Camera takes us through the doors of the offices of Scrooge & Marley. Donald Trump, playing Scrooge, is rolling around in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck in the old comic books. (Look closely enough and there is an uncanny physical resemblance between the two as well as a close correlation in intellectual sophistication.) The money could be dollars, euros or Russian rubles, but where they come from, who can tell?
Enter a timorous Bob Cractchet.
Trump/Scrooge: Who are you? What are you doing here? You’re not Kelly, Tillerson, Preibus or Sessions because I’m pretty sure I’ve already fired all of them.
Cratchet: I’m Bob Cratchet, sir. I’ve worked for you for many years.
Trump/Scrooge: You’re sure you’re not really Mike Pence?
Cratchet: No, sir, I’m Cratchet, and I’d just like to spend some time with my family and my poor crippled son, Tiny Tim. It is Christmas Eve, after all.
Trump/Scrooge: Christmas Eve? Tiny Tim? Bah, humbug. You’re just like all those immigrants. Trying to take full advantage of all our good old white peoples’ Christian holidays while all the time making up new ones like Hanukah and Ramadan. Next thing you know you’ll tell me there should be medical care and reasonable accommodations for gimps like your son and that reporter I got big laughs for imitating right before the election.
Cratchet: But, sir,…
Trump/Scrooge: I might as well make you chief of staff since no one else will take the job permanently. No raise. No benefits. And you have to sign a confidentiality agreement and hum a few bars on Handel’s Messiah whenever I enter a room during the Christmas season. Now down to work. Write a memo or tweet firing someone. Leave the name and position blank and I’ll fill them in later according to what I hear on Fox News. And use your best quill pen to draft up a really nice-looking pardon I can dangle in front of Paul Manafort.
Scene closes. Obligatory shots of Merrie Old London in the last days before Brexit, including Boris Johnson, snarled traffic, Russians setting out poison for former spies, sewage flooding Westminster Abbey, etc. Montage ends at the cramped Cratchet household with Tiny Tim by the hearthside carrying on against insuperable odds and an unfair lot in life almost as pluckily as Teresa May. Scene then abruptly shifts to a building that appears to be named Trump Tower though angry residents have removed most of the letters. Trump/Scrooge is alone, again swimming in money that this time looks like Saudi riyals while looking up the meaning of the phrase “emoluments clause” in Wikipedia. Trump/Scrooge then begins jabbing buttons on his iPhone, intending randomly to insult various Nobel Prize and Medal of Honor winners but drops off to sleep mid-tweet He awakes with a start to see the woeful countenance of an anguished, wraith-like figure at the foot of his enormous four poster bed: his longtime colleague Michael Cohen, weighed down in chains and wearing a prison jump suit. Cohen points at Trump/Scrooge accusingly for a full thirty seconds but fades away as nearby church bells chime midnight. “Remember me, remember me,” intones Cohen in a voice like George Clooney doing a bad imitation of Charles Laughton.
Trump/Scrooge, a man well into his seventies not unused to waking in the middle of night, nevertheless looks relieved as the figure melts back into oblivion: “Bah, humbug. What a loser. He deserves to rot in jail even if there is prison reform. Even I know that it’s Hamlet’s father’s ghost who says “Remember me,” not a real ghost. It was in a Classic comics book. But I have to admit the apparition had me scared for a moment. It looked so ghoulish I thought it might be Rudy Giuliani, and lord knows what ideas he might come up with in the middle of the night.”
Trump/Scrooge begins an angry tweet about lax parole policies but drifts into fitful sleep, only to be awakened again, by the Spirit of Christmas Past who has assumed the unmistakable form of Stormy Daniels. In this version of the story, many characters have their own lawyers; Stormy is accompanied by a spectral Michael Avenatti, looking even shadier than usual. Avenatti recounts the Yuletide antics of a younger, happier, more carefree Trump: fondling Miss Universe contestants, being taped with Russian hookers, outrunning creditors to bankruptcy court, and enriching himself at the expense of the IRS, business partners, tenants and possibly even his father, as recounted at length in the New Yorker magazine.
