Donald Trump Is Our Least Racist President Since Axl Rose

President Trump has been widely mocked in recent weeks for tampering with Facebook’s algorithms and for describing himself as The Least Racist Person You’ll Ever Interview. To this point, I hadn’t wanted to allow his and my past friendship to come to light, for fear some would say it prevents my assessing the Trump presidency dispassionately. I have now become convinced, though, that it’s time for a full disclosure.

We were friends while studying at the Wharton School, but that isn’t saying much. I don’t think you could find half a dozen Wharton alumni from those years who doesn’t remember Donald as a friend. He wasn’t only the best and brightest of us, but also the kindest, always willing to help a fellow Whart, as we students jocularly called each other, with his or her homework, always willing to stay up almost until dawn comforting those whose girlfriends (or, in the case of the gay students, boyfriends) had left them, or whose grandparents had just passed away. 

We were both in fraternities, Donald in Tau Bama Lama, I in Gamma Smegma Beta. The so-called Tau Bams had no keg parties, but instead spent their weekend nights taking the lonely out salsa-dancing, or just for churros and coffee, and washing the feet of lepers. Their initiation ritual was thought to be the most challenging on campus. One had to undergo a sex change, wear provocative clothing, and have unprotected sex with sailors on Philadelphia’s notorious South Street, with all the initiates’, well, honoraria put into a fund to shelter the homeless, though homelessness wouldn’t begin in earnest until the presidency of Ronald Reagan. 

As even the best friends do, Don and I lost touch in the decades after graduation. While I wrote a negative review of the first Led Zeppelin album and liner notes for a Kinks compilation, he built lo-cost housing, hospitals, and schools for the indigent, and established a chain of pay-what-u-can leper-washing salons extending from Greenwich, Connecticut, down to Charlottesville, Virginia. We hadn’t spoken for decades when, a couple of days after Xmas 2016, I was delighted to receive a phone call from hot White House communications director-designate Hope Hicks inviting me to attend Donald’s inauguration as his special guest. How could I say no? At the ball after the swearing-in, I had the pleasure of meeting and even salsa-dancing briefly with his wife Melania, whose sense of rhythm it grieves me to report needs work.

I stayed in Washington for 48 hours thereafter, and had the privilege of accompanying the new president on one of his secret late-night hikes through the impoverished Anacostia neighbourhood in Ward 8. (With his ludicrous coiffure dissembled and without the padding he wears to make himself appear obese, the president is pretty nearly unrecognisable.) It was on this walk that I saw first-hand how avidly non-racist he is. When we encountered Caucasian veterans huddled in the doorways of check-cashing facilities and liquor stores with ratty 7 Eleven coffee cups in front of them for spare change, Donald would invariably stop, kneel, and say something like, “I fully intend to make a contribution, brother, and to wash your feet, but first must ascertain if there are in the vicinity African American vets suffering privation comparable to your own. If so, I feel I should, to atone symbolically for our country’s appalling past racism, contribute to them first.” The closest any of his prospective beneficiaries came to disagreeing was the grizzled, bearded, urine-reeking Viet Nam vet who said, “But I would urge you, Mr. President, to accord Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians the same courtesy. Let’s face it, sir, to which of its minorities has America ever been kind?” 

“All that’s going to change now, my friend,” the new president said, with tears in his eyes, and I can’t imagine anyone saying he hasn’t been as good as his word, as witness his having appointed Dr. Ben Carson Secretary of the Inferior, and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia having become a fixture at Mar-a-Lago.