Tag: Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Americans across the country wish that Donald Trump would reveal his secret to staying so young and vibrant, the nation’s personal trainers have confirmed. According to Tracy Klugian, a fitness professional in St. Louis, “not a day goes by” without one of his clients requesting a physical regimen that will give him or her the youthful appearance and mental sharpness that have made Trump the envy of millions. “Clients will come in and say, ‘Make me as young and vibrant as Donald Trump,’ ” Klugian said. “I have to warn them that that’s setting the bar very, very high.” Having analyzed Trump’s fitness habits, Klugian has theorized that his startling youthfulness and off-the-charts vibrance might be the result of eight hours that he devotes each day to “Executive Time.” “Lifting the remote, putting it down, lifting it again, and then tweeting is an exercise routine that very few people could keep up for one hour, and Trump does it for eight,” he said. “I tell my clients, if you want to be as young and vibrant as Donald Trump, you’re going to have to put in that kind of time.” Klugian said that he was also putting clients on a “Trump diet,” consisting entirely of hamburgers and Coke, to give their bodies the fuel necessary to complete the gruelling remote-lifting-and-tweeting workout. But the personal trainer said that he urges his clients not to be discouraged if, even after adopting Trump’s rigorous exercise routine and diet, they fail to achieve Trump’s physical perfection. “At the end of the day, Donald Trump has found the Fountain of Youth, and also the Fountain of Vibrance,” he said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Reacting to the journalist April Ryan’s call for her to be fired, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, on Friday, that she has been the victim of the media’s “widespread anti-liar bias.” “From their obsession with fact-checking to their relentless attacks on falsehoods, the media have made no secret of their bias,” Sanders said. “It’s open season on liars in America.” “This is media hypocrisy at its very worst,” she added. “The same journalists who advocate freedom of speech want to take that freedom away from anyone whose speech consists entirely of lies.” “This is nothing more or less than a direct attack on the lying life style,” she said. “You take away my right to lie and you take away my ability to earn a living.” Kellyanne Conway, the White House senior counsellor, spoke out in support of Sanders, telling reporters, “An attack on one liar is an attack on all liars.” “Our country has seen some dark days, from the Bowling Green Massacre to the bugging of the White House microwave,” she said. “But this might be the darkest.”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Americans are in a state of abject panic amid reports that Donald J. Trump is threatening to dump thousands of fired Cabinet members and aides on cities that do not support him. Harland Dorrinson, who lives in San Francisco, said that “every American should be alarmed” at the spectre of former Trump staffers like Kirstjen Nielsen, Scott Pruitt, and Anthony Scaramucci descending on their towns. “A lot of these people were unsavory to begin with, and their time at the White House only hardened them,” he said. Carol Foyler, who resides in Boston, said that, with Trump staffers being fired at a rate of four hundred a day, she lives in terror at the prospect of these castoffs melting into the general population. “I was on line at Starbucks the other day and I thought I saw Steve Bannon,” she said. “It turned out it was just some other creepy-looking guy, but my heart was racing. The fear is real.” Tracy Klugian, who lives in Minneapolis, has started a petition to create a city ordinance preventing former Trump aides from settling in his town. “This city is full,” he said. As they brace themselves for an onslaught of fired Trump underlings, some Americans are grasping for a silver lining. “As of now, Stephen Miller and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are still employed at the White House, where their movements can be closely monitored,” Foyler said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Offering an upbeat assessment of the headline-grabbing college-admissions scandal, Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that bribing colleges gave students “a really neat opportunity” to learn math. The Secretary of Education suggested that, rather than keeping children in the dark about the bribes that enable their college acceptances, “Parents should sit around the kitchen table with their kids and work on some fun math problems together.” “Let’s say it’ll cost Amber seventy-five thousand dollars to get into Stanford, and it’ll cost her twin brother Dylan seventy-five thousand to get into Georgetown,” she said. “How much money total will their parents have to wire?” “Or let’s say Jenna has a 470 verbal score, but she needs a 730 to get into Yale,” DeVos said. “How much will she have to pay to get her score changed?” DeVos said that, as regrettable as the criminal charges against the parents in the bribery scandal were, the arrests themselves provided a teachable moment. “Lori Loughlin posted a million dollars in bail, and Felicity Huffman posted two hundred fifty thousand,” she said. “How much bail did Lori and Felicity post?”