A 5 year-old’s valiant quest for a $3 Lamborghini. Plus Trump shoots self in foot, while his underlings get caught with their pants down trying to create fake news.

A late model Lambo. If you have to ask what it costs, you can’t 

afford one. Enter a five-year-old boy with big ambitions.

No need reminding you that the news out of our Trumpian dystopia lately has been horrendously grim. That’s why I’m pleased to begin today with a story out of Utah, guaranteed to produce, if not a laugh, at least a nervous chuckle. It started when a five-year-old boy had a dispute with his mother. What it boiled down to was simple. 

He wanted her to buy him a Lamborghini, a car whose cheapest version, will run you about $200,000 before you add in the price of air conditioning, an MP3 player, a cellphone cup holder, and any other option or ego toy you feel that your Lambo absolutely must have. Panoramic woofers and tweeters, I suppose.  

At any rate, the little boy’s mom for some reason refused.

The kid hits the road

and also, almost, a few 

other nearby cars

So the five year old swiped the family Buick and headed to California, the Promised Land for car fanciers, to buy his very own Lambo. Unfortunately, he was so small that he had to sit at the edge of his seat to see (more or less) over the windshield. It’s not known whether anybody ever taught him to drive or whether, like Trump, he was just going on down the road on his own juvenile instincts. 

Nevertheless, he managed to get out of the driveway, over to a nearby Interstate, and two miles closer to California before the Utah Highway Patrol noticed him weaving across lanes in an erratic manner, nearly colliding with other cars. A highway patrol cop pulled him over. Thereupon, the whole Lambo purchase master plan unraveled.

What seemed to mystify the cop, aside from the question of how a five-year-old had any idea how to drive, was how the boy expected to buy the Lambo, since he only had three bucks in his pocket. And that makes me wish that the kid had made it all the way to the Left Coast. 

I keep fantasizing that the kid would have somehow persuaded a California Lambo dealer — one perhaps with an overwhelming thirst for publicity — to let him have the Lambo for the three dollars, with a full tank of gas so that the five-year-old could make it back to Utah. But that’s just the beginning of the fantasy.

Near the end of my fantasy, the kid sits down at his computer and writes a book. It’s called “The Real Art of the Deal.” Enraged that a five-year-old can negotiate a better deal (and write a better book) than he ever could, Trump pulls a Rumpelstiltskin. You know Rumpelstiltskin. He was the medieval ogre involved with a greed-laden fairy tale scheme for spinning straw into gold.

Anyway, in a Rumpelstiltskin-like rage, Trump stamps his foot so hard that he sinks into the White House lawn up to his waist. Infuriated, he grabs his other foot with both hands and tears himself in half. Hey, you can’t make this stuff up — but the Brothers Grimm of Grimm Fairy Tales fame could. Just check Wikipedia.

And now on to the real Donald Trump, who isn’t all that much different from the fantasy Donald Trump.

Trump undone by 

the Streisand Effect

Back around 2003, a photographer took pictures from the air of Barbara Streisand’s multi-million dollar Malibu hideaway. The photographer wasn’t all that interested in Streisand's house. He was documenting California coastal erosion, and her palazzo happened to be sitting on the eroding coast. Hardly anybody else was interested, either. The image had been downloaded only six times. But then Streisand kicked up a fuss and sued the photographer

And whammo! Over 420,000 people visited the website. Streisand not only lost in court, but had to pay the photographer’s legal fees, some $155,000 worth.

That’s the “Streisand Effect” — the act of calling overwhelming public attention to something by trying to suppress it. Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Seems a group of Republicans, who call themselves the Lincoln Project, have had enough of Trump. Yes! Republicans! Then want him out, come the next election. No ifs, buts, or maybes. They didn’t have a huge budget, but they did have enough money to edit together some documentary footage and sad music. They made a commercial that used the line “mourning in America” — playing off an old Ronald Regan TV spot called “It’s morning in America,” but in this case referring to the mounting loss of money, jobs, and life caused by Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis.

It might have sat out there forever on the Internet, getting a few clicks here, a few likes there, but not doing much else. Before Trump lost his marbles over it, the YouTube version of the ad had “a couple of thousand views,” according to Ad Age, the leading advertising industry trade paper.

Then Trump took to twitter to denounce “Mourning” in America in a series of enraged, foaming-at-the-mouth tweets. He referred to various members of the Lincoln Project as “Moonface,” “deranged loser,” “Crazed,” and “LOSERS.” And whaddya know? The Streisand effect went into overdrive. As of May 5^th, the viewership of Mourning in America had gone up to 433,707, Ad Age reports.

In case you’ve missed it, or would like to add to the damage caused byTrump’s stumbling over the Streisand Effect tripwire and shooting off his own foot, here it is:

Faking “fake news” to

make it really fake

You’d think that after all the carrying on Donald Trump has done about “Fake News,” he’d be extra-special, double-super-careful not to let his people try faking any news themselves.

Hah!

The Trump campaign has been sent a cease-and-desist letter, telling it to take down an ad that makes “false, misleading, and deceptive” use of CNN programming.

According to the media trade publication Medialite, in the ad …

…two brief snippets of CNN footage from the March 30th episode of The Situation Room are included. The first includes part of a question from anchor Wolf Blitzer to CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. As the letter points out, the ad truncates the question from Blitzer to make it seem like he is only asking about President Donald Trump’s ban on a commercial travel ban from China in early January and that, without that decision, Blitzer concludes “it could’ve been two million people dead here in the United States?” Moments later, Gupta is seen saying “Yes,” in apparent affirmation. 

But is that what really happened on CNN’s air? Nope.

“The advertisement purposely and deceptively edits the clip to imply that Mr. Blitzer and Dr. Gupta were crediting the President’s travel ban policy issued in January for saving millions of American lives, when in fact Mr. Blitzer and Dr. Gupta were discussing recently implemented social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders issued by state and local governments,” Rick McMurtry, associate general counsel for WarnerMedia, wrote in the letter addressed to Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director. “CNN hereby demands that you discontinue airing the advertisement with the CNN clip that has been distorted in such a way as to mislead the public.

Trump people trying to mislead the public? I am shocked … shocked!