#11 - A Trumpery Campaign

There is a word that has been sitting in the English language since the fifteenth century, quietly waiting for its moment. TRUMPERY. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a trumpery as deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery — something of less value than it seems. Worthless stuff, trash, rubbish. Shakespeare used it. The French coined it. And the man who embodies the word was born on June 14th, 1946.

In this episode, I suggest the launch of A Trumpery Campaign — a crowdsourced lexicon of pointed, humorous observations that name the absurdities, corruptions, and patterns of the Trump administration with precision and wit. Not invented absurdity. Observed abnormalities. Named inanity. Identified idiocies.

The episode provides examples from an early Trumpery Lexicon — from Speed Trumps to Trumpback Whales to Electile Dysfunction. It traces the comic history of a man who has spent his career putting his name on things that subsequently become doomed to failure.  

I invite listeners to create their own Trumperies and share them broadly. Send me an email with your own inventions . The best  submissions will be featured on June 14th — Trump's 80th birthday. The winner will receive a Golden Trumpinal Award to commemorate their wit and wisdom.

Laughter is resistance and the word has been waiting five centuries to take its place in a movement to save democracy. Let's put it to work.

Transcript

THE TRUMPERY CAMPAIGN Flourish In Times of Struggle — Episode [X]

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast.

This series is an invitation to think together about how all of us can stay steady, compassionate, and engaged at a time when cruelty, corruption, and division have become increasingly normalized. My hope is that together we can prepare ourselves to take the meaningful actions this moment requires.

Today's episode is about one form of action. I’m going to float the idea of a specific campaign that uses humor to undermine the power and influence of people who are pushing our country towards authoritarian rule.  

I’ve have been talking in recent episodes about humor as a tool of resistance — about Aristophanes mocking the warmonger Cleon in front of thousands of Athenians, about the Polish Orange Alternative painting grinning dwarves on city walls, about what Medieval court jesters can teach us about the power and limitations of human. So, I want to see if we, together can use humor to protect our democracy. 

I’m proposing the launch of a Trumpery Campaign.

WHAT IS A TRUMPERY?

What is a Trumpery Campaign. It is a campaign to deploy Trumperies aimed at the foibles of our would-be dictator.

Trumpery. Root word: Trump. So a Trumpery is something The Donald might actually commit. And it's a real word. That’s the beauty of it. I'm not making it up.

I’d thought of calling them Trumpicules - little jabs that ridicule, but the real word is too rich to pass on. 

The word Trumpery has been sitting in the English language since the fifteenth century, quietly waiting for its moment.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a Trumpery as: deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery. Something of less value than it seems. Worthless stuff, trash, rubbish.

How did they know? They nailed it, five centuries in advance.

The word comes from the Old French tromperie — rooted in tromper, meaning to deceive. As in: telling lies. Le Grand Tromperie. You can see the same root in trompe-l'oeil — "deceives the eye" — a painting so realistic it fools you into thinking you're seeing the actual thing. All surface. No substance.

Shakespeare used the word, so you know it's classy. In The Tempest, the wizard Prospero instructs his sprite Ariel: "The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither — for stale to catch these thieves." He hangs cheap, glittering finery on a line as bait for the conspirators plotting against him. Caliban — the supposed monster — sees through the trick immediately and tries to warn his companions. They can't resist the glitter. They abandon their plot, squabble over the showy clothes, and are caught. Undone by their own appetite for worthless finery. We can only hope.

The word has been waiting five centuries to come into is own. It’s time has arrived.

For our purposes, a Trumpery is a pointed, humorous observation that names something true about Trump and his administration with precision and wit. The best Trumperies produce both laughter and recognition — a flash of clarity about a characteristic of their unique brand of chicanery. Trumperies don't invent the absurdity. They name it. They probe it. They expose it.

And there is, as you may have noticed, no shortage of absurdity to name, expose, and mock.

THE LEXICON — A GUIDED TOUR

Let me walk you through some early entries in the Trumpery Lexicon — just to give you a sense of what we're talking about. We begin with a brief appreciation of the man who inspired the whole enterprise.

Donald Trump has always loved putting his name on things — often attaching it to iconic structures and trying, by association, to absorb some of their reflected glory.

But first — a brief family history. Because the name wasn't always Trump.

When Donald's grandfather Friedrich immigrated from Bavaria in 1885 at the age of sixteen, the family name was Drumpf. Friedrich Drumpf. He fled Germany to avoid mandatory military service — a draft dodger, in other words — and made his fortune in America running a brothel during the Klondike Gold Rush. Draft-dodging. Brothels. Gold. The family pattern was established early.