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The redaction of the Mueller report stalled on Monday after the Attorney General, William Barr, passed out from inhaling fumes from multiple Sharpie markers. Barr, who had been working around the clock to redact the report before its release, reportedly lost consciousness while trying to black out a seventy-four-page section detailing Donald Trump, Jr.,’s contacts with more than three dozen Russian individuals. “You cannot use that many Sharpies, for hours on end, without proper ventilation,” a Justice Department staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. “This was a disaster waiting to happen.” The insentient Barr was rushed to Walter Reed medical center, where a grim-faced hospital spokesperson described his condition as “Ben Carson–like.” At the White House, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, offered a more upbeat assessment. “We expect Attorney General Barr to make a swift and full recovery, so that he can get to work on the President’s taxes,” she said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—German Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded that Donald Trump issue a “complete and sincere apology” to the German people, after Trump claimed incorrectly, on Tuesday, that his father was born in Germany. “Of the many insulting things that Donald Trump could say to the German people, alleging that his father was born here is by far the most hurtful,” she said. “He must take it back at once.” Merkel said that Germany would consider breaking off diplomatic relations with the U.S. immediately if Trump did not acknowledge “that his father was born somewhere else.” Despite widely available evidence that Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was born in the Bronx, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, stuck by Trump’s story on Tuesday afternoon. “The President is proud that his father was born in a great foreign country like Germany, and not in a bad foreign country like Puerto Rico,” she said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The comedian Rosie O’Donnell will narrate the audiobook of Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report, the special counsel’s office confirmed on Saturday. Explaining the selection of O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Mueller said, “Donald Trump has complained about how much this report has cost, and Rosie has agreed to narrate it for free. In fact, she offered to pay us to let her narrate it.” Speaking to reporters, O’Donnell called the job of narrating Mueller’s report “the acting job of a lifetime.” “I never thought I’d get the chance to play so many twisted characters,” she said. “I mean, when else am I going to get to be both Ivanka and Jared? People are gonna freaking love listening to this in the car.” She said that she fully expected Trump to be one of those listeners. “He’s not a big reader, that’s for sure,” she said. “And I think it’s best that he hear what’s in the report from me.”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former President Barack Obama ignited a firestorm of controversy on Wednesday by demanding to see President Donald Trump’s elementary-school diploma. Speaking to reporters in Washington, Obama called on Trump to prove “once and for all” that had completed a K-through-five program. “While the U.S. Constitution does not require the President to have graduated from fifth grade, it would still be nice to know that he had done so,” Obama said. By insisting on the release of Trump’s diploma, Obama joined a growing movement of so-called schoolers, who contend that Trump never attended school. Schoolers’ demands to see documentation of Trump’s elementary-school attendance have yet to sway the White House, which has released only a short version of Trump’s second-grade report card, with the grades completely redacted. Obama revealed that he had hired forensic detectives to study Trump’s utterances and tweets to determine the extent of his verifiable schooling, but, so far, they had found “no proof” of a fifth-grade education. “Donald Trump claims that he attended elementary school,” Obama said. “All I’m asking is, where’s the evidence?” Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com. Read more »

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping a singularly disastrous week for the Commander-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump stormed out of a Washington, D.C., McDonald’s restaurant on Friday after failing to close a six-dollar Meal Deal at the establishment. At approximately 12:30 P.M., Trump took a break from his designated “executive time” to travel to the nearby McDonald’s, where he placed an order for a Meal Deal consisting of a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, Coke, and an apple pie. Tracy Klugian, the McDonald’s employee who took Trump’s order, said that he was aware of Trump’s difficulty in closing deals and therefore hiked the price of the Meal Deal to twelve dollars. “I really thought he would drive a harder bargain, what with ‘The Art of the Deal’ and all,” the McDonald’s staffer said. “I was kind of surprised when he just bailed.” With the McDonald’s deal in tatters, one White House aide acknowledged that Trump “really needs a win right now,” and that he was en route to Arby’s.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As he prepared to testify to Congress on Wednesday, the former Trump lawyer Michael D. Cohen received a thorough scolding from the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who warned Cohen to “leave lying to the professionals.” “You probably think you can step up to the microphone and lie like it’s the easiest thing in the world,” she said. “Well, you should try doing it each and every day, and then tell me how easy it is.” Sanders drew a sharp distinction between professional liars who take pride in their work and liars like Cohen, whom she called “strictly amateur.” “Michael Cohen has never demonstrated that he is willing to put in the hard work, practice, and sheer drudgery of becoming a great liar,” she said. “This is definitely one of those ten-thousand-hours things.” She said she hoped if American children watch Cohen’s “pathetic performance” before Congress that they do not get the wrong idea about America’s liars. “Kids need to know that there are many well-trained and highly professional liars in this country, and many of them are right here in the White House,” she said.