Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I magine if all those thousands of bored, unfriendly TSA screeners at the airports were turned loose to harass folks on the street. That’s sort of how Trump’s deportation plans are shaping up. Instead of you going to them, they’ll be coming to you. Taking off your shoes will no longer suffice. Now they’ll have the power to seriously screw up your life. Just because they’re hunting undocumented immigrants doesn’t mean they’ll leave everyone else alone. What Trump wants is for people to be detained merely on the basis of accusation. And, no doubt, collaboration. He wants 10,000 new agents devoted to the task, and he wants every local law enforcement agency in the country to help out. He also wants to loosen or bypass due process for those who object to being rounded up. Nobody wants violent criminals in this country, particularly if they’re here illegally. That’s why these people were already being arrested and deported long before the current president afflicted us. What Trump wants now...

Y ou get used to President Trump blowing bullshit, but this has to rank as the most inelegant non sequitur in the history of presidential remarks. Here’s Trump on Wednesday, fielding a question about the “sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States: "Well, I just want to say that we are, you know, very honored by the victory that we had — 316 electoral college votes. We were not supposed to crack 220. You know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there’s no way to 270. And there’s tremendous enthusiasm out there." Thanks for clearing up your feelings about hateful behavior, Mr. President. Your words are a comfort in these troubled times.

This is supposed to be a bookshelf S eriously, you have to figure out a way to tune this stuff out once in awhile. In my case, I took up woodworking. I know; that’s a hobby you’d expect of any aging retiree, even without an alarming political climate. But it was a pretty big step for me. Prior to last November, I’d never built a damned thing. Now, three months after Trump’s election, I’ve put together a headboard, a bookshelf with cupboards, a coffee table and a big sideboard/buffet for the kitchen. Oh, and quite a few charming bookends. It hasn’t been a path to instant serenity. I’m still about as good a woodworker as Trump is a president. But it is helping me cope with the day-to-day outrages perpetrated by this absurd man and his minions. When you’re trying to align drawers in a cabinet that is somehow not fully square, it tends to take your mind off national concerns. And the tedium of applying multiple coats of varnish to a project is about as close to zen as this cowboy will ever...

N o matter what happens with Trump’s dumb travel ban, we’re nearly certain to see another ISIS-inspired attack sometime this year. But that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is that Trump and Bannon will be absolutely delighted when it happens. It’s been nearly eight months since the last big incident, in which an American citizen killed 49 people in Orlando. Now, the media ignored the Orlando massacre so you’ve probably never heard of it, but I do recall Trump congratulating himself at the time. He relished “the congrats for being right” about the threat posed by people with Muslim-sounding names. Not much since then, though. Trump keeps going on about terror and crime and carnage everywhere, but without some real blood in the streets his words ring a little hollow. You can never find a terrorist when you need one. Trump and Bannon would settle for a few dozen casualties, but what they’d really like is a really spectacular attack, something to stampede public opinion and make it ...

If only mass shooters used muzzle-loaders. I n the tragic wake of the Bowling Green Massacre, you’d think people would be lining up at gun stores. That’s the normal response when guns are used to kill large numbers of Americans at a single sitting: People immediately think to themselves, “hey, how better to honor the memory of the victims than by buying a bunch of the same weapons used to kill them?” But gun sales now are not just flat, they’re actually declining! I can think of only two reasons for that: (A) The Bowling Green Massacre happened only within the skeletal head of Kellyanne Conway, and (B) treacherous gun-grabber Barack Hussein Obama is taking a break from all that, having failed to grab a single gun during the past eight years. And so we arrive at the single silver lining of Trump’s dark carnival: Gun makers are feeling some pain. Stock prices are down about 20 percent and so are ammo sales. The NRA’s chosen one ends up screwing the industry on which it thrives. This prob...

N ot all morons are assholes, and not all assholes are morons. In a nutshell, morons are people who don’t know what they’re doing wrong, and assholes are people who don’t care. Very few of either category wind up president of the United States. So now that we have a president who is both a moron and an asshole, it kind of feels like God has decamped to another universe. Apparently, the slogan on our paper money is no longer enough to ensure God’s continued support. El Presidente Donaldo von Trumpachev: Moron (Exhibit A: Naked ignorance of any single fucking thing that might possibly be germane to the job he now holds. Or, just anything he happens to be talking about. See: Frederick Douglass, the difference between “refugee” and “illegal immigrant,” and “Two Corinthians.” Add your favorite here; it’s the internet so we can’t run out of space. Can we?) Supreme Leader for the Next Eighteen Months Doni Goodluck Trumpabe: Asshole. (Exhibit A: Instinctively sticking it to anyone who seems w...