You know you’ve arrived when people start contacting you out of the blue with breaking (wind) stories.
Don Lessem is a renowned dinosaur expert and author, and a somewhat less renowned Trump hater. But he’s hoping to up his Trump-hectoring game with the upcoming international unveiling of a giant, robotic, farting Trump statue. (I didn’t ask him what distinguishes the statue from Trump himself, but I suppose I should have. Presumably it’s more shiny? I don’t know.)
Anyway, in “real life” Lessem is a dinosaur explorer and author, and an adviser to Jurassic Park (I assume the movie series, unless there’s something he’s not telling me) and Disney. He says he was inspired to build the robotic Trump statue during a visit to a factory in Sichuan, China, that makes his dinosaur robots.
“I saw all sorts of abominable sculptures, from tiny dragons to leprechauns,” he says. “I realized they can make anything robotic, no matter how frightening. For $25,000 of my money, I decided this was a monument worth making. Now I am hoping others want to share my pain.”
The sculpture is headed from China to London in time for Trump’s June arrival. It’s being shipped “on a freighter whose name I won't disclose for fear Trump will bomb it,” says Lessem.
Lessem’s anti-Trump bona fides are impressive (he’s written a book called Who Said It: Trump Or This Other Schmuck? and he maintains TheDumpTrumpDump.com, which he touts as “your home for all things anti-Trump”), but he’s hoping to make a bigger splash with his answer to last year’s celebrated Trump baby blimp.
“My goal is to create this year's attention-getting and bile-producing sequel to the Trump baby balloon, and one that could be more easily deployed at rallies all over the world,” he says. “I think we need a focus to our rage, and as many and large reminders as possible of what a disgusting disgrace this oaf is to humanity.”
Meanwhile, Lessem has spared no expense in making his statue as lifelike as possible.
“When not on the links, Trump apparently spends most of his time on the can tweeting, so I figured to pay full tribute to him he’d have to be positioned on a golden toilet. For his own safety, we thought to put his overlong tie into the toilet itself. He's tweeting of course, and his mouth moves to utter deathless quotes in his own voice .... His Make America Great Again cap is subtitled ‘Impeach Me’ — as if we needed a reminder.
“The fart noises, however, are not his own — recordings of his flatulence are apparently unavailable.”
Lessem has contacted the organizers of last year’s London protest and the makers of the baby Trump balloon to let them know the statue is on its way to England. But before it shipped, he had to clear up his Chinese suppliers’ confusion about what we can still happily regard — at least for the time being — as one of America’s highest ideals.
“By the way, it being China where it was made, the factory owner asked me, ‘Can your really do this without going to prison?’ ‘Answer cloudy, ask again later,’ I told him.”
Don’t worry, Don. The West is still free. And with your help, it will remain so.
Godspeed.
