Trump's Piggyback Ploy

Dave Barry’s Pulitzer Prize, as amended by me in the style of Donald Trump

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Yesterday, the servile board of trustees of the stately John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to put Donald Trump’s name back on the facade of the august Kennedy Center on the grounds that Trump authorized a renovation project there. (At public expense.) He’ll be kind of polishing up the place, and for that he thinks he deserves his name out front, even though he knows less about the performing arts than your average potato, and is as august and stately as a fart.

The egomaniacal gall of the man.

This gave me an idea.

I am going to demand that the trustees of Columbia University alter their certificates to give me, Gene Weingarten, equal credit for some other people’s Pulitzer Prizes, because I, as an editor of their stories, was similarly responsible for, you know, polishing. That’s what editors do.

We’ll start with Dave Barry. I get half of his 1988 Pulitzer for commentary. I can’t remember actually changing any words in his winning columns — Dave’s the genius here — but, hell, the columns passed briskly through my hands. That’s got to count for something.

Also, my friend Michel DuCille, who won a Pulitzer for his haunting 1987 photo essay about life inside a crack house in Miami. I didn’t take any of the photos — my sense of composition is laughable — nor did I actually risk going to the crack house day after day, as Michel did. But I published those pictures in my magazine and rearranged some of them on the page. You know, polishing.

Add those two Pulitzers to my own two, and I will have four, which ties the record for most individual Pulitzers by one journalist. Ever!

Wait.

Whoa.

Almost 40 years ago, I got a journalism fellowship at Harvard, and one of the other writers there was a guy from the Sacramento Bee named Dale Maharidge. Dale told me he was writing a book that would be called “And Their Children After Them”. It was going to be about the descendants of the people written about in the great but now almost forgotten book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” by James Agee and Walker Evans. That book was about the harsh lives and quiet dignity of three tenant farming families in rural Alabama during the Great Depression.

I was at a party when Dale told me this. I don’t remember exactly what I said to him — I am sure I was at least mildly diplomatic — but the message I conveyed was that his book would die on the shelves in the I-got-mine Reagan-era America. Dale looked kind of crestfallen.

“And Their Children After Them” went on to win the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Very successful book.

I contributed nothing more to Dale’s book. But I contend I shepherded it into greatness by subtly challenging Dale, through ridicule, to prove me wrong. It’s what great editors like me do! The more I think about it, the surer I am that I am right.

And then, after I win my fifth Pulitzer by piggybacking on Dale’s book, I will have become, officially,

The Greatest Journalist Who Ever Lived

Thanks, Donald. I couldn’t have done it without you.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Speaking of Donald, the big regime-change news is that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has announced that she is leaving the regime to, proverbially, “spend more time with my family.”

I don’t want her to spend more time with my family, but that’s a different matter altogether. The point is, this, too, is an opportunity for me. I’m thinking of applying for her job. On the snowball-in-hell chance I get it, I have another Plan.

As press secretary, I would lie just as fervently as she does in heaping plaudits on the boss. But I will be subversive in a way Donald Trump, a near-illiterate, will not understand:

“This president stands tall, and second to none, in his statesmanship, his regard for the American people, and his relentless concupiscence.”

“The president, to my certainty, is not not misrepresenting the facts…”

And there would be coded messages, in the style of Samuel Pepys, the noted 17th century English diarist, who would lapse into an unintelligible mishmash of Spanish, French and Italian to describe but disguise his moments of feverish self-pleasuring.

“The president spent the afternoon in conversation with heads of state, pero no realmente. En fait, il était giocare a golf e barare.” Trump will be impressed. He will think I am just being classy.

Eventually, of course, someone will rat on me and I’ll be fired. Then I’ll write a book about it and win my sixth Pulitzer.

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And et enfin:

It would be a smart move to become a paying subscriber, because then you would officially become the employer of The Greatest Journalist Who Ever Lived. You can even put it on your resume! Donald Trump would approve.

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