Trump/Scrooge resists the insult to grab some of the what were once considered unmentionable parts of Christmas Past’s anatomy and says instead: “Bah, humbug. I have lots of shady lawyers of my own. At least I used to before they were all disbarred or refused to represent me.. And who in Hell reads the long articles in the New Yorker anyway? My base doesn’t even look at the cartoons.”
The church bells chime. The buxom ghost and her shadowy companion steal away. But not before Trump/Scrooge taunts the receding figures with his favorite negotiating ploy and maxim of life: “I’m rubber, you’re glue and everything you say bounces off me and sticks back to you.”
Scrooge/Trump groggily begins a tweet suggesting that the FBI search for Hilary Clinton’s server in the bodice of Christmas Present but again nods off into disordered, non-REM sleep. Enter the Spirit of Christmas Present: Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi shows Trump/Scrooge a PowerPoint displaying recent election results, up to the minute polls and voter surveys and draft articles of impeachment. Then she shares Instagram’s from Tiny Tim of the Cratchet family sitting down to warmed over pizza and Mountain Dew for Christmas dinner. Pelosi, using every doleful emoji in the app and a slide borrowed from the last ghost, Michael Avenatti (who usually uses it to sway jurors, no matter what the issue), wraps up by showing Trump/Scrooge a graphic depiction of two miserable, emaciated children identified as Ignorance and Want. “Of these beware Ignorance above all,” warns Pelosi, wagging an admonitory finger as the chimes signal her departure.
Trump/Scrooge: “Bah, humbug. What’s wrong with cold pizza? And why would I of all people fear Ignorance? It’s what got me elected. Count your votes all you want. But just wait and see what happens to them in two years when Republican election officials get through with them.”
Trump/Scrooge is too weary even to tweet a single snide criticism of the Federal Reserve Board or the State of California. He falls into a restless half-sleep. But the Sprits are not yet done with the aging, miserly curmudgeon in the “Make American Great Again” nightcap, tossing and turning in his troubled bed among the rustle of laundered Swiss francs and smuggled Venezuelan bolivars. For now enters the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, a stately, composite apparition, one half Robert Mueller and one half Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And in a voice both prosecutorial and judgmental this final visitation speaks: “Confess, resign, repent. Think of American and the constitution that you, like us, took an oath to preserve, defend and protect. Think of the environment. Think of all the votes the Democrats in the House will have to commence impeachment proceedings.”
Trump/Scrooge at first looks startled and confused. “Bah, humbug,” he mutters, “where are Brett Kavanagh and a doctor who will prescribe sleeping pills when you need them?” But soon some of his confidence returns as he rubs sleepy seeds and a few bank notes of dubious provenance out of his eyes: “Who are you to lecture me about America? I’m making America great again. Just look at my night cap and all the people wearing the hats. My doctors tell me I already have a great constitution, a constitution healthier than that of men and women half my age, including Jim Comey and Elizabeth Warren. The environment? It’s a hoax. There are only two environments that matter: my hotels and my golf courses. And they are doing great. ‘Repent, confess, resign?’ Give me a break. That’s even lamer than the first ghost. It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not even Christopher Marlowe.”
“I’ll tell you what, though. I’ve got to start getting a good night’s sleep to face Melania in the mornings. I’ll make a deal to make all the weirdos in reject Halloween costumes go away. I’ll give Bob Cratchet and others a big, fat goose from Costco every Christmas Day. And I’ll have Melania begin doing recycling for the environment in the White House every Tuesday and Friday.”
Mueller/Ginsburg: “You mean a real goose of the brant species, like a snow goose, not the kind you thought you might be giving the Spirit of Christmas Past?”
Trump/Scrooge: “Absolutely. You can depend on it. Would I lie?”
The Place to Take a Humor Break