Tag: Andy Borowitz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—One day after the Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity blamed him for the historic plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, former President Barack Obama agreed to stop making stocks tumble. “Sean Hannity has accused me of making the stock market go down,” Obama told reporters on Tuesday morning. “All I have to say is, ‘Guilty as charged.’ ” A visibly chastened Obama said that, at first, he thought that he had gotten away with making the stock market crash, but when he saw Hannity blame him on Fox, “I knew I had been busted.” Obama offered scant explanation for why he had made stocks crash on Monday. “I guess since leaving the White House I haven’t really found enough ways to fill my time, so tanking the stock market seemed like something to do,” he said. “But I know that’s not a good excuse. The fact is, I caused a lot of folks a lot of pain yesterday, and for that I am very, very sorry.” He said that he would “get to work right away” to return stocks to their previously lofty levels. “I made the stock market go down, and, darn it, I can make it go up again,” he said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is proofreading the text of tonight’s State of the Union address one last time to remove any remaining facts, Sanders confirmed on Tuesday. While a team of wordsmiths led by the senior adviser Stephen Miller has attempted to craft an entirely fact-free address, “It’s good to have a fresh set of eyes to root out any stray accuracies that might have crept in,” Sanders said. The press secretary said that, for example, while purging the speech of truths, she noticed a reference to the African-American unemployment rate standing at 6.8 per cent, a statistic that she deemed “unacceptably correct.” “I read that and my Sanders sense started tingling,” she said. Taking her blue pencil to the text, Sanders changed the number to a “better-sounding” 2.3 per cent. “That may seem like a tiny detail, but it’s stuff like that that separates the professional liars from the mere amateurs,” she said. Once Sanders is confident that she has obliterated any lingering traces of reality from the script, she will forward it to Donald J. Trump, who will insert misspellings. “It makes him more comfortable reading it on the teleprompter if things are spelled his way,” she said. The prospect of delivering tonight’s speech appears to have energized Trump, who tweeted early Tuesday morning that he was “very much looking forward to the Steak of the Onion.”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After watching it suffer its worst losses since he became President, Donald Trump is “seriously considering” firing the Dow Jones industrial Average, aides have confirmed. According to the aides, Trump is “furious” at the D.J.I.A. for going down so precipitously and believes that it has treated him “very unfairly.” “Increasingly, the President has become convinced that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is not on his team,” one aide said. “Seeing the negative Dow numbers in the corner of the TV screen has been wrecking eleven hours of every day for him.” Reportedly, Trump is mulling replacing the Dow with a new system, in which Sarah Huckabee Sanders would appear every day at 4 P.M. to announce how high stocks had skyrocketed. En route to an appearance in Ohio, Trump stopped short of saying that he would ask for the stock market index’s resignation, but his contempt for the Dow was palpable. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a disgrace, and it should be very, very ashamed of itself,” he said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former hippies across the United States have been put in the unbearable position of rooting for the F.B.I., hippies have confirmed. From Vermont to California, erstwhile hippies bemoaned a nightmare scenario that has forced them to side with a law-enforcement agency they have despised since the Summer of Love. “I always dreamed I’d spend my retirement surrounded by my grandchildren, telling them that the F.B.I. “That dream has been shot to hell.” Her husband, Mick, nodded his head in sad agreement. “We were so happy when pot was legalized in California,” he said. “But the fact that we’re now on the same side as the F.B.I. has ruined even that.” Now in their seventies, the Foylers are spending their days doing things they never dreamed possible when they traipsed through the mud at Woodstock: going door to door in Santa Cruz, asking other former freaks to sign a pro-F.B.I. petition. “Donald Trump has wrecked America’s standing around the world, spread misogyny and bigotry, ravaged the environment, and endorsed a child molester,” Carol said. “But making people like us support the F.B.I.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump collapsed from exhaustion after approximately ninety minutes of pretending to be a human being with empathy, the White House doctor has confirmed. “In all my years of practicing medicine, I have never met a patient as healthy and vigorous as President Trump,” Dr. Ronny Jackson said. “But the sustained effort of simulating compassion proved too much for someone who has never exercised that part of his brain before.” Shortly after Trump spent a gruelling ninety minutes pretending to care about immigrants, the unemployed, and other people whom he normally dismisses as losers, aides noticed that he was turning from a bright orange to a slightly paler orange before crumpling to the ground in a giant heap. “If you have never spent a moment thinking about a human being besides yourself, imagine trying to pretend you are doing that for a solid ninety minutes,” Jackson said. “It’s physically punishing.” Immediately following his collapse, Trump was rushed to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where a brain scan showed that his brush with human feelings did no permanent damage. “I just visited with him, and he was sitting up in his bed, trashing Jay-Z on Twitter,” Dr. Jackson said. “It was such a relief to see that.” Vice-President Mike Pence, who reportedly reacted to Trump’s collapse by leaping to his feet and exclaiming, “Am I President now?,” was not available for comment.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is proofreading the text of tonight’s State of the Union address one last time to remove any remaining facts, Sanders confirmed on Tuesday. While a team of wordsmiths led by the senior adviser Stephen Miller has attempted to craft an entirely fact-free address, “It’s good to have a fresh set of eyes to root out any stray accuracies that might have crept in,” Sanders said. The press secretary said that, for example, while purging the speech of truths, she noticed a reference to the African-American unemployment rate standing at 6.8 per cent, a statistic that she deemed “unacceptably correct.” “I read that and my Sanders sense started tingling,” she said. Taking her blue pencil to the text, Sanders changed the number to a “better-sounding” 2.3 per cent. “That may seem like a tiny detail, but it’s stuff like that that separates the professional liars from the mere amateurs,” she said. Once Sanders is confident that she has obliterated any lingering traces of reality from the script, she will forward it to Donald J. Trump, who will insert misspellings. “It makes him more comfortable reading it on the teleprompter if things are spelled his way,” she said. The prospect of delivering tonight’s speech appears to have energized Trump, who tweeted early Tuesday morning that he was “very much looking forward to the Steak of the Onion.”

