June 23, 2020
Donald Trump is nothing if not menacing, because, among other things, he has absolutely no social skills that anyone in our vast pool of associate solitary reporters has ever noticed. Just ask best-selling author Michael D’Antonio, who wrote Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015).
As the whole world knows, on June 1 Trump staged an elaborate
photo-op holding somebody else’s Bible (a book he’s never read, and, not only that, he’s never read our Constitution, either) in front of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, “the Presidents’ Church,” which faces Lafayette Square, which is the closest park to the peoples’ White House. That June 1 stunt required all kinds of nasty stuff to be launched against protesters in Lafayette Park, including tear gas.
Because Trump thinks (wrongly) that he has the backing of all the nation’s police unions, and because of widespread incidents of police brutality against black and brown people, there are still anti-Trump protesters in Lafayette Square, many of them from the Black Lives Matter movement, and they have now created an autonomous zone, which Trump has lavishly condemned (yes, AP fans, we know it’s the wrong word…. but). Read all about today’s developments at https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/trump-dc-autonomous-zone-335340.
Today we welcome to these pages two newly minted asociate solitary reporters, Claudine de Maupassant and Jennifer Vaucluse, both of whom are direct descendants of Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, a French aristocrat who was instrumental in helping George Washington and many thousands of other patriots defeat the forces of King George III, particularly at the Battle of Yorktown. Lafayette Park is named for him and, much less importantly, your solitary reporter was ordained (“made ordinary”) at First Unitarian Church of Denver, 1400 Lafayette Street, right here in the Mile High City, in October 1996, but he’s since joined up with the Presbyterian USA folks, though not as a minister.
Enough of all that. ASRs de Maupassant and Vaucluse spoke moments ago with the leaders of the Lafayette Park protesters, who told them in fluent French that in honor of La Fayette, and in furtherance of the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have gone one step beyond declaring Lafayette to be a police-free autonomous zone.
Instead, they have declared that Lafayette Park is, in its
entirely — including St. John’s Episcopal Church — an independent nation.
At a mere seven acres, the Republic of Lafayette is the smