As soft as a president’s brain

By BRUCE LOWITT

Donald Trump insists he is not violating any clauses or amendments of the United States Constitution “because I have the best skin of any president in history – no one has ever seen skin like mine – and I make my own lotions and ointments and have developed my own special cosmetic creams, so why would I want anyone to give me any emoluments that aren’t anywhere near as good as my own?”

Trump, whose complexion varies, depending on the hour and lighting, from rust to marmalade to tangerine to squash to apricot to pumpkin to butterscotch to burnt sienna to gamboge, and whose knowledge of the dictionary ranges from “aardvark” to “abomination,” said he would never use an emolument that hadn’t first been approved by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain worm, “my secretary of abidance. No one knew that was a word until I just looked it up.”

The president also said that at the end of his first term in office, the U.S. Supreme Court had “cleared me of any wrong uses of emoluments.” In two cases involving the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the governor of Maine stayed there at taxpayers’ expense, and Saudi lobbyists spent $300,000 there, which Trump received.

“The Supreme Court never told me exactly what the so-called problems were,” Trump said, “but I assume it had to do with all the little bottles of shampoo and lotions in the bathrooms that the governor and the Arabs kept stuffing in their luggage.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi, formerly a lobbyist for the Qatari government, was asked whether Trump’s accepting a $200-million Boeing jumbo jet from Qatar violates the Article 1, Section 9, clause in the Constitution prohibiting federal officials from “accepting gifts, titles, or emoluments from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.”
She declined to acknowledge whether or not she knows “emolument” is a synonym for “payment, fee, profit,” or the meaning of a dozen other words the president avoids.

Instead, Bondi, not offering any legal judgment on the decision to accept the plane and to ask the Air Force to upgrade it at a cost of $1-billion or more, replied, “Don’t you think the emolument I use makes my hair lustrous, healthy, silky and radiant?”
The Constitution requires that Congress approve any large gift to the president, who insists its not a gift to him. Republican members of Congress reportedly have asked Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas for advice on how to get planes, trains, or automobiles of their own from Middle Eastern potentates.

Kennedy said he had studied emoluments at Georgetown Preparatory School “and thought I had discovered that they were a cure for measles. But at Harvard I realized I had mistaken emoluments for emollients, which is what I use now to make my skin so burnished, and am also investigating as a possible cure for autism.”

“In fact, (Associate Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan and I were having lunch a few weeks ago,” Kennedy said, “and when I asked her what she thought of when she looks at me, she said, ‘chazer,’ which I think means ‘magnificent’ in Jewish, right?”