New York Magazine Competition No. 82: Trump As Hemingway

Welcome back to the New York Magazine Competition. On regular Mondays, we lay out a challenge and offer sample responses. Enter in the comments section, or on Twitter with the hashtag we’ve provided, and the editors will select a winner. Criteria are highly subjective, but heavily retweeted and favorited posts will have an advantage. The prize is a year’s subscription to New York in print or a two-year subscription to the iPad edition (winner’s choice). Full rules are here.

COMPETITION NO. 82: “TRUMP AS HEMINGWAY.”

“For Trump, his online dominance is a source of pride. He boasts to friends, aides and journalists alike about the quality of his writing — pointed, pungent and memorable — and claims that people call him ‘the Ernest Hemingway of Twitter.’” —Philip Rucker and Danielle Paquette, in the Washington Post.

Please compose a sample of the president-elect’s Hemingwayesque prose. For example:

His faith in Cuba was no longer strong. He had once liked the casinos there, or the idea of the casinos. No longer. The leader needed to go. “It was good riddance,” he said, after he was gone.

She was a nasty woman. She needed to be defeated, and she was. Someone more beautiful and younger should perhaps have run. I always knew. It was sad.

The papers and magazines were failing, and I saw them failing. Their editors were against me from the beginning, so it was good that they failed.

The Russians were tough and strong. We understood each other. We wanted to make each other great again.

Enter on Twitter with the hashtag #trumpashemingway, or in the comments thread below, by January 20.

RESULTS OF COMPETITION NO. 81, 2016 IN A COUPLET, in which you were asked for a two-line poem summing up the year.


HONORABLE MENTION TO:

2016 has left us bereft,
Sadly shout the few of us left.
—TrixieinDixie

Events were very complicated: it was like living inside a Pandora’s box …
And Toto, I have a feeling we need a yellow brick road now to Fort Knox. 
—YettaTelebenda

’16’s done, the next will be better

I’ll eat well, sleep more, and avoid crossing Yetta.
—joanie1 (who gets extra honors this week for submitting a very long poem that, strictly speaking, violates the rules of this Competition but is mighty impressive)

If you wore a turban, a hijab, a fez,
You had reason to fear our soon-to-be prez.
—KathleenS

I hold this truth to be self-evident:
Lin-Manuel, please run for president.
—@debfreedman1

Trump’s cabinet picks are a simmering cauldron
Meaning four years’ more work for one Alec Baldwin.
—ragman1940

2016 took Bowie and Prince,
We’ve given up our democracy since.
—@adamtannenbaum

Of all of his pipe dreams, the Trump faithful’s favorite
was that he’d build a big wall and make Mexico pay for it.
—kaboomm

“Bud sex” and love equus
Thanks, I guess, Science of Us?
—RealityCzech

We lost HEROES, lost FAITH, lost THE FORCE …
Brangelina’s still here, but they got a divorce.
—3North

As 2016 kicks the bucket
Let’s look back — you know what? No. Fuck it.
—@majtague

’Tis Trump-like and bold, at the end of the day,
When your couplets don’t scan, but you post anyway.
—queasyrider

AND THE WINNER IS:

The surest conclusion, when all the smoke clears,
Is the Mayans had fudged up their math by four years.
—Classicist

Competition No. 82: Trump As Hemingway