Diane Roberts: What Donald Trump means by ’looking presidential’
According to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton does not appear presidential. As he remarked in an ABC television interview last week: “Well, I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.” A presidential look. Hmm. Let’s think this through. Could it be the hands? Everyone knows presidents should have small hands and her hands are on the large side. Could it be the ties? She doesn’t even wear a tie! You know who else doesn’t wear a tie? Fidel Castro. Kim Jong Un. And that Iranian guy. What about the lipstick? Have you ever seen a president in lipstick? Other than Ronald Reagan that time. Maybe it’s the smiling. She doesn’t do enough of it. George Washington was a big smiler, you know, rocking those wooden teeth. Of course, you could say she smiles too much. Not dignified. Much better to affect a sphincterish pout. And what’s with that hair? OK, it’s blond (Thomas Jefferson was a blond), and styled and everything, but when the wind blows, it, like, moves. Everyone knows presidential hair should not budge during public appearances. Presidential hair should have the gravitas that comes from Extra Firm Hold hair spray and/or staples. Donald Trump’s hair only moves at night, when he lets it loose to hunt small animals for food. Even Hillary Clinton’s insults are lame and thus unpresidential. “Basket of Deplorables”? Jeez Louise, what is she, some kind of professor? Here’s how a truly presidential person applies the old verbal slap-down: refer to Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas;” ridicule John McCain for being a POW; call Megyn Kelly “lightweight” and a “bimbo.” Say Ruth Bader Ginsburg is senile, David Brooks is an idiot and Michael Bloomberg is short. And for good measure, disparage a Gold Star family who happens to be Muslim, diss a crying baby, label Mexicans “rapists” and “murderers,” and make fun of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from arthrogryposis. Side note: Ann Coulter insists Donald Trump wasn’t making fun of Kovaleski, he was merely “doing standard retard.” But Trump rejects the very notion of “standard.” I happen to think if Trump was “doing” a “retard,” it would be the most retarded, HUGELY retarded, luxury retarded, the absolutely best retarded act anyone has ever seen in the history of the planet. Back to that unpresidential Hillary, which is to say: pneumonia. Who ever heard of a president with pneumonia? Grover Cleveland had gout. JFK suffered from Addison’s disease so bad he got hooked on opioids. Taft was morbidly obese. Abraham Lincoln got smallpox. Andrew Jackson had rotting teeth, migraines, bleeding in his lungs, and pain from the bullet wounds he got in two separate duels. He was also as crazy as a cut snake. But he didn’t have pneumonia. Only William Henry Harrison got pneumonia, and we all remember what a disaster he was. Remember when Trump said this about Carly Fiorina? “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” I don’t know about you, but I’ve detected a slight resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina. Can’t quite put my finger on it. Elizabeth Warren Clinton’s eyes are bigger. Fiorina is taller. Clinton’s a D; Fiorina is an R … Call me crazy — and definitely unpresidential — but I think what Trump means when he says Clinton lacks that “presidential look” is really that she lacks a penis. Women don’t play football. Women don’t join the infantry. Women don’t become president — except for when they do. ___ Diane Roberts’s book “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America” will be out in paperback this fall. She teaches at FSU
Diane Roberts: Donald Trump feels presidency is ‘man’s job’
Hillary Clinton is sick. Important white men-types, such as Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump, say so. She sits down at some of her campaign appearances — ON A STOOL! Or with a PILLOW BEHIND HER BACK! Clearly, her spine is disintegrating before our very eyes. She has Parkinson’s. A blood clot. A brain tumor. She has no stamina. She’s feeble. She has fits, seizures, rolling her eyes around and laughing. Or she’s possessed by demons. Giuliani, now: there’s an hombre! His intellect is so honed, so energetic, so like a cheetah about to pounce on a gazelle, that at a recent campaign event, he forgot 9/11. Which happened while he was mayor of New York. Last week, he praised Republicans thus: “Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.” Giuliani’s been all over television, insisting that the press ignores the obvious fact that Clinton is Not Long for This World. Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, she of the necklace made of bullets and the assertion that “Obama invaded Afghanistan,” went on CNN and concurred: she diagnosed Clinton with “dysphasia,” a language disorder resulting from brain damage. You will have noticed that Hillary Clinton can barely string three words together while Pierson’s boss is a silver-tongued master of Ciceronian rhetoric. Donald Trump says Clinton sleeps all the time. She takes “too many naps.” Trump only needs three or four hours of shut-eye. No naps. He says himself: “no naps for Trump!” Only losers and weaklings nap. But here’s the thing about womenfolk: they are always sick. When they’re young, the monthly cycles make them moody and weird. When they get pregnant, the rampant hormones invade their brains, turning them pretty much crazy. Then it’s the menopause, attacking what little rationality they have left. After that, it’s downhill into dementia. You can’t allow one of them to become the most powerful person on the planet. There was a movie about this very thing: it came out in 1964 and was called “Kisses for My President,” Polly Bergen plays the first woman president; Fred MacMurray is her husband, the First Gentleman. What