Escalatorgate

They go up, they go down, and sometimes they just stop

In 2015, Donald Trump made history when he came down an escalator. Yesterday, he made history when he went up. Or tried to. The escalator didn’t actually go up, and therein lies the problem. But Trump did. He walked. That’s quite an achievement given that he doesn’t have a good record when it comes to ascending stairs. The thing that links the two events ten years apart, besides escalators, is lies. Yes, I know that Trump lies whenever he opens his mouth, but bear with me on this.

On 16 June 2015, Trump came down the golden elevator to the basement of Trump Tower in New York to announce that he was going to run for president. When he reached the bottom, he clambered onto a makeshift stage and said: ‘Wow! Woah! That is some group of people. Thousands!’ That was the first lie, the one that should have put paid to the whole daft idea that doofus Trump might actually become president. Imagine if, instead of focusing on Trump, the cameras had panned around and revealed that there were maybe, at most, seventy-five people standing around looking bored. Not thousands, but a few dozen. Trump would immediately have been revealed for the fraud he so clearly is.

Nah, it wouldn’t have made any difference; Trump has always been impervious to the truth. It’s his superpower.

The majority of those few dozen spectators were wearing T-shirts that said ‘Trump. Make America Great Again’. At the time, that statement wasn’t shibboleth or symbol or movement, it was simply a slogan – brand new, without all the sordid baggage of the last ten years. The whole thing was new; there was none of the frenetic energy that we’ve all come to expect whenever Trump appears in front of a MAGA crowd.

Enquiring minds might wonder about the fact that they were wearing those T-shirts. That doesn’t suggest spontaneity. In fact, Trump hired Extra Mile Casting, a New York firm that provides extras for films, to deliver a crowd for the event. Their email to their database of clients went like this:

We are working helping one of are [sic] associates out at Gotham GR with a big event happening on TUESDAY 6/16/15. This is an event in support of Donald Trump and an upcoming exciting announcement he will be making at this event.

This event is called “People for a Stronger America.” The entire group is a pro-small business group that is dedicated to encouraging Donald Trump and his latest ventures. This event will be televised.

We are looking to cast people for the event to wear t-shirts and carry signs and help cheer him in support of his announcement. We understand this is not a traditional “background job,” but we believe acting comes in all forms and this is inclusive of that school of thought.

The rate for this is: $50 CASH at the end of the event.

Isn’t that interesting? What screams out about the above casting call is that the turnout was small because Trump was too cheap to pay for a bigger crowd.

He had a prepared speech for the event, but, once he got comfortable, he went off script, spouting what we now know to be his greatest hits: Obama, the Wall, windmills, Mexico, immigrants, China, China, China. The more comfortable Trump feels, the more he lies. He felt supremely comfortable and confident that day. The speech featured the first public airing of a claim that has since become his tag line:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting.

There’s an interesting story related to that outburst. Directly in front of the makeshift stage, just fifteen metres away, was an ice cream parlour. Behind the counter was a guy from Mexico, very likely undocumented. He was neatly turned out, very polite and working very hard to keep up with demand for banana splits and knickerbocker glories. He wore a hat that said ‘Trump Ice Cream’. Charlotte Alter, then a junior reporter for Time, found the whole scene a bit surreal:

‘It was just so interesting to me that literally, you know, Trump is speaking to this crowd and there are all these cameras, and then behind the cameras, behind the crowd, in his line of vision, there’s this guy standing directly in front of him, who is a perfect example of all of the sort of contradictions at work in this campaign.’

Ah, how innocent we were back then. If only we’d known that contradictions would provide the backbeat to our lives for the next ten years and will inevitably do so for at least four more.

Fast forward to the present. Yesterday Trump was taking time out of his busy schedule to make an ass of himself at the UN headquarters in New York. I won’t go into what he said, since that’s been covered all too well in the media. Pundits are insisting that the extended harangue of UN delegates is further evidence that Trump is slipping into the black hole of dementia, but I can’t honestly tell the difference from the way he has behaved ever since he first invaded my consciousness ten years ago. He’s always been a lunatic, always been an asshole. I think it’s quite funny that he told delegates that the UN building is a piece of shit and that he once offered to improve it for just $500 million. You could have had marble floors instead of terrazzo, he boasted yesterday. Given what everyone now knows about the Oval Office remodel, those comments must have prompted a massive sigh of relief. You can easily understand why the UN politely turned him down.

