Trump's White House, You Can't Parody A Parody

Trump turns tax policy into folklore, immigration into fiction, and a press conference into a spectacle of lies.

Where do you even begin when the leader of the free world praises Hannibal Lecter, flirts with random women from the podium, invents fictional trade deals, and brags that he can fix the Federal Reserve with “the utterance of a sentence”?

This was a Thursday at the White House. The event was billed as a press conference celebrating Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, a Frankenstein of immigration crackdowns, tax delusions, and cultural grievance. But it quickly devolved into something closer to a Shark Tank pitch for authoritarianism, part home shopping network, part late-stage empire if the host had a felony record and a grudge against reality.

Trump opened with the bombshell claim that the U.S. had “just signed a deal with China.” News to China. News to the trade office. News to his own staff. He waved at India too, claiming we’re about to “open up India,” like it’s a Bass Pro Shops grand opening.

Then came his classic border melodrama, caravans, criminals, and the claim that 11,888 murderers had walked into the country under Biden’s watch. That number is as specific as it is fictional. Bonus points for announcing he personally coined the term “caravan.”

He insisted his immigration crackdown will deport “a bare minimum of 1 million illegal aliens a year,” and then added with dead seriousness, that we can tell who to deport because “you can look at them and say: big trouble.”

Not racist, he assures us. Just “common sense.”

Mid-rant, Trump revived a campaign fable about a “beautiful” waitress in Las Vegas who once told him that tips shouldn’t be taxed. He claims this offhand comment inspired his no-tax-on-tips crusade, a line he’s been pushing since 2020 and recycled heavily during his 2024 campaign. By 2025, it’s evolved into full-blown origin myth: a spur-of-the-moment revelation that supposedly won him Nevada and now, he insists, transformed the U.S. tax code.

“A legend was made,” he beamed, as if tax policy is handed down via room service epiphany.

And this time, unlike previous cycles, the idea actually is in the bill, or at least in the current House version. Whether it survives the Senate is another matter entirely. Whether it applies to all tipped workers, how it’s enforced, or whether it’ll become yet another IRS loophole for Trump-branded clubs, none of that has been explained.

As with most Trumpian promises, the applause is real. The policy is vague. The impact? Probably left to the waitstaff to sort out.

In one breath, Trump claimed the bill would cut $1.7 trillion in federal spending, but also strengthen Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, without anyone feeling a thing. In the next, he insisted we could save “almost a trillion dollars” just by whispering at the Fed chair to lower interest rates.

Then he claimed we’ve taken in “$88 billion in tariffs”, which he presents as revenue, not the consumer-paid import tax it actually is. It’s not just bad math, it’s math-flavored propaganda.

Oh, and he compared this economic masterstroke to the invention of the paperclip. In 1817. (Fun fact: it was patented in 1899.)

In what is now a Trump rally staple, the former president referenced the Silence of the Lambs cannibal, calling him “the late great Hannibal Lecter.” He presented this as proof of his immigration success. Don’t try to make it make sense, you’ll pull a muscle.

“Why do I mention Hannibal? Because we won in a landslide,” he offered, helpfully.

He pivoted to trans athletes, a rhetorical sugar high for his base, by inventing a race in which a trans woman beat her opponent by “five hours and 14 minutes.” (Trump now believes women’s long-distance races last roughly as long as international flights.)

The punchline: “It’s so ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t want to be a crier. But it makes you sick to your stomach.”

Same.

Then, and I am serious, Trump called Jewish Senator Chuck Schumer “our great Palestinian senator” and said, “he used to like Jewish people. Now he’s totally against Jewish people.” The implication? That being critical of Israeli policy or of Trump himself means you’ve turned on your faith or ethnicity.

This is, full stop, antisemitic garbage.

Rather than a sales pitch to pass the bill, this was performance art, dangerous, delusional, and drenched in grievance. Trump’s presidency has always been part spectacle, part vendetta, and part legal evasion. But moments like these show us what the future would actually look like if we don’t call out this behavior.

A White House where lies are indistinguishable from law.
A tax code built on cocktail napkin conversations.
An immigration policy based on facial profiling and movie villains.
A nation ruled, not governed, by someone who brags, “I think that’s the way I’ve ruled.”

Call this whatever you want, just don’t call it normal.