ensues is, to put it in Trumpian terms: A Disaster! Madam President spends so much time on working with Congress, containing dangerous dictators and dealing with the Russians, she doesn’t even notice that her daughter’s running around with an unsuitable boy, and her emasculated husband, installed in an office with ruffled curtains and other girlie stuff, nearly runs off with an old flame. It’s chaos. Until one day this bad mother of a president faints, and it is revealed she’s pregnant. She resigns (because hormones, obvs) and the natural order is restored. There’s a reason why American women were not allowed to vote until 100 years ago (the anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s final passage is Aug. 26), despite all that stuff about equality and democracy in our founding documents. Because they’re weak. Their uteruses tell them what to do. They get hysterical — that’s from the Greek word for uterus! They’re not strong-minded. Peter Thiel, the gazillionaire founder of PayPal and Trump delegate, thinks it’s a pity women ever got the franchise, since they turn around and vote for welfare, disaster relief, the environment, other women. Bunch of suckers. Or else they’re unfeminine. When Donald Trump divorced his first wife Ivana, he said it was because she no longer had her “softness.” She’d become “an executive, not a wife.” Trump left her, as he told Vanity Fair magazine, for “a piece of ass — a good one!” but when the POA (AKA Marla Maples) took to working outside the home, he balked again: “When I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.” Yeah, women are just too emotional and petty to be president. Especially Hillary Clinton. A female Trump voter at a recent rally clarified it for Daily Show reporter Jordan Klepper and the rest of us: “The presidency is a man’s job,” she said. “A female has more hormones she could start a war in 10 seconds.” Ladies, don’t you just want to go lie down? Maybe take a Valium? ___ Diane Roberts’s book “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America” will be out in paperback this fall. She teaches at FSU.
Diane Roberts: Hey, football fans! How’s Donald Trump gonna do?
Greeting sportsfans, I’m Brent Toast of ESPN, along with former Heisman winner Johnny Twitt. Welcome to the most important event of 2016, the college football national championship! Who will prevail? Will it be the Clemson University Tigers, led by evangelical whackjob Dabo Swinney, or the Crimson Tide of Alabama, coached by gazillionaire and part-time Bond villain Nick Saban? But first, let’s look at the second-most important event of 2016, the race for the White House. Who’s playing with his hand in the dirt? Who’s got his ears pinned back? And — this is crucial — who’s No. 1 in pandering? Johnny? Thanks, Brent. Right now I’d say you’ve got to give the edge to Carly Fiorina. Her 40 time ain’t that hot — at 22 hours, it’s right up there with the Matanuska Glacier — but there’s nobody out there more shameless. Check this out: Minutes before Stanford took the field against an Iowa team already demoralized by the sheer number of Republican hopefuls crisscrossing the state, Fiorina sent this tweet: “Love my alma mater, but rooting for a Hawkeyes win today. #Rose Bowl.” Whoa, Johnny! That’s impressively, you might even say, stupidly, brazen. You got it, Brent. Between Christian McCaffrey’s running and the Stanford band’s halftime show featuring cow-tipping and references to FarmersOnly.com, Iowa collapsed like wet wheat. At least Fiorina tried to make a play. All Jeb Bush could come up with was free coozies at the pregame pep rally. Coozies, Johnny? That’s right, Brent. Coozies, black and gold, with “Hawkeyes for Jeb” on ‘em. That’s pretty tragic right there, Johnny. Not even “Jeb for the Hawkeyes.” No. No. What about Marco Rubio? Could be a momentum issue: the Michigan Wolverines delivered an old-fashioned fanny-whupping to Marco Rubio’s Gators down in the Citrus Bowl. That had to hurt. Bad year all round for Florida, Johnny. Houston owned FSU in the Peach and USF got slapped harder than a redheaded stepchild by Western Kentucky. Plus, Rick Scott is their governor. Ugly, Brent. Ugly. What’s happening with the Democrats, football-wise? Well, Brent, no one’s actually seen the Democrats, since they held their debates on game nights, and Hillary Clinton has failed to tell us who she’s supporting in Monday night’s championship game. I have to think it’s Clemson: the state of Alabama has pretty much outlawed Democrats. South Carolina has an early primary, too. What about Donald Trump? Well, that’s the big question. We reached out to his campaign but all they’d say is that he roots for the Wharton School of Business. The Wharton doesn’t have its own football team, Johnny. Must be some confusion with the U Penn Quakers. Au contraire, Brent. Trump specifically stated that the Quakers are “huge losers” and that he would kill ISIS the way they taught him to at Wharton. Well, OK, then. In related news, we now know who bankrolled the skywriting over the Rose Bowl, you know, the “Trump is Disgusting”? A property developer from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Name’s Stan Pate. Democrat? No, a Republican. Scary. Developer versus developer. It’s like the Civil War. Whatever. Trump’s getting some football love from former Georgia Bulldog great Herschel Walker and Patriot QB Tom Brady … Hot wife. Can’t argue with you there, my friend, but those guys have been hit in the head many, many times. Hard. Got to remember that, Johnny. Stay with us — we’ll be right back with Sen. Bernie Sanders, our guest picker on GameDay. Can he beat Rick Ross and Katy Perry? • • • Diane Roberts teaches at Florida State University. Her latest book is “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.” For more state and national commentary visit Context Florida.
