Earlier today, I addressed some erroneous news reports. In remarks from the Treaty Room of the State Department, I reaffirmed my faith in President Trump’s America-first agenda, my admiration of the president’s leadership, and my commitment to serving as secretary of State.
I neglected, however, to deny the basic thrust of those erroneous reports. Namely, that I once used an epithet to disparage the president’s intelligence. My thought was that such “petty nonsense” did not merit a response, and that what really mattered was to reiterate my support for the president’s policy goals. But that was a stupid thought. And that I thought it proves that it is I, in fact, who has the bad brain.
To address a few specifics that have been misreported this morning: I have not described — and would never describe — the president as a “moron,” nor “fucking moron.” Nor have I referred to him as a “true doofus,” “real dumb-dumb,” or “sub-simian chucklehead.” Nor have I ever asked a staffer, “How many President Trumps does it take to screw in a light bulb?” and, after giving said staffer adequate time to formulate an estimate (between three and seven seconds, depending on whether the staffer appeared distracted when I initiated my query), I have never then said, “Two: one to tell me to screw in the light bulb for him, and another to mindlessly tweet ‘Rex is wasting his time,’ like the drool-soaked dunderhead that Donald J. Trump truly is.”
If anyone ever overheard me using any of the aforementioned epithets, I was probably just shouting them into a mirror. That is how frustrated I sometimes get with my own BIG-LEAGUE stupidity. Could anyone really blame the president if he started referring to me in tweets as “Rocks for Brains Rex”? I certainly couldn’t.
And I won’t.
Let me tell you what I’ve learned about this president, whom I did not know before taking this office. He loves sudoku. He plays it on the hard setting and gets all the best numbers within seconds. His verbal skills break the mold of what people traditionally think is achievable in the game of Scrabble.
I, on the other hand, am a low-energy Scrabble player who once wasted a wild tile on the word dog. And I misspelled dog, too. Yeah, that’s it. Write that down. “Rocks for Brains Rex” spelled it with a silent L. For loser. Because that’s what he is.
At the Riyadh summit, President Trump beat King Salman in a game of Cranium. At the G7, the president challenged Emmanuel Macron to a speed-reading competition, and finished a French-language version of Swann’s Way in 25 minutes. The French president — whose wife is in such good physical shape (believe me) — still hasn’t gotten through section three.
I secretly don’t know how to read because my parents were Dust Bowl dirt people who gave me very bad genes — like a dog.
President Trump invented string theory. He ghost-wrote Infinite Jest, and secretly helped solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. He was the real-life inspiration for the Academy Award–winning film A Beautiful Mind, except he isn’t crazy, and they only made him crazy in the movie for the sake of the plot.
When I wake up in the morning, my first thoughts are, “Durrrr … how do I put my shoes on my feetses?!” and then, “How am I going to make it through another day pretending that I don’t know what everybody else does: that I fundamentally lack the cognitive capacity, intellectual curiosity, and attention span necessary to execute the role I’ve been given? Can I really keep projecting my own manifest inadequacies onto other people? Why can’t I be a world-historic genius like Donald Trump, who was a good student at Wharton, and comprehends very well?”
And as I struggle to put on my shoes and then trip and get my butt lodged in a bucket, and then start rolling sideways in the bucket toward a staircase, and then hit my head on every post of the banister of the staircase, like the cartoon idiot that I genuinely am, in real life, I accept that I will never be a smart person like President Trump.
I am Rocks for Brains Rex. The man who gave up being CEO of one of the world’s most powerful companies for this. L’idiot, c’est moi.
