. I can’t stop imagining the private moments of Trump now he’s settling in at the White House. Because the big stuff is almost too unbearable to think about I find myself thinking of the little things. All the little ordinary things humans do, that he too must be doing, right now, in the Obama’s house.

I wonder if he wandered in from the podium after the inauguration to shake a few hands – probably just the pale ones closest to him – before going to christen Obama’s toilet, ceremonially masking the DNA of a good man with his own absurdly boy-child Diet Coke piss-stink; marking his territory. Maybe he looked down at his member while taking a messy slash and drew his effluence in big powerful circles around the bowl while clenching his saggy butt cheeks and rocking back and forth – heel toe, piss jet, heel toe, piss jet, heel toe, pause, piss drop, piss drop, pi-i-iss drop, pause. Little shake. I hate myself for thinking of it. I bet he fucking spoke to his penis. I bet he’s renamed it Mr Mini President or something. I bet he sang to it in a mock Marilyn Monroe rasp. “Happy Inauguration Day, Mister…Mini…Pres-i-dent.” Ugh. I can’t bear it. I bet even Bush had the decency to pee neatly for the first few weeks with some sort of deference to where he was. I bet Bush was so fucking confused he grew on-the-spot kidney stones.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe Trump just congratulated himself with a little wink in the mirror before going back to act all Presidential with a bunch of people either trying not to weep or trying not to wank. What does Trump see when he looks at himself? Does he see a good man with good intentions? Or does he see a bullish man of business who got all the way to the top position by expounding meaningless rhetoric and spurting shit and telling outright lies and calling in old family favours and slamming down anyone that got in his way however he could, and that’s alright with him? Which version of the truth does Trump really see? Not many people are insightful enough to see their own true colours are they?

I wonder how he slept on his first night. I bet he took an annoying amount of time getting undressed. I bet he’s very particular with his clothes. Which is surprising seeing as he looks like he’s shat himself at someone else’s house and panic-stolen a suit. I’m not big into tailoring, but come on mate. (Also, I don’t think I’d like his feet. I bet Obama has pretty feet. Slender and brown and clean and smooth with baby pink soles. Oh Barack.)

I wonder what he’s like in the presidential bedroom, when he’s at his most private. I wonder if he takes the time to look over at his wife undressing, hanging her imitation Jackie O dress on a sturdy hanger. I wonder if looking at her makes him smile. If he notices the little things about her, like a mole on the back of her neck or the way she unconsciously pats her stomach in the mirror. I wonder if he’s tender with her, if he strokes her hair as she falls asleep, or if she slides all the way to the other side of the continentine bed to stare at the shadows, batting her lashes against a satin eye mask and feeling trapped trapped trapped by her foolish assent to being money’s bitch. Or…maybe there is love between them. Maybe they have that and we just don’t see it because we’re mad and doubtful of it all. I wonder if his voice sounds nice when she rests her face on his chest, if he says nice things and makes her smile. He must do mustn’t he? There must be some semblance of a loving creature in there somewhere. It’s just nature to want a cuddle, even if you’re a creature more pre-disposed to sticking your fingers in random dry holes and wondering why they’re not instantly wet for you when you’ve made all that fucking grade A man money. A cuddle. Something in Trump needs to be held. The long-forgotten boy, the one that existed before the spoiling. Think of that. But it’s just too dreadful to think about him being human somehow when everything feels so awful, when the future seems so fucking dark.

I wonder what his first morning was like. I can imagine him eating half a grapefruit for breakfast, pushing the juicy segments through his curiously taut beak, followed by a soft boiled egg with a really expensive spoon that’s breakfasted dozens of Presidents before him. I can see him pretending to read the papers, shuffling them about manfully while Melania sits there blinking, unsure of what it is she’s supposed to do. Maybe new spoons is at the top of her list. I bet Michelle left her a nice note on her First Lady pillow saying “Don’t worry. You’ll find your feet. Remember to smile and you’re halfway there. You can change the spoons if you like, I don’t mind.” Michelle would want Melania to feel nice. Because she’s Michelle.

