We always knew that Donald Trump was obsessed with genes, attributing favorable traits in people to “good” genes and unfavorable ones — like low intelligence or poverty — to “bad” genes. He’s commented on it in public far too many times to believe it’s anything other than gospel to him, like that great aunt in Sacramento who won’t stop telling you how good her psychic is.
But it looks like he’s left his genetic mark on our government as well, and we don’t just mean the way he spits on the Constitution.
The official word from the White House on any given thing used to be final, a given, kind of the end-all, be-all authority on what was real. At least when I was a kid, that’s the way it was: The White House said I had to do jumping jacks and eat spinach and study geography or I’d never grow up to be President myself one day, and to this day I still do all but the jumping jacks (nobody wants to see that).
Now, according to the New York Times, the official word from the White House is that Donald Trump’s preternaturally sienna-tinged glow is the result of the President’s very good genes, and absolutely not from tanning in a tanning bed at all whatsoever.
Two former insiders — Omarosa Manigault-Newman and none other than former FBI Director James Comey — have included in books they have published recalling the details of their time adjacent to Trump that he had a tanning bed and that he bore the hallmarks of indoor sun: The telltale reverse-raccoon eyes left behind by those tiny goggles one wears while under the lamps.
But the White House, officially, has banked on you believing that despite being descended from the ultra-white inhabitants of ancestral Germany and Scotland, and despite exactly zero other people in his family looking anything like that, you know, color-wise, that Trump’s bizarre tone — not found in even the most diverse of all palettes, the 120-count Crayola box — derives from generations of off-yellow sperm seeking abnormally red eggs (or perhaps vice versa) to eventually result in the orange you see today.
I’ll tell you what, though: I don’t reckon Mr. Trump eats spinach or studies geography, and I doubt he could hoist himself in the air for a single jack of the jumping variety, so maybe what I’ve really been missing all this time is the mystery gene that turns people the inhuman orange that occupies the White House now.
Featured image via screen capture