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—With just one day until Donald J. Trump’s first State of the Union address, the cast of “Fox and Friends” is working furiously on the final draft of the speech, members confirmed today. “We’ve really been burning the midnight oil,” Steve Doocy, the host of the Fox program, said. “We have so much to say tomorrow night, and we want to get it all in there.” Doocy said that when he read the first draft of the State of the Union address last week, he “kind of flipped out” when he realized that there was “absolutely no mention of Hillary Clinton’s Hydra-like tentacles controlling the Deep State.” “The State of the Union address is the President’s chance to tell the American people where the country is and where it’s going,” Doocy said. “You can’t do that without talking about how Crooked Hillary is funnelling her Russian-uranium riches directly into Bob Mueller’s bank account in the Seychelles.” While Trump reportedly has had input from other sources, including the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and several neo-Nazi Twitter accounts, Doocy said that the cast of “Fox & Friends” has final approval of the version that Trump will read Tuesday night. “Someone has to have the last word,” Doocy said. “There are a lot of voices in President Trump’s head, and that’s not including the actual voices that are always in his head.”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One day after Donald J. Trump offered to testify under oath for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, a newly discovered video of Trump lying under oath has sent shock waves through Washington. In the video, which experts believe was recorded approximately one year ago, Trump places his left hand on a Bible and raises his right hand before uttering a stream of falsehoods. “The video shows him lying in front of what appears to be a substantial number of witnesses, including his wife and a Supreme Court Justice,” Davis Logsdon, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said. “It does raise questions about what, exactly, testifying under oath means to him.” At the office of the special counsel, Mueller’s team was reportedly considering having Trump swear on something that was more meaningful to him than the Bible, such as a rolled-up copy of Forbes. But, while Washington mulled the implications of the explosive video, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, questioned the authenticity of the video itself. “The person in this video is not the President of the United States,” she said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Amid reports that Donald Trump might soon be summoned to appear before Robert Mueller, the White House doctor wrote a note on Wednesday indicating that Trump was too sick to talk to the special counsel. “Donald Trump is not well,” Dr. Ronny Jackson wrote. The doctor’s note offered a laundry list of ailments afflicting Trump, including flu-like symptoms, upset stomach, headaches, dizziness, confusion, and what Jackson called a “wartime foot injury that appears to be acting up.” Jackson acknowledged in the note that his current assessment of Trump’s health was at odds with the robust picture he painted last week, but added, “Every patient is entitled to a second opinion, and this is mine.” Minutes after the White House doctor issued his note, the special counsel responded by indicating that if Trump is too ill to come to Mueller’s office, then Mueller would be “more than happy” to interrogate Trump at his sickbed. The White House doctor, however, quickly rebuffed this offer. “The strain of being under oath and giving truthful answers could kill him,” the doctor said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “the least I can do for my country,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Saturday morning that she would lie for free during the government shutdown. “Now more than ever it’s important that the stream of falsehoods and distortions from this White House continues to flow in a steady and uninterrupted fashion,” Sanders said. “To achieve that, for the duration of the government shutdown I will be lying on a pro-bono basis.” Sanders said that Donald Trump had asked that she keep a full accounting of the lies she told during the shutdown so that she could be reimbursed for them later, but she turned down that offer. “I’ve often said that I like to lie so much I would do it for free,” she said. “This is a chance to put my money where my mouth is.” The press secretary said that her offer had already inspired other top Administration figures to lie for free during the shutdown, including Vice-President Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and White House doctor Ronny Jackson. After making her announcement, Sanders moved on to a broad range of other topics, including her assertion that the government had not shut down.