On Tuesday night, our big, dopey, wet president put on his big boy pants and his struggling-to-keep-a-meal-down-while-trying-to-be-serious face and gave his very first Oval Office address on the horrific fact that there is no large slab of concrete, steel slat barrier, or, uh, swiss cheese-type barrier contraption with viewing holes in it adjacent to the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most of the words were, of course, lies and bullshit, standard Republican disinformation as well as the type of lie that only a brain addled by constant ass-kissing and Penthouse magazines from 1986 could come up with, such as the fact that houses also have walls, and so building a wall on our southern border is just like that, only slightly larger.
Just as important, or at least as interesting, as what President Trump said last night is what he didn’t say—or rather, what he did during the time in-between when he was saying things. Sometimes, he took no pauses at all between phrases, like a child reading a school assignment he’s not particularly fond of, or someone’s dad reading an instruction manual for setting up a video game console he’s never heard of before. Mostly though, he was breathing.
Not the normal, everyday breathing that you and I would do. His breathing was labored but also panicked, as if he knew that he desperately needed to get air into his system but just didn’t quite know how.
Why was the president breathing like this? Maybe, like many of us do during the seasons when the air is cold and dry, President Trump (just like Sinatra once did, remember Sinatra? We’re going to bring him back) had a cold. Maybe a life of eating habits filled with Diet Coke and McDonald’s has rendered him winded even just from sitting down. Maybe there’s even something more nefarious afoot.
Or maybe, just maybe, the president’s labored, sniffly breaths were like a sigh inverted inwards, the long existential groan of a man who got what he wanted, then realized he never actually wanted it at all.
Anyway, here is a video of President Trump breathing that will most likely ruin your day.