For decades, Donald's father Fred claimed the family was Swedish — from a town called Karlstad — to conceal the German draft-dodging roots. This was a lie. The family was from Kallstadt, a small wine-growing village in Bavaria. They were German. They were Drumpfs.

But the Swedish cover story does raise an interesting question: what does the word Trump actually mean in Swedish?

Well, the Swedish word trumpen means grumpy. Sulky. Den Trumpne — The Grumpy One. Remove the T and you get rump — which, in Swedish, means exactly what you think it means. And in the South Saami indigenous language of Sweden, tromhpe is a parasitic fly that lays its eggs in the nose of reindeer.

The Swedes, it turns out, had him figured out too.

But, I digress.  Back to the main point. Donald Trump has always loved putting his name on things.

Take Trump Taj Mahal — a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Trump billed it as the eighth wonder of the world on opening day in 1990, with Michael Jackson as the guest of honor.

How did it work out?

Bankrupt within a year. Bankrupt again in 2004. Bankrupt again in 2009. Bankrupt again in 2014.

Trump owed the 253 small contractors who built it — the plumbers, the electricians, the families who installed the toilets — $69.5 million. They got thirty cents on the dollar. One contractor's daughter said: "I grit my teeth every time I see him on television blustering about what a wonderful businessman he is."

And it wasn't just one casino.

Trump Plaza — bankrupt. Closed 2014. Demolished 2021. 

Trump Castle — bankrupt. Sold. Now the Golden Nugget. 

Trump Marina — bankrupt. Sold.

By 2014, the casinos had fallen into such disrepair that Trump himself filed a lawsuit demanding his name be removed from them. His erections were such an embarrassment he went to court to get his name taken off.

To be fair — he may be a bad businessman, but he is a very good crook. Even as his businesses failed, Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted his personal debts to the casinos, and collected millions in salary, bonuses, and fees — including a million dollars a year simply for letting the casinos use his name. Until they became too much of an embarrassment even for him.

New Jersey's own casino regulator put it plainly: "When he left Atlantic City, it wasn't 'Sorry to see you go.' It was 'How fast can you get the hell out of here?'"

The eighth wonder of the world closed permanently in 2016. It now operates as the Hard Rock Hotel. His failed erection was renamed the Hard Rock Hotel. I love it.

We wouldn't exactly call this the Midas Touch. This is the Trump Touch — the reliable transformation of anything of genuine value into gold-painted kitsch. Unlike the Midas touch, which produced real gold, the Trump Touch just applies a thin layer gold paint. Gold paint that ultimately kills whatever it covers, peels off in the rain, and turns valuable things into laughable imitations of themselves.

And the list goes on.

Trump University — shut down by court order. Twenty-five million dollar fraud settlement. Graduates received refunds instead of diplomas. 

Trump Airlines — bankrupt. The only Trump venture that actually took off — briefly. 

Trump Mortgage — dead in less than a year. 

Trump Steaks — dead on arrival. Sold exclusively at The Sharper Image. Not a joke. The Sharper Image. 

Trump Vodka — gone. Trump Magazine — gone. Trump: The Game — gone. 

Trump Institute, Trump Network, Trump Travel — gone, gone, gone.

The businesses failed. The bankruptcies accumulated. The courts intervened. But the name — the name survived everything. Simply peeled off one failed facade and pressed onto the next available surface.

And now — have you heard this? — Trump is wandering around the West Wing with a glue gun, affixing gold coins bearing his face to every door in the building. One by one. Door by door. This is true. You cannot make this up. A White House official commented that everyone was impressed by how good it looked.

Meanwhile, in private conversations, Trump has reportedly begun thinking of himself less as a peer of Washington and Lincoln, and more as the next addition to what he describes as history's greatest trifecta: Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon.

The man with the glue gun. Alexander the Great. One of these things is not like the others.

He put his name on the Kennedy Center. It is now the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That trips right off the tongue, doesn't it? Let's see how well they perform after being handled by the Trump Touch.

Then there is the United States Institute of Peace. Trump fired the entire board, sent DOGE in to take it over, fired two hundred staff members, and had a federal court rule the takeover illegal. Then — while still fighting the original organization in court — he put his name on the building. The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. A former official noted: "It's pretty ironic that he put his name on an institution he destroyed."

Trump the Destroyer. That will be his name when he becomes a professional wrestler.

He is also obsessed with renaming things — which is a somewhat different pathology. Narcissism puts your name on a new building. Authoritarianism erases the names that were there before.

He renamed Alaska's Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley — erasing the indigenous name that Obama had restored in 2015. Apparently Trump thinks it more important to honor a president who never set foot in Alaska than to honor the Native Alaska peoples who had named the mountain thousands of years ago.

