“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi.
I debated whether to go big and somewhat obscure with this post title. It was a short debate: I went big with Big Yellow Trumpy, which was the first title that occurred to me when I saw the pictures. It’s the post title as earworm.
The atrocious redo of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is far from the worst thing the Insult Comedian has ever done but it epitomizes what we’ve always known: Everything Trump touches turns to shit.
The punny titles have been raining down on us since the big reveal. There was this variation on Big Yellow Taxi from Vogue: They Paved Paradise? A Closer Look at Trump’s New White House Rose Garden.
The Daily Beast chimed in with a different musical pun: Trump Doesn’t Beg Pardon For What He’s Done to the White House Rose Garden.
Is Trump trying to live up to this band name and destroy American culture?
Destruction is his jam, but I think he wanted to see his name paired with Jackie Kennedy: Crass meets class. Celebrity culture is everything to the Kaiser of Chaos. He also loves concrete. He’s a New York real estate developer, after all.
That is, of course, a characteristically quirky SCOTSÂ cover of the Seventies hit. I never promised you Lynn Anderson’s hit version, but might as well post it anyway:
Has Trump pardoned anyone lately? I’d let him go down for this redesign but it’s only a misdemeanor in comparison to everything else his regime has done. Still, it’s ugly and looks like something you’d see at a chain hotel in deep shit suburbia:
That brings me to a question that’s raging on my social media feeds. Is it okay to mock the Fascist fuck-ups running the federal government for small things when they’re doing major damage? I think you know my answer: Hell yes.
Mockery is the best medicine. The Insult Comedian is a classic bully; he can dish it out but can’t take it.
Does anyone believe Trump’s stated reason for paving over Jackie’s lawn?
It’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to look, I think it’s actually going to look better. But some people would like to leave it. But the problem is you can’t. We had the press here yesterday. Do you see the women there? They’re going crazy. The grass was wet. Their heels are going right through the grass, like four inches deep.”
Say what? After a lifetime as a boorish and sexist asshole, he’s suddenly considerate? If you buy that, you probably believe that the big ugly bill didn’t cut Medicaid or that DOGE rooted out waste, fraud, and abuse. They should have started at the Oval Office: the estimate for *all* the renovations is around $100 million including a 90K square foot ballroom. They should call it Studio 54 On The Potomac.
Back to the post title. I went with Big Yellow Trumpy because of all the jokes about his weird skin color from makeup, spray tanning or whatever the hell this vain motherfucker uses. There are some good skin color adjacent nicknames including Cheeto Jesus, Mandarin Mussolini, and the Orange Man, all of which evoke the messianic malakatude of King MAGA. I prefer green to orange and grass to concrete but nobody elected me king. The same goes for Trumpy.
Repeat after Joni and me: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Jackie Kennedy weeps.
The last word goes to Joni Mitchell:
Trump has mob connections with concrete contractors that need to wet their beaks.
ALSO, makes a prime location for disappearing inconvenient bodies.
Here’s the thing I can’t let go of: he’s making these long term changes bc he expects it to be his long term home. He has no intention of going anywhere.