Monkey With a Gun: The Donald Trump Story

On Thursday night we learned of a new Possibly Most Embarrassing Thing Ever that Donald Trump has inflicted on himself and the rest of us. The man appears to have drunk-dialed the Norwegian minister of finance to demand a Nobel prize, threatening consequences if he didn't get it.

Yes. Yes, that is apparently a thing that happened.

"Out of the blue, while Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg was walking down the street in Oslo, Donald Trump called," Dagens Naeringsliv reported, citing unnamed sources.

"He wanted the Nobel Prize - and to discuss tariffs."

In a comment to Reuters, Stoltenberg said the call was to discuss tariffs and economic cooperation ahead of Trump's call with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Stoere. "I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation," he added.

Several White House officials, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer were on the call, Stoltenberg added.

Hoo boy. There are a lot of different ways we can go with this story, but the notion that this pouting omnifelon cold-called Norway's finance minister to whine about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize while suggesting that something might happen to Norway if he didn't get it—what can you even say? How can you possibly respond to that?

Your first question might be "is the Norwegian finance minister in charge of dispensing Nobel Peace Prizes" and the answer is no, not really, though I suppose if the governing body that manages Peace Prizes is anything like the one that governs international soccer all bets are off.

This detail probably does not matter much to Donald Trump, however, because Donald Trump has had his entire life to learn how things like tariffs or toilets work and hasn't succeeded yet. There's no way you're going to get him to understand it now, not as he quite clearly battles frequent episodes of dementia.

To answer Donald's questions, it's the American importer who pays the tariffs, and if you keep flushing classified documents down your toilet you can't expect it to flush properly, that's not what toilets are built for. And the Norwegian finance minister is not a Pez dispenser who pops out Nobel Peace Prizes, and in general, when you're angling for a Nobel Peace Prize one of the least productive things you can do is threaten disruption of the whole world's economy if you don't get it.

Let me ask you something. At the lowest point in your life, at the point where you were the drunkest, on the most drugs, or in those first 30 seconds after waking up from general anesthesia, have you ever cold-called the Norwegian finance minister to demand a Nobel prize?

No. No, I bet you never have. You might have called an ex. You might have called your boss, and they probably weren't your boss by the end of the call. You might have called a local restaurant to ask whether their refrigerator was running, and told them that if it was they should go catch it. But no matter how dipped in the sauce you might have been, you probably did not call random government officials to demand Nobel prizes.

This dude, though. This guy does it like it's nothing. His brain is so holed he thinks the Norwegian finance minister is the Stormy Daniels of peace prizes, and he's calling him up at work to ask what he's wearing and to express his extreme thirst for them prizes.

It's so embarrassing—FOR THE REST OF US—that it makes you want to curl up and die.

At this point I have an apology to make, and it's because in a recent post I described the ongoing situation with Trump and his advisers as "Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office, angry and pantsless and waving a loaded gun around, and every lawmaker and executive in America is stuck in the room with him."

I realized almost immediately after publishing that that it was not an appropriate thing to say, and for that I need to apologize. The situation is not at all like an angry, pantsless man waving a loaded gun around in the Oval Office, and I am sorry for suggesting it.

No, the proper description of what's been going on in America is that there's a pantsless angry monkey waving a loaded gun around in the Oval Office. And not one of those smart monkeys, the ones that can ride little bicycles or be taught rude gestures. I'm talking about the kind known for random acts of violence, the kind the zoo has to post warning signs about because they like to crap in their hand and then fling it at you. Donald Trump has lived his whole life as that kind of monkey, and apparently the voting portions of the American public thought it would be very, very funny to hand the monkey a loaded gun and set him loose in the White House again, knowing full well he was going to crap on the desk and shoot things.

You can't use human reasoning on that kind of monkey, it just won't work. The best you can do is distract them with food or shiny trinkets while an accomplice tries to snatch the gun away.

I will point out, though, that this only works if you follow up by trying to take the gun, you idiots. Giving the angry frothing monkey a shiny new trinket doesn't do anything, by itself. You're just giving him something else to smear with poop and fling at your head.

We've got a monkey with a gun climbing around the now gold-painted Oval Office walls, randomly firing off shots in all directions because apparently we've given this stupid monkey a magic gun that never runs out of bullets, or maybe Mike Johnson or Stephen Miller sneaks in every night to put more ammo in the desk drawers. No matter what the monkey's top advisers do, the monkey just keeps getting angrier and angrier, seemingly because it thinks it deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and nobody's following through with that.