He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America — a body of water that has been called the Gulf of Mexico for five centuries. What's next? The Atlantic should probably become the American Ocean. And the Pacific. In fact, all bodies of water that touch our great nation should be renamed accordingly. The Gulf Stream shall henceforth be known as the Trump Stream.

He mused publicly about renaming the Strait of Hormuz the Gulf of Trump. Republican allies have introduced bills to carve his likeness into Mount Rushmore, rename the Washington Metro the Trump Train, replace Benjamin Franklin on the hundred dollar bill with Trump's face — and create a new $250 bill with his face on that one too.

One historian described the pattern as "toponymic narcissism" — a geographical form of self-aggrandizement typically seen in cults of personality associated with authoritarian dictators. Duh!

Enough frivolity. Let's get to the point.

If Trump insists on putting his name on everything, we can return the favor. The trick is to find something universally familiar — something everyone already knows and has an instinctive reaction to — and rename it after Trump in a way that suddenly makes you see both things differently. 

The familiar object illuminates Trump. Trump illuminates the familiar object. And the combination produces that flash of recognition that is the signature of a good Trumpery.

Consider those annoying bumps in the road designed to slow traffic. In the age of Trump, they have a new name.

Speed Trumps — What are Speed Trumps?: any procedural delay or legal maneuver deployed to slow accountability. Like the pavement bump, a Speed Trump doesn't stop movement entirely. It just forces everything to jolt uncomfortably and slow down at the worst possible moment. "The Supreme Court's six-week delay is a well-placed Speed Trump on the road to accountability."

And those large political creatures that conduct their most consequential activities beneath the surface?

Trumpback Whale — a large political creature that conducts its most consequential work in the deep, far beneath the surface of public attention. It surfaces briefly — to spout noise, claim credit, or issue a provocation — before diving back down where the real feeding happens. By the time anyone notices what it has been doing, the ecosystem has already changed.

"While everyone was watching the rallies and the tweets, the Trumpback whales of Project 2025 spent four years in the deep drafting the blueprint, recruiting the loyalists, and building the machinery of authoritarianism. They surfaced on January 20th. The feeding was already done."

Your challenge — should you choose to accept it — is to develop your own Trumperies and spread clever mockery throughout the land.

This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION

As we move toward the midterm elections in November, we need a Trumpery that names Trump's current inability to win elections without artificial assistance. I propose the term Electile Dysfunction.

His popularity is in the toilet. His endorsements are toxic. He knows he faces a reckoning in November. And he and his MAGA allies are reaching for every remedy they can find to prop up their flagging prospects — voter suppression, gerrymandering, intimidation, disinformation, and the systematic dismantling of every oversight mechanism that might hold them accountable.

Let's all of these modes of electoral manipulation what they really are: Viagra.

Electile Dysfunction — the chronic inability to achieve or maintain a free and fair electoral victory without artificial assistance. Caused by the gradual accumulation of donor-class plaque in the arteries of accountability. Transmitted primarily through sycophantic contact with the carrier — specifically, through the act of sucking up to the big guy.

Symptoms include compulsive litigation, spontaneous outbreaks of Stop the Steal, and the unshakeable conviction that any election not won was an election stolen.

Viagra. Viagra. Viagra.

But remember — there are side effects. The up side, if you will, has a won't-come-down side. The four-hour problem.

[Commercial voice] If your electoral erection persists for more than four years, seek immediate constitutional attention. Side effects include criminal indictment, loss of allies, and the growing suspicion among observers that something has gone badly wrong. January 6th trials still ongoing.

[In the voice of the King himself] And now — a little song I wrote called The Electile Blues:

Woke up this mornin', looked at my phone Nobody likes me, man my mojo's up and gone I got Electile Dysfunction, can't get the votes I need to win I got Electile Dysfunction, gonna lose this thing again

[Music fades]

THE CAMPAIGN

You get the idea. Let it play around in your mind for a while. You'll start coming up with your own Trumperies. The creation of Trumperies, it should be warned, can be addictive.

On June 14th — Donald Trump's birthday and Flag Day — share your favorite Trumperies with friends and family. Post them on social media with the hashtag #Trumperies. Use them to mark his 80th. And consider flying your flags at half mast. He will be.

But most importantly — turn the laughter into action. The Trumpery Campaign is not just comedy. It is an escalator — a low-risk walkway that moves people from passive observation toward active resistance. Every joke shared is a crack in the wall of manufactured invincibility. Every laugh is a signal that we are not afraid.

The word Trumperies has been waiting five centuries. Let's put it to work.

Resist voter suppression. Make sure everyone votes in November. Vote against dictatorship, against Trumperies. Vote for democracy, progress, freedom, decency, fairness, and accountability. And be prepared to take organized action when Trump and his allies attempt — again — to overturn free and fair election results.

The word has been waiting five centuries. We are not.