I wonder if Michelle will ever run for president. I wonder if the Obamas will get to return to the White House in reversed roles. I wonder if the White House staff will all get the sack and be replaced by Trump sycophants. I wonder if the cleaners cried when they changed the sheets. I wonder if black White House staff feel the echoes of an old shame to their servitude now that their boss isn’t a beacon of equanimous equality and friendliness, now that their new boss sees through them, back through the decades to bowing slaves. I wonder about all these ‘little things’.

Fuck I hate that he’s in there. I hate that he’s human and gets to do little things as well as big things like breaking the world. And fuck I’d love to hollow him out with a fucking spoon. A stainless steel one from fucking Sheffield.

Four More Years

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Sadie Hasler

So, he did it. The cool dude got four more years. He can keep his enamel President badge on his jacket pocket. His fit missus can go ahead with the new Whitehouse carpet, which I like to picture as one big Bill Cosby sweater. His kids can continue to throw jelly at the portraits of stiffs in wigs in the Abraham Lincoln playroom. The morons have receded for a while. It’s all good. Chillax.

Four More Years is the chant that accompanied the Obamas there. It was the thing cried at rallies, at conferences, by people on the street, by people on the campaign wagons, by people watching the footage all around the globe. It was the internal mantra of everyone with a brain who cared about the world: “Please, just, not the Mormon. He looks like George Hamilton and Ted Danson had a fight in a body bag and accidentally morphed. Which would be really cool if he wasn’t a total chump.” The civilised world all squeezed their eyes tight shut and prayed that America would get off the couch and go and vote; to allow their ‘great nation’ to keep moving forwards and not devolve back to the political equivalent of having no opposable thumbs. They did it. They put their Oreos down and went outside, to the polls. Democracy is safe for another fou…

HANG THE EFFING EFF ON!! Obama’s been in power for four years already? Where the Fricklin Delanor Roosevelt did that go? Why are we asking for another four years when the first four aren’t up yet, surely? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO TIME? How casually we flick it off like wooden beads on an abacus into the ether.

I took my nephew Elliot to see Madagascar 3 in the week. In 3D – I’m no skinflint, I want him to call me Cool Auntie Sadie, and I’m not morally above paying for the title. I didn’t pay for 3D glasses though because it just felt wrong. (Bite me, Odeon. Your prices are disgraceful.) Instead we wore 3D glasses that accidentally fell in my bag last time I was there. (It’s very dark in there, isn’t it?) We were about a third of the way through, and I was running a very rumbustious internal monologue about how Dreamworks’ scriptwriters should go to a Pixar seminar on How To Be Good At It, when I heard a rustling next to me. I remembered I was sitting there next to a little person that I was related to, and I saw that he was loving it. I stopped my cerebral rant and looked at the pretty colours.

I turned to secretly watch Elliot for a bit. He was holding up his head so the way-too-big 3D glasses didn’t slip down the heart-wrenching freckles on his nose. His face was lit up by the screen and his smile was as wide as the sea. He roared with laughter, his nose wrinkling and popping the glasses off the end. He reached for them without taking his eyes off the screen and clumsily prodded them back onto his face. He didn’t want to miss a nanosecond of the magic. In that semi-lit moment I saw the man he would be. He is at that age, where the face starts becoming the face it will be. Elliot is 5. In four more years, he will be 9. Four years after that he will be 13. Then 17, then 21. A man. He will hold the keys to the door. He will drink, and make love to someone, and vote. He will shape his life.

I almost did a little sick-up of Nachos flavoured love and panic. I can accept the quick passing of my own life, I almost look forward to the slipper shuffling of my seventies, the blanket-on-knee cantankerousness which I hope will be shared with someone even more cantankerous than myself. But when I thought of Elliot’s time passing that quickly, when I thought of his life being notched off in chunky increments – old phases ushered out and the new ones hurried in, quad-bundles of time being ticked off like inventoried cargo, four more years: check, tick, gone – I almost stood up in the cinema and wailed at everyone to make it stop. Press pause. Don’t let it go too quickly for him. Let the glasses stay magical and not vari-focal. Let him stay young.

Then a lion and a leopard and a hippo danced to Katy Perry’s Firework and it was all over. I was blubbing like a good un. The film finished, the lights came up. Elliot delivered his considered critique (“That was good.”) and chomped the last Butterkist. And we went home for tea, singing.