So here we are, every day worse than the last, everyone in America dodging angry monkey bullets.

Trump has always been like this, of course. He was born with a gun, and nobody ever even thought to take the gun away because that's not how our tax policies work. He went through school flinging poop, made himself a half-assed "career" out of flinging poop and selling real estate, and eventually the Hollywood people came calling to give him the Shit-Flinging Monkey With A Gun Funtime Hour because that, too, is just how this country works.

That the Shit-Flinging Gun Monkey show became even a little popular is an indictment of our nation, but probably not a surprise. Say whatever else you want about it, you can't deny the cheap entertainment value. The Roman coliseum's bookers would have given their arms and legs to get a monkey with a gun in that arena, but guns hadn't been invented yet. They had to do with knife-wielding monkeys at best.

Displaying fully armed shit-throwing monkeys for public amusement really only became popular after the invention of Plexiglas, a historical connection that I imagine is self-explanatory. It took until about 1970 for that material to come into widespread use; note that the public fascination with Donald Trump began not too long afterwards.

You may choose to take that as a coincidence, or you may not.

But we still might have been fine, you know. We would have been fine, except that people kept giving the monkey bigger and bigger guns and the Supreme Court kept stripping away layers of Plexiglas, one sheet at a time, and that is exactly how we got here and nobody even pretends otherwise.

You might remember that during the first Gun Monkey administration there were numerous editorials assuring us that everything would be fine. Anonymous administration officials were writing op-eds to tell us not to worry, the Plexiglas was of the highest possible quality. Gun Monkey might shoot a lot of bullets and fling a lot of crap, they wrote, but our Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, knew about monkeys and knew about guns and knew that the American people were, first and foremost, a group of mostly-drunken idiots who almost certainly would make an angry armed monkey their president sooner or later. So our system was almost entirely armed monkey-proof, we were assured. There were monkey handlers, a whole West Wing of them, and there were Plexiglas-polishers, and there were entire agencies whose purpose was to make sure the gun-toting monkey couldn't do anything worse than maybe graze you a little.

That was the promise. What they didn't account for, however, was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts having a huge boner for gun-toting monkeys.

"This monkey should be able to shoot any American he wants," John Roberts said after the monkey escaped the Oval Office and started shooting its way through the U.S. Capitol. And cooked his gun monkey business books. And ran off with our national defense secrets. "You're not allowed to question the motives of the Gun Monkey." And he was almost certainly masturbating at the time, because you can read the ruling and just know it, the whole thing just stinks of weird monkey fetish, but we're not supposed to talk about that because John Roberts also says Supreme Court justices get to have whatever fetishes they want—flags, garden statues, Alaskan fishing trips—and it's an affront to the system for you to be icked out by that.

That was probably, and it was pretty obvious at the time, the exact moment where we lost all future prospects of monkey containment. That one Supreme Court ruling, one fully premised on the fetishistic notion that a monkey with a gun is better than you, and knows more about the world than you do, because the monkey gets classified briefings and watches television every single day, and must therefore be given every opportunity to murder you and eat your face because well what if this monkey is secretly a time-traveling monkey genius and eating your face off, you poor anonymous nobody, would reset the space-time continuum in ways that the rest of us simply can't grasp. Maybe it would lead to the invention of, I don't know, ice cream that cures syphilis.

So we have to trust in the wisdom of the violent shit-flinging monkey, said John Freaking Roberts. We are not allowed to put obstacles between us and Shit-Flinging Gun Monkey because it's not sporting and not nearly fun enough. And there's no way that monkey is going to get a Nobel Peace Prize if we don't let him shoot up the place.

So I apologize, readers, for suggesting that Donald Trump was an angry, pantsless, egregiously over-armed man. He may be angry and pantsless, and he may exist solely to throw things and shoot things, but suggesting he was a "man" was going too far and I am sorry. It implied a possible coherence to his actions that his tiny mushroom-like monkey brain could never deliver; it was a cruel suggestion, because it implied that the creature might be communicated with and reasoned with when there is and has never been such evidence.

That is all I have to say, and thank you for your attention to this matter.