The loser apprentice

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

THE APPRENTICE was my favourite reality TV show. And I far preferred the common or garden Apprentice to the celebrity version because, for me, those genuinely formerly famous morons, like Meatloaf and Gary Busey, took away from the show’s real attraction, which was the wannabe celebrity apprentice himself, Donald Trump.

I loved everything he did, no matter how small or stupid. When he flubbed the introduction to one of the silly competitions, I cheered. When he made an ostensibly knowing comment that revealed his pig-ignorance, I snickered. When he fired, usually, the wrong person, who’d had the least to do with the losing team’s failure, and his idiotic offspring bobbled their heads and complimented him on his acuity, I cackled.

Every week, I was in front of the TV before the first guitar note of the O’Jays’ For the Love of Money theme twanged out. I sat through advertisements rather than miss a moment that might contain Trump.

“Why,” my wife would ask, “do you watch that stupid fat bald combover jack---?”

“Because,” I told her, “for this hour, every week, I feel superior to a billionaire!”

(Of course he wasn’t really a billionaire.)

Even when he took his personal train-wreck show onto world television by seeking the Republican presidential nomination he never expected to get, and even though I recognised CNN was creating a Frankenstein's monster, I was glad an otherwise completely useless person had been made useful by his entertainment value.

And there was no guilt in laughing at him because he did not suffer any physical disability, if you discount his elephantine waddle, brought on by a surfeit of hips. I even knew I had better hair than Trump, and I had none at all.

The higher he rose, the greater grew my feeling of superiority, even if my bubble had to burst. If, somehow, he won the nomination, he would lose the election, and that media exposure would ensure another season of the Apprentice.

And my Sunday night snigger at the dullest self-important man in the world would return.

But, of course, I reckoned without the combination of American stupidity, racism and desperation that allowed Trump to sneak een to the White House through the Electoral College back door.

His four years of chaos were especially difficult for those who understood that a man who rose to power like Hitler would cling to it in the same way.

And, no doubt, he will do the greatest harm he can before the equivalent of the White House bailiff drags him out by his ear.

And I understand he is dangerous, this man with near-limitless power and no brain, conscience or personality at all.

But, as the countdown to his cancellation goes to weeks, not months, and days, not weeks, he has reverted to his old witless, entertaining self. Not even on the weakest-scripted episode of the Apprentice have I seen anything as hilariously entertaining as his clownish attempts to make himself the American Mussolini. (Hitler was too thin to be the correct fascist comparison.)

As he’s grown more desperate, the comedy has ballooned proportionally. Rudy with the streaky hair dye, the Republican congressional a--lickers, the US$3 million for 87 votes (or whatever) in Georgia. It’s just got funnier and funnier.

His final attempt to steal the election will come on January 6, when he hopes Republicans in Congress will deny the vote of the people.

And he really thinks he has a chance of pulling it off.

Just like he thought the Republican governors would cheat for him. And the Supreme Court would pay him back for their gigs by keeping him in the White House illegally.

Despite the horror this absurd, amoral man has inflicted on his people, his country and the world, there is not just solace, but hilarity in understanding he will revert to what he was before he got to Washington.

Which is the biggest firetrucking joke in the world; a moron who expected an Emmy for the emptiest TV show in history and a second term after a cut-a-- in the election.

This time next month, it won’t be the United Nations laughing at him. It will be the united nations of the world laughing at him.

The only thing that would make it funnier would be for CBS to give him another season of the Apprentice.

BC Pires is cracking up over Fat Nixon’s cracking up. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com