The Clap

 I appreciate a good practical joke. I will admit right up front that I enjoy them most when I am not the target. Still, the execution of a truly inspired bit of shenanigans often leaves me weak with laughter, but more often when the jape is truly inspired I have a different response: The Slow Clap. Please, if you are unfamiliar with this trope, please take your time with the preceding link, since it will perhaps give you some insight for what I am about to lay on you.

The Slow Clap of the Year goes out to the facilities manager at the UN Building. There are plenty of ways that things could gang agley in a property as immense and filled with history as the headquarters of the United Nations. Located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, this structure had stood in Midtown for more than seventy years, standing as a monument to the triumphs and challenges of the world's efforts to, well, Unite. 

Which brings us to last week when the convicted felon and subject of the Epstein Files who likes to pretend that he is the "president" of our country showed up for what we have come to call Hell Week in New York, previously known as UN Week. I did not arrive at this rebranding lightly, since the adjudicated rapist used his opportunity at the podium to rail against the assembled leaders of the world to insist, “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.” At this point he was addressing immigration, but it could just as well have been denying climate change or Tylenol. Eventually he got even more specific, calling out London's mayor, Sadiq Khan: "I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it's been changed, it's been so changed," he babbled. "Now they want to go to Sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can't do that."

And if that was the moment that someone backstage decided to pull the plug on his royal bloatedness, then it would have been quite the prank. Or perhaps upon hearing this and the rest of the usual ravings of this "very stable genius" the folks who work hard to keep the UN humming decided to lay in wait for this blundering oaf at the escalator, awaiting his eventual exit. And once he set his girth on the bottom step, they turned it off. Incapable of moving his considerable bulk up or down any incline in a safe manner, he was trapped. 

To this, I say "bravo." And while we will all have to endure the investigation into what the twice impeached best friend of Jeffery Epstein called "triple sabotage," I would like to start us all off in a round of measured applause, building to a crescendo. 

Release the Trumpstein files.