The Onion Leaks a Trove of Trump Docs
The Trump Documents (from The Onion) - http://www.theonion.com/trumpdocuments
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For the story behind The Trump Documents:
The Onion Leaks a Trove of Trump Docs
By Charles Bethea May 22, 2017
The staff of the Onion, a satirical online newspaper that’s been a reliable antidote to reality for nearly three decades, was not thrilled by the prospect of a Trump Presidency. The paper’s longtime writer Chad Nackers told me in March that the thought of having to frequently satirize Trump and the bit players in his Administration for four years—or more—filled many of the publication’s staffers with “comedic dread.” The Onion has been tormenting Trump for close to twenty years, beginning back when he was a mere citizen-object of scorn, with headlines like 2012’s “Donald Trump Stares Forlornly at Tiny, Aged Penis in Mirror Before Putting On Clothes, Beginning Day” and, from 2013, “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead in About 15 or 20 Years.” (The latter provoked Trump’s general counsel, Michael Cohen, to demand an apology to his client. The Onion ignored this request.) But, for a President Trump, Cole Bolton, the Onion’s editor-in-chief, told me last week, “We needed something much bigger, much broader, which can hit all the themes we want to hit in a single stroke.”
More than a dozen writers and eight graphics editors have been assembling that something over the past four months: seven hundred pages of Trump-related documents that have been “leaked” to the Onion. The first batch was revealed at noon on Monday on the Onion’s Facebook page, as well as on a special Web site. “Document dumps,” Bolton said, “are the vogue way to talk about major breaking news in the world, whether it’s WikiLeaks or the Panama Papers. Leaks seemed like the perfect means to get at Trump and his inner circle, as well as his decision-making.”
Among the leaked Trump documents: a string of e-mails between the President and Boeing’s C.E.O., about Trump’s desired upgrades—marble everything—to Air Force One; some of the Vice-President’s handwritten notes, with helpful illustrations, describing puritanical inventions of his, like a “nose harness” to prevent the smelling of “sinful smells,” like a woman’s skin, and a “blouse that cannot flutter in the wind”; and three of the President’s idiosyncratic daily briefings, written on children’s placemats. “Like you get at Denny’s,” Bolton said. “They say things like, ‘These are the security issues today. Find them in the word box!’ ” There are Mad Libs-style executive orders (“fill-in a ‘fear-inducing noun,’ ” one instructs, then an “adjective that implies ‘sub-human’ without actually stating it”), a note from Obama to Trump that was left in the Oval Office, as well as handwritten letters between Melania Trump and her concerned relatives back in Slovenia. All the documents appear to have originated between Trump’s Inauguration and the current day, with the exception of a few e-mails between the press secretary, Sean Spicer, and Trump, exchanged prior to the election. Trump’s voice is limited in the documents. “His voice is so over-mocked,” Bolton said. “Everyone throws the word ‘huge’ in there and says they’re an orange-so-and-so with small hands. Those jokes are done to death. We wanted to not fall in those traps.”
Riffing on the minutiae of the news cycle is generally not the Onion’s goal, and these documents are no different. There are a few items related to the recent James Comey chaos, like a series of very simplistically encrypted e-mails that Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, sent to Trump. (“Flynn has device Moscow is pleased,” one decoded missive reads. Another says, simply, “Focus Donald.”) A few other specific events are mentioned, such as Spicer suggesting that Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler. But the documents mostly play on broad themes of the Trump Administration: stupidity, duplicity, and the strategic use of fear.
More: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-onion-leaks-a-trove-of-trump-docs
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