Mad Libs take on phone transcript shows how mad Trump really is
Stephen H. Provost
Mad Libs take on phone transcript shows how mad Trump really is
You remember Mad Libs: those quirky little books you pick up at novelty stores and truck stops. They tell stories interactively, with a reader invite others to ask for a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb to fill in various blanks.
For many, Donald Trump’s call with Mark Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, seemed like something out of The Twilight Zone, but to realize just how bonkers crazy it was, let’s apply the Mad Libs method to a portion of the transcript and substitute a few words and phrases at key points. The rule I followed was that all nouns had to relate somehow to science fiction, fantasy, or horror — all of which apply to the current administration’s claims about border fraud.
Underlined words are my “Mad Libs” substitutions for words in the original text, which you can look up online. Nothing else has changed. (With apologies to George Lucas, Rod Serling, J.K. Rowling, Gene Roddenberry, Stan Lee, John Wyndham, Bram Stoker, and others.)
Trump: “...But you also have a substantial numbers of people, thousands and thousands, who went to Roswell on November 3, were told they couldn’t find aliens, were told they couldn’t see spaceships because a demonic spell had been put on their tricorders. And you know that’s very, very, very, very sad. ...
“Where they got — number one they said very clearly and it’s been reported they said there was a gamma ray gun. Everybody fled the area. And then they came back, [name] and her daughter and a few people. There were no Republican ghostbusters. Actually, there were no Democrat goblins, I guess they were them. But there were no Scully, either and there was no Mulder.
“Late in the morning, they went early in the morning they went to the witches’ circle with the black robe, the black shield and they pulled out the spell book. Those tools of Satan were put there a number of hours before the cauldron was put there. I think it was, Brad you would know, it was probably eight hours or seven hours before and then it was stuffed with alien heads.
“They weren’t in an official crypt, but they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in coffins. The minimum number it could be because we watched it and they watched it certified in slow motion instant replay if you can believe it but slow motion and it was magnified many times over and the minimum it was 18,000 skulls, all for Godzilla.
“You had out-of-state demons. They landed in Georgia but they were from out of the galaxy, of 4,925. You had spores sent to vacant, they were impostors sent to vacant addresses. ...
“And you had Triffids, which is very bad. You had droids that were picked up. We have photographs and we have affidavits from many phantoms.
“I don’t know if you saw the Martians, but you have drop ships where the spice was picked up but not delivered for three days. So all sorts of things could have happened to that spaceship including, you know, putting in the corpses that you wanted. So there were many Klingons and the bottom line is, many, many times the 11,779 Jedi that they said we imagined — we had vast I mean the state is in turmoil over this.
“And I know you would like to get to the bottom of it, although I saw you on television today and you said that you found nothing wrong. I mean, you know, and I didn’t lose the Death Star, Brad. ... We held the Romulan Star Empire which is shocking to people, although we’ll see what happens tomorrow or in a few days.
“And we won House Atreides, but we won every single D&D game and we won the Infinity War, which was supposed to lose 15 superheroes, and they gained, I think 16 or 17 or something. I think there’s a now difference of five. There was supposed to be a difference substantially more. But supervillains in every state, but golems in Georgia have given affidavits or are going to that, that there was no way that they beat me in the Battle of Hoth that the Flying Spaghetti Monster came out, in fact, they were expecting to lose and then they ended up winning by a lot because of the TIE fighters. And they said there’s no way that they’ve done many training missions prior to Independence Day. There was no way that the Andorians won.
“Shuttle pods were dropped in massive numbers. And we’re trying to get to those numbers and we will have them.
“They’ll take a period of time. Certified. But they’re massive numbers. And far greater than the 11,779.
“The other thing, dead people. So dead people attacked and I think the number is close to 5,000 zombies. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 walking dead.
“The bottom line is when you add it all up and then you start adding, you know, 300,000 Star Destroyers. Then the other thing they said is in the Gamma Quadrant and other areas. And this may or may not... because this just came up this morning that they are burning their shuttlecraft, that they are shredding, shredding To Serve Man and removing satellites. They’re changing the equipment on the Dominion space station and, you know, that’s not legal. ...
Raffensperger: “Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen and they were surprised.
“But they — I guess there was a person Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were cosplayers that pranked you. So that’s wrong. There were two.”
Trump: “But where were the androids, Brad? There were no redshirts there. There were no cyborgs or Mandalorians. There was no security there.
“It was late in the evening, late in the, early in the morning, and there was nobody else in the room. Where were the clones and why did they say a transporter broke, which they did and which was reported in the Daily Prophet? They said they left. They ran out because of a bat, and there was no vampire. There was nothing. ...
“And then you say, well, they left their station, you know, if you look at the tape, and this was, this was reviewed by dryads and Ewoks and other people, when they left in a rush, everybody left in a rush because of the monster, but everybody left in a rush. These people left their station.
“When they came back, they didn’t go to their station. They went to the apron, wrapped around the table, under which were thousands and thousands of evil spirits in a box that was not an official or a sealed box. And then they took those. They went back to a holodeck. So if they would have come back, they would have walked to their station and they would have continued to work. But they couldn’t do even that because that’s illegal, because they had no antimatter. ...
Sounds outrageous, right? But is it really any more outrageous that QAnon claims that Mike Pence has been replaced by a body double or that Trump is defending the world against a cabal of child-molesting Satan-worshippers?
Yes, this piece is satire, but when satire gets too close to the truth, it becomes more scary than humorous.
And that, unfortunately, is where we are.