“I hope you liked your signature.” The line got Donald Trump some chuckles as he recently addressed the crowd of a couple of hundred supporters (or maybe it was a million) at the Machine Shed restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa. Noting the large black ink stain on his pointing finger, the former president added somewhat bitterly that it would probably be there “for two weeks.”
It must be increasingly obvious, even to Mr. Trump, that actions have consequences. When he entered the Machine Shed, Trump noticed two men in the lobby, writing on their clipboards. In full campaign mode, he swooped down upon them, grabbed their clipboards and their Sharpie and without so much as a “howdy-do” or a “by-your-leave”, Trump signed his scribbly signature, while unwittingly blotting his forefinger and went on about his way.
Now I’m not saying that grabbing perfect strangers by the, um, clipboard is as bad as the behavior he bragged about in the “Access Hollywood” tape when he explained that he assaults women because he feels like it and because it is his right as a famous person. “I don’t even wait,” he told host Billy Bush. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it…. You can do anything.” Maybe the Urbandale guys were flattered that Donald J. Trump snatched their documents and scribbled on them. So what, if he was only using them as campaign props and to satisfy his own ego and his childish impulses? He’s a star so I guess they had to let him do it.
Of course, Trump’s former victim E. Jean Carroll did successfully sue him last month for $5 million. And now Carroll, author of the 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?” along with niece Mary Trump, author of “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” are collaborating on a romance novel. You can’t make this stuff up.
Mr. Trump has long had a curious obsession with Sharpie pens. You might even call it a fetish. Remember “Sharpiegate”—when Trump crudely doctored a hurricane map with his Sharpie to show that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama because it was what he had falsely predicted although the National Weather Service said otherwise? He took so much heat for that cringeworthy forgery that he actually had the Sharpie company create a line of Trump brand markers bearing his signature scribbled in gold, looking like the seismograph of a minor earthquake and sold them for $15 for a set of five. (What a classy guy!)
Trump used a Sharpie to sign presidential documents, autographs, even a section of his $147 million unfinished boarder wall in Otay Mesa, California. During his first impeachment inquiry about extorting Ukraine, Trump’s speech notes, in thick black block letters were visible to all but the most bleary-eyed Washington press photographers. “I want nothing,” he wrote, “I want no quid pro quo. This is the final word from the pres.” (If only that were true….)
Now Trump is back on the campaign trail, studiously avoiding indelicate questions about his impending indictments while focusing on vital issues like low-flush toilets, his stolen election and the evils of Tik Tok. As Trump points at Ron DeSantis as a sanctimonious loser and Joe Biden as a doddering crook, the proof that he himself is an abuser of people and Sharpies alike is written all over his finger.