The Weekly Screed (#768)

The Achilles’ kisser
of Donald Trump
by David Benjamin

“Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”
                                          — Donald Trump

PARIS — It’s a mystery — especially given the example he has established — why none of his opponents for the presidency of the United States have attacked presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump where he’s most vulnerable.

The guy looks awful. I mean, to use his word, horrible. Disgusting. Creepy, discolored and bloated. Normally, knocking a politician’s looks is taboo. But this year, as they say on “Law and Order,” Trump has “opened the door.”

We’re talking a huge door here, beginning with the guy’s mouth. I get the willies every time I watch Donald talking through a lipless orifice that looks like one of Mattel’s rejected prototypes for the plastic kisser on Malibu Barbie. “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah noticed that Trump’s signature moué looks more like an anus that a mouth. Cartoonist Tom Toles draws Trump’s mouth as a sort of octopus-sucker on a pedestal. It’s chillingly accurate.

But Trump’s mouth is just the tip of the blubberberg.

For any reasonably aggressive opponent, Donald’s soft underbelly is, well, his soft underbelly. The guy is fat. Donald talks about Rosie O’Donnell? He’s fatter.

I cannot begin to fathom why, at every opportunity, Trump’s adversaries don’t dwell on his hair, cantilevered front and back, dyed a shade of strawberry blonde unknown to nature and teased into a state of perpetual, giggling self-mockery. Every day, all day, Americans are gazing at the most ridiculous and unconvincing comb-over since Gene Keady retired as basketball coach at Purdue. Why is this not an issue?

Stated in terms as politically incorrect as the man deserves, Trump is bald. Bald! He’s a cueball with fringe.

Next, let’s talk fingers. When Kurt Anderson, in Spy, last century, summarized Donald as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” he triggered two decades of vengeful vituperation from Trump. Why? Because Anderson was right. Check out those little Trump stumps. He couldn’t cover an octave to save Atlantic City. Trump’s attenuated digits are pink, dainty and softer than a teddy’s tummy. More significantly, they’re the sort of feckless fingers that have never done an honest day’s work, turned a screw, cleaned a toilet or gripped an ax-handle. They’re the hands of a sissy, rendered all the more effeminate by Trump’s pathological germophobia. He says he loves, loves, loves ‘em, but he’d rather not touch the horny-pawed Caucasoids who fill his stadia, sucker-punch his protesters and swallow gleefully his vows of ethnic cleansing and autocracy.

Next: What is the man doing to his skin? It’s tinted (basted? spray-painted?) only slightly less orange than his hair. I keep wondering when one of those white-bordered green fruit molds is going to suddenly erupt, and spread, on one of Trump’s puffy little apricot cheeks.

Plus, he’s old! He’s the only politician in history who wears make-up when he’s NOT on television. Strip away the cosmetic surgery, wash off all the foundation and blusher, the chemical tan and a ton of talcum, plop a flowered hat on his chromium dome and he turn, for all appearances, into one of those demented grandmothers in the express checkout line at Waldbaum’s arguing unto death the price of a single beet.

How does he get away with this? If only his tastefully reluctant opponent set them loose, Hillary’s campaign attack dogs could revel in mocking that polyurethane face, his swollen figure and those frantic little doll-fingers.

Sure, Trump could retaliate, sniping at Hillary’s wrinkles, her unruly mane, her jowls and pantsuits? But he’d simply be conceding that she’s a 60-something lady who looks her age and doesn’t work that hard to hide it because — as she’ll mention — she’s got a white whale to harpoon.

Trump is the cliché of a guy fighting desperately against the ravages of time, and losing by three touchdowns. His media saturation has gotten people used to looking — without recoil — at the Dorian Gray of Mar-a-Lago. But if you encountered him for the first time, perhaps strolling with your little daughter on the sidewalks of New York, you’d wonder for a moment if one of Stephen King’s circus-clowns had risen from the sewer. You’d notice the vainglorious strut, the jut of his painted jaw, the lifeless smile, and you’d say, “Let’s cross the street, sweetie. I don’t like the looks of this guy.”

And then, of course, there’s his “equipment.”While Trump blithely implicates Hillary in her husband’s infidelities, he boasts about the breathtaking beauty of every willing broad he’s ever (prodigiously) boinked, in and out of various wedlocks. He’s begging a question that his every foe has, inexplicably, neglected to ask: “Girls, girls, girls! Why?”

Because he’s rich. Or says he is.

Picture Trump, instead, as a shnook from Jackson Heights who drives a cab, works the loading dock at Wal-Mart or maybe both. Would the working-class Donald draw even a glance from any of those models, showgirls, beauty queens and groupies that the tycoon Trump bribed into the backseat of his limo? Hah! If this guy even tried to say, “How ya doin’, doll?” to one of them, he’d be risking — like you, me, or any other penniless slob — a stiletto heel right through the eyehole.

Bernie, Hillary, Paul Ryan, all you folks: If you really want to hit Trump where it stings, where he’ll lose his cool and start flinging F-bombs on live TV, then just keep repeating the second opinion of the doctor in that famous joke:

“Okay. You’re ugly.”

To follow up, you could produce a poll (real or fake, — with Trump, it doesn’t matter) in which 65 percent of Americans, including 79 percent of women and 88 percent of the really hot-looking ones, agree with the punchline: “You’re ugly, Donald.”

Quick, sweetie. Let’s cross the street. And don’t stare.