September 19, 2018

South Korea’s President, Moon Jae-in, and North Korea’s chubby Kim Jong-un have been having a lot of photo-ops recently.

Moon went to Pyongyang yesterday, and Kim will visit Seoul later this year as part of a charm offensive by both leaders.

Donald Trump’s most recent National Security Advisor is John Bolton, a notorious hawk on matters relating to North Korea.

Bolton summoned associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones to his office a few minutes ago.

“Johanna, my record as being a North Korea sceptic is well-established, and I can’t stand this mutual make nice that’s going on over there.”

“I advised Mr. Trump — who, as you well know, knows nothing about international relations — not to permit this coziness. Not only does it diminish our abiliy to call all the shots, we sure don’t want to move all our troop out of South Korea.”

“And I didn’t like it at all that Mr. Trump went to  Singapore to meet with Kim. When he did that, he totally broke with our tradition of having nothing to do with the North Koreans that might enhance Kim’s reputation.”

With that, Bolton walked out the door, leaving Jones to tell Trump what had happened.

Thirty-one people in the Carolinas have died as a result of Hurricane Florence.

We here at AP have been covering this tragedy; see the last four paragraphs of our post of September 14, https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2018/09/14/trump-pardons-manafort-then-in-north-carolina-says-hurricane-florence-is-fake-news-created-by-democrats/, so we could let our many readers learn that Donald Trump is convinced that Hurricane Florence never happened, but that it was created as fake news by the Democrats just to make him look bad.

So associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, who covers Congress for us, accompanied 83-year old Oklahoma’s senior senator, Jim Inhofe, to North Carolina, which is closed for business.

Florence arrived in a very unpretty manner at Wilmington, which received rainfall totals of 26 inches; Wilmington is cut off from the rest of the Tarheel State.

Inhofe represents Oklahoma, to which we refer as the Earthquake State because it loves fracking, which has caused numerous earthquakes.

Oklahoma is part of the Bible Belt. That must be why Sen. Inhofe, quixotically refusing to listen to the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans cause global warming, likes to say that “God’s still up there” and that the concept of climate change is a big big hoax.

As soon as he set foot in mostly flooded Wilmington, Inhofe told ASR Smith, “My God, Meliisa, I sure do wish some of that water could be sent to Oklahoma for badly needed swimming pools!”

North Carolina is also in the Bible Belt.

As he met flood victim Jasper Johnston, who is an evangelical Christian, Inhofe said, “No worries, Jasper, God does everyhing for a reason!”

Back in Washington, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is being AnitaHilled, collapsed in distress when associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones told him that Trump, in a vain effort to shore up his standing with women ahead of the midterms, has withdrawn his nomination in favor of Professor Anita Hill, who truthfully testified in 1991 before the Senate Judiciary Committtee that now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had explicitly verbally sexual harassed her.

“Brett,” ASR Jones began, “Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991 took place at a time before Harvey Weinstein made many men look really bad. Times have changed, Brett. You’ll be much happier going back to your Republican buddies on the D.C. Circuit.”

Anita Hill is a professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Strategically standing in her office when she received Jones’ call was associate solitary reporter Anthony Sullivan, a Phi Betta Kappa graduate of Brandeis. Sullivan holds an endowered professsorship at Brandeis in Photography. When Hill fainted, Sullivan, a true gentleman, helped her to her feet and immediately began vetting her for her confirmation hearing after the midterms.

Donald Trump knows virtually nothing about American history.

He has probably never even heard of The Federalist Papers. All he knows is that when he gives a federal judge a lifetime appointment, he listens only to Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose project for many years has been to fill our federal courts, at all three levels, especially the Supreme Court, with ideologically conservative Republican judges such as Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. And it’s worked beautifully for Leo and McConnell et al.

Alexander Hamilton (not Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry) wrote Federalist Paper No. 1 in 1787, to urge citizens of New York to agree to ratify a new Constitution. 

Federalist Paper No. 1 reads, in part:

“It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political consitutions on accident and force.”  

As Bob Woodward has plainly said in Fear: Trump In The White House, Trump operates on the principle that power is based on fear. He believes in bravado, lies, and most of all fear and force. He is the virtually total opposite of President Obama.

Trump has probably never read the Constitution.

Rudy Giuliani has; so has Michael Cohen; and so has Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Today, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort copped a plea, agreeing fully to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller.