In order to get to the General Assembly hall, Trump had to go up an escalator. He and Melania were accompanied by the usual entourage of advisers, Secret Service agents, minions, photographers, etc. As he stepped on to the escalator, it suddenly stopped. You can see the video here:

As you can hear from the video, when Trump started speaking, he immediately complained about the faulty escalator which was, I guess, further proof about what a shitty building the UN headquarters is. He also complained about the faulty teleprompter, apparently another example of UN incompetence. (I’m not sure why he was so bothered about the teleprompter since he never uses it anyway and going off script offers him so much more opportunity to lie, which is his favourite sport.)

After the speech, most of the serious media — or what’s left of it — wanted to talk about the string of insults that Trump hurled at delegates, and what an overall embarrassment he is. The Trumpers, however, had other ideas. For them, the biggest news item that day was that malfunctioning escalator. Karoline Leavitt, a.k.a. Propaganda Barbie, was one of the first to fire a shot:

“If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.”

Over on Fox News, Jesse Watters provided his trademark over-reaction:

“They sabotaged them and they could have hurt the first lady. This is an insurrection. We either need to leave the UN or we need to bomb it.”

A little while later, Leavitt strode into the Fox studio, keen to turn this little crisis into a full blown apocalypse. She had the following exchange on live television with Watters:

Watters: “It does appear to be sabotage with the escalator and the teleprompter. Leavitt: It appears that way to me. If we find these were UN staffers who were purposely trying to literally trip up the president and the first lady, there better be accountability for those people and I will personally see to it.”

“Also, the audio inside of the room was much lower and different for the president than the previous speaker. So when you put all of this together - teleprompter, escalator - it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me. And I know that we have people, including the Secret Service, who are looking into this to try to get to the bottom of it.”

That was a red rag to the MAGA bulls who were listening. Give them an excuse to start a war and they’ll do just that. Senator Mike Lee, MAGA’s favourite rent-a-lunatic, is always ready with something inflammatory to say. On this occasion, he did not disappoint:

‘This should be the beginning of the end of America’s relationship with the UN. The UN deep state tried to embarrass Trump and make him less safe Instead, they embarrassed themselves and gave momentum to the effort to defund the UN.’

Not to be outdone, General Michael Flynn, went into characteristic meltdown mode:

‘It is high time the US gives the UN the middle finger, walks away from it, tells those that want to stay to build a new UN in the Gaza Strip since most of the nations love Hamas. Turn the current UN into a hotel and stick a giant “TRUMP” sign on the outside! AND Assign Delta Force as his personal security. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. These are dangerous times and we can no longer kid ourselves.’

With the floodgates fully open, there followed a tsunami of utter lunacy, with contributors eager to outdo one another for sheer idiocy. ‘Defund the UN!’, was a common cry. The MAGA faithful out in Podunkville were absolutely certain that the malfunctioning escalator was sufficient excuse for launching the nukes. Podcaster Brenden Dilley shouted: ‘If we discover that the UN deliberately turned off the escalator and risked everything injuring the president and first lady, we should bomb them. All of them.’ And so on and so on, and scooby dooby ooh ah.

What a bloody mess. As if Trump’s speech to the UN wasn’t ridiculous enough, the whole shitshow gets even shittier by the addition of Escalatorgate. Do these people have any idea just how stupid they sound? No, probably not.

Oh, by the way, it’s subsequently been discovered that the escalator stopped because someone from Trump’s party accidentally triggered the emergency stop mechanism just as Trump was climbing on. It was also revealed that Trump’s teleprompter was entirely under the control of White House staff. So, nothing to do with the UN. A statement to that effect was issued by a UN official, to which Deputy White House Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich responded:

“I call bullshit.”

Yeah? Well so do I. Oh, please, when is this all going to end? I’m just gonna lie down in the dark and take a couple Tylenol, or paracetamol as they say over here. While resting, I’m gonna fantasise about what might have happened if someone had pushed that emergency stop button back in 2015.

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