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You Totally Got This, Don. And By 'This' We Mean A Felony Indictment

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | July 18, 2017 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | July 18, 2017 |


I hate to break it to everyone, but as it turns out, there are websites devoted to intelligent entertainment outside of our beloved Pajiba. As it happens, while browsing YouTube this weekend, I came across the Things I Learned Today series. Given that it wasn’t in direct competition with my own usual subjects (why everyone is foolish for not knowing how hot Lip Gallagher is and on a scale from one to ten, how bird-like is John Oliver (it’s stork. The answer is stork)), I decided to give it a go. This is where I learned about the so-called “small penis rule.” Essentially, if a writer wants to base a character on a real person, but also wants to avoid being sued for libel, they give the fictional character one particular quality that is so abhorrent the libeled person would rather not sue than have to acknowledge having it. So I could write an entire post about how awful my fictional coworker is, what with him always talking about how great socialized medicine in the U.K. is or how good at bike riding he is or how much money he’s saving by not bothering to buy the sleeves for his many t-shirts, as long as I include one terrible detail he’d refuse to attribute to himself like the fact that he hates the Backstreet Boys. And who would possibly want to admit something that terrible, right?

I bring all of this up because I can only imagine that if Donny Jr were ever the subject of a “small penis rule” characterization, not only would he fully embrace having a tiny penis, he’d brag about having the tiniest of the penises.

Because, DJ, my dude, you are not doing this the right way.

Donald J. Trump Jr. has been accused of masterminding a plot with the help of the Russians to ferry top secret information from the Kremlin to his father in order to pull off one of the biggest political upsets in the history of the U.S., and take down one of the strongest political families of the past thirty years. His excuse upon being caught red-handed is, “Oh no, I’m too fucking stupid to have done that.” Which is a weird response. Because on the one hand, yeah, he’s too fucking stupid to have pulled that off. But when you’re in charge of a multinational real estate conglomerate, and spokesperson for a presidential administration, telling people how fucking stupid you are probably isn’t the best of moves.



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Also telling people you are too fucking stupid to know that you were breaking the law doesn’t mean you weren’t breaking the law. I have to imagine that DJ is telling the world that he had no idea he’d done anything wrong because he expects that that will get him out of trouble. Except there’s no reason to believe that. The general public might buy his story, but you know who isn’t? Bob Goddamn Mueller. And the general public isn’t the one conducting a criminal investigation into Trump’s campaign.

The other part of this is the lack of distance between the offending action, and DJ’s explanation. If, and this is a big if, DJ had a meeting with Russian spies lawyers spies, a full year ago, and then no one spoke of Russia at all for twelve months, Donny J could maybe get away with this. Maybe. “Oh shit, that meeting was illegal? I had no idea. This is the first I’m hearing of it. I was totally new to the political game back then what with my did just having clinched the nomination, and didn’t understand that getting classified information from adversarial governments isn’t allowed. Although now saying that sentence out loud makes it clear how naive I was. My bad.” None of that is a good excuse for behaving in clearly underhanded, self-serving ways, but it might be believable.

If the entire goddamn Trump administration hadn’t been lying about Russia for twelve months straight. DJ lied about the meeting, and changed his story fours times. He has continually lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign from the time he took the meeting until just last week. You can’t say, “I was too fucking stupid to know I was doing anything wrong” when people have been asking you on a daily basis, “Hey, did you do this thing? Because it’s totally wrong and illegal.”



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As it turns out, international collusion is a tough game, and those who can’t play it well are likely to get burned. DJ, when faced with the prospect of his illegal meeting being exposed, had to choose between two not very great options. Maybe we should all be a little more sympathetic. We will after all be in the same position when we’re left with Eric or Tiffany as DJ’s replacement.