How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

by P.J. O'Rourke

I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.

Has the office of the presidency diminished in stature until it attracts only the leprechauns of public life?

Trump’s suits are expensive, according to Trump, but they have a cut and sheen as if they came from the trunk sale of a visiting Bombay tailor staying in a cheap hotel in Trump’s native Queens and taking a nip between fittings. Trump wears neckties in Outer Borough colors. And, Donald, the end of your necktie belongs up around your belt buckle, not between your knees and your nuts. Trump’s haircut makes Kim Jong Un laugh.

Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn’t look the way America does. And the way America looks is due, in no small part, to buildings Trump built.

I support Trump because of something the political satirist H. L. Mencken said. He said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it—good and hard.”

The 2016 presidential campaign is the most severe case of American mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. In fact, it’s worse. What kind of witch hunt leaves Goodwife Hillary not dunked in a pond, not pressed under stones, not fastened by the ankles in the it-takes-a-village stocks?

Crony capitalists are like trust fund babies, except they made the baby by screwing the public.

Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself.

Better a Marie Antoinette of the left saying, “Let them eat fruit and fiber” than a sans-culotte in Madame Defarge drag who would be Robespierre if he could spell it.

Trump played the boss you wish you had. Not the boss you wish you had at work. He’s the boss you wish you had after work, when you’re having drinks with your coworkers and telling hilarious stories. “You won’t believe what that buttwad did today!”