Your solitary reporter has, since February, been wearing, virtually every day, a t-shirt given to him on the occasion of his birthday. It reads “It’s Mueller Time” against the backdrop of the well-known “It’s Miller Time” beer brand. He regularly tells those who admire it that he will gladly sell it to anyone who wants it, for a donation to the Democratic Naitonal Committee or to the Denver Democratic Party.

Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was with Trump earlier today as he watched Fox News’ report that his close personal friend Paul Manafort had agreed to cooperate with Mueller. Yup, that was the same Manafort, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist and friend of dictators, who had previously vowed to go to trial next week, and who had said that he would never betray Trump.

As Jones watched in horror, Trump signed a pardon for Manafort. Then she watched him board a helicopter that took him straight to Wilmington, North Carolina.

Associate solitary reporter Vincent Compton was in Wilmington as Hurricane Florence took four lives — but Trump was there trying unsuccessfully to explain to nobody in particular that Hurricane Florence had never happened.

Has anyone in Trump’s rapidly diminishing orbit told him that both Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, who wants to go to the Senate, and the Sunshine State’s GOP gubernatorial candidate and Trump clone Ron DeSantis, that they simply want him to shut up about his paranoid conspiracy theory that the fact that nearly 3,000 American citizens in Puerto died, only that fact was made up by Democrats just to make him look bad? (https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/09/13/mr-president-shut-up-florida-republicans-pan-trumps-puerto-rico-conspiracy-608895).

For an answer to that, we turned to associate solitary reporter John Mulford, a lifelong resident of Florida.

Mulford was typically succinct. His immediate answer to our question was, “Of course not!"

Donald Trump loves to take credit where none is due.

Yesterday, the Twitterer-in-Chief said that all the really wonderful things that he did for Puerto Rico last year when Hurricane Maria struck, were unappreciated (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/12/donald-trump-puerto-rico-a-plus-job-815801).

Puerto Rico is a US Territory, and lots more folk there speak Spanish than English.

Trump sent his tweet yesterday ahead of the coming apocalypse from Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 nasty. 

Trump is a climate change denier, closely aligned with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma).

So we sent associate solitary reporter Selvatica Juguete, who covers all of Central and South America for us, to San Juan to get a quick sample of how Puerto Ricans feel about Trump.

This is what one ordinary Puerto Rican told her:

“Todos 3,659,007 de nosotros leales ciudandanos estadounidenses de Puerto Rico vamos a reunirnos en Tijuana y cruzar la frontera tan pronto llegue Florencia llegara al continente donde la gente puede votar” (“All three million six hundred thousand fifty-nine thousand and seven of us loyal Puerto Rican citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave are going to go to Tijuana and cross the border into San Diego, as soon as Lady Florencia arrives on the mainland where people can actually vote for president.”)

When Defense Secretary James Mattis and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats read Juguete’s email, they immediately resigned, leaving Trump to rely only on associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones to save his butt.

As the whole world watches, Donald Trump’s time in the White House is drawing closer and closer to implosion.

He has an unholy alliance with the climate change deniers. He’s hellbent on making our air dirtier and dirtier because he sucked up to the coal lobby. He’s turned the EPA around 180 degrees. Just about everything that President Obama did, he wants to undo.

He’s virtually perfected the Art of the Lie. No wonder his lawyers won’t let him sit down for an interview under oath by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

With the publication today of veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House, and with the Times’ publication last week of a White House mole’s anonymous op-ed piece, Trump really doesn’t have any place to go except to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminister or wherever he has a golf course where it’s not needed.

Early this morning, associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, who is with Trump all the time, was startled to wake up a mere ten feet away from him, as the 239 pound man with a fake orange squirrel on top of his head sat atop one of the numerous mountains of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

“”Sir,” Jones asked, “what are you doing there, and are you safe?”

“Dammit, Johanna, get lost! Go back to Tom Perez at the DNC and tell him to give you a job in the secretarial pool!”

“How did you get here, Sir?”

“All you tree-hugging environmentalists, all you phony liberals, and Woodward, and Omarosa, all you wanna do is make me look bad. And that’s not only illegal, it’s unconstitutional!”

“Sir, have you ever read the Constitution?”

Jones, who is only 25, has much better eyesight than Trump. As she stared at the horizon, she noticed Air Force One far away in the distance, but it came closer and closer to them. But as the pilot spotted them, and without Trump even noticing it, it veered away and returned to Travis Air Force Base in California. As the crew deplaned, they all, to a woman and a man, caught a commuter plane to Sacramento, where they met with Gov. Jerry Brown to sign up to volunteer for his highly touted efforts to lessen the impact of climate change.