A torn tissue of stylish lies

A torn tissue of stylish lies
by David Benjamin

“He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth… He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her, she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’”
— Donald Trump, 2011

MADISON, Wis. — Amidst the latest D.C. mishigoss over Kavanaugh and Cohen, not to mention the “Horseface vs. Tiny” tiff, the media have glossed over the sudden resignation of one of Donald Trump’s most devoted senior enablers.

Incredibly, I was the first journalist to call and ask him why he was leaving. I’m referring, of course, to Arlo Fiffler, whose official West Wing title is Special Assistant for Wild-Ass Theories (SAWAT, pronounced “Say what?”), but who has been whispering creatively into Trump’s ear for almost a decade.

“I’m the one who came up with the ‘Kenyan usurper’ dodge,” said Fiffling. “Donny-Boy — I call him that — he says to me, ‘Aw, ridiculous! Nobody’ll swallow it.’ And I’m like, ‘Trust me, Donny. There’s a million nuts out there absolutely sure that Hitler never offed a single Jew, and ten times that many who believe Elvis is still alive and living in Tupelo disguised as a Filipina hairdresser named Elvira. And Hillary? If you stood up and said she’s a serial murderer with 50 bodies buried under the White House lawn, I promise, you’d get at least 20 million Americans screaming at the Secret Service to drive a backhoe into the Rose Garden and start digging up stiffs! I’m saying this to Donny-boy and he gets this glint in his eye. He goes, ‘Ya think?’ And I go, ‘Damn straight, Boss!’ Then he just grins that sneery grin of his and he goes, ‘Hot diggity, I’m gonna be president!’”

“And that’s when you dreamed up the fairy tale about Obama born in Kenya?”

“Well,” said Fiffling, “the rumor was already circulating. What it needed was a back story — my specialty — and, of course, a shameless blowhard to sell it.”

“And you had a built-in blowhard.”

“Exactly!” said Fiffling. “Me and Donny, a match made in Ringling’s center ring. Donny-boy’s birther whopper was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“But Arlo,” I said, “why leave now? Your whole scam is working so well.”

Fiffling confessed his frustrations. “I’m an artist. Really. I mean, look, every great con starts with one neat nugget of bullshit in 25 words or less — the Big Lie: Donny had bone spurs. Ted Cruz’s dad shot JFK. Donny has big hands and a gigantic penis. Hillary kidnaps tiny tots and sells them to perverts out of a pizza parlor. Donny is an avid reader, a devout Christian, a faithful spouse and a doting father with a scratch handicap. None of it true, but easy to claim and hard to challenge, right? The hard part for me, though, is that there’s no art, no style, to any of this malignant mendacity!”

He rambled on. “The art — the beauty — is in the back story, the details and flourishes that turn a mere falsehood into a literary tour de force! For instance…”

Fiffling boasted about inventing Obama’s Kenyan granny and fabricating her memory of baby Barack’s birth — on videotape! — in a Kenyan hut. “But I had all these cool details!” said Fiffling. “The printing of a birth notice in a fake Honolulu newspaper, the delicate process of ‘aging’ the news clip to look 40 years old. I made his white mother non-existent and his transcripts phony. My favorite touch was how evil Socialists spirited Obama into America, flying in rickety DC-3s from Nairobi to Jakarta to Bogotá and finally Little Rock, tucked into one of Bill Clinton’s monthly shipments of heroin, whores, mescal and Mexican pedophiles.

“I mean,” said Fiffling, “this was an adventure to keep you on the edge of your seat! I wrote it down, in big letters, for Donny to spin the whole yarn, expose Obama, destroy the Clintons, shock the world. The press would’ve ate it up!”

Fiffling’s back story was far more fun than Trump’s crapola about his imaginary detectives in Hawaii and the unlikely forgery of a phony birth certificate. I asked, “What happened? Where did this terrific tale go?”

“Donny-boy just skimmed all my work, flipped a few pages and then he goes, ‘Hey, tremendous, Arlo! But it’s, like, way too long. Why don’t I just wing it?’”

“Wing it? Really?” I said. As a fellow storyteller, I could feel Arlo’s pain.

“Still, I stuck with the big guy,” said Fiffling. “I figured once Donny’s president, he’ll feel the gravity of the office. He’ll want lies more beautiful and lyrical — long-form falsehoods that soothe the savage breast and mesmerize the media. He’ll grow. Together, we could produce bullshit so smooth and synthetic that you could frost a wedding cake with it.”

Fiffling was especially proud of his emergency back story for the “Access Hollywood” fiasco. It was a whopper he had to trump up in a matter of minutes.

“At first, I was stumped. How do you cover for a guy who admits he’s a sexual predator? But then,” said Fiffling, “when Donny hit his moral rock-bottom — the bit about ‘grabbing pussy’ — I saw the light at the end of the love-tunnel.”

Fiffling paused to savor the memory. “First, in that whole disgusting dialog, he never said ‘woman’ or ‘girl.’ Just ‘them’ or ‘it.” So, I ask myself, was Donny talking about girls at all? No! Way! In the revised version — mine — the tape had not started running yet when Donny started raving about how much he loves kittens. Pussy cats! He goes on — untaped! — about Fluffy, his very first kitten, and how he loved Fluffy to pieces and couldn’t resist kissing Fluffy all the time, and Fluffy would let Donny do anything to her because Fluffy loved Donny just as much. But then, poor Donny! He was crushed when his cruel dad packed him off to military school, where he couldn’t take Fluffy. Heartbreak turned to horror when Fluffy saw Donny leaving her, ran into the street and was squished by a wayward cement truck. The story ends with Donny crying himself to sleep over his poor dead pussy every night in the barracks, where he got the nickname Crybaby Don — which motivates Donny to become the toughest, coolest cadet in school history and to launch his playful habit of giving his best buddies affectionate nicknames like Lyin‘ Ted, Little Marco and Crooked Hillary.”

“Gosh, that’s great material, Arlo,” I said.

Bitterly, Fiffling said, “You know how much Donny used? Nothing! He handed it back and said, ‘Nice, Arlo, but I don’t need it. Putin has my back.”

The last straw landed this week when Fiffling concocted a wild-ass, but riveting “rogue killers” alibi designed to cover for Trump’s BFF, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.

“C’mon, man,” I said. “How do you explain a journalist and a bone saw going into a room, and the journalist never comes out in one piece? Or any pieces?”

“Well, I’ve done it,” said Fiffling, “as if anybody cares.”

I said I care, so Fiffling said, eagerly, “Okay, first, how’d the rogue killers get into the embassy? Easy. Through the kitchen, disguised as 15 greengrocers delivering yams and turnips. But not just any turnips. These are rare desert turnips seized from farms in Yemen. Do you have any idea how hard a raw Yemeni turnip is. It’s like a rock! You need — that’s right! — a bone saw to slice it up before you can cook it. So, y’see, nobody in the kitchen looked twice when the killers — who happened to be ruthless rogue Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar — flashed the bone saw. Everyone thought they were just there to help chop turnips. The surprise didn’t come ’til they charged right through the kitchen, grabbed the first journalist they could find and started sawing him into little pieces. I mean, Rohingya Muslims really hate reporters. They see one and they go totally postal…”

There was more to Arlo’s wild-ass whopper. A lot more. But after about ten more minutes, I lost interest and stopped listening.