Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

the raucous cheers of his brethren below. By day’s end, dozens had been injured. Prior to these events, Trump’s future pen pal Richard M. Nixon had been in a fragile state of mind. Widely vilified for the bombing of Cambodia, he was, according to those close to him, “on the edge of a nervous breakdown.” The savagery of the Hardhat Riot seemed to cheer him up. “Last week, a group of construction workers came up Wall Street and beat the living hell out of some demonstrators who were desecrating the American flag,” his aide Pat Buchanan wrote to him. “Whether one condones this kind of violence or not, probably half the living rooms in America were in standing applause at the spectacle.” There was little doubt whether Nixon and Buchanan condoned this kind of violence; to show his appreciation for the attack, the president invited leaders of the rioters’ unions to the White House for a celebratory photo op. Nixon claimed that he was honoring “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.” In return, the labor chieftains gave him an honorary hard hat. As Nixon later reminisced, the hardhats “were with us when some of the elitist crowd were running away from us. Thank God for the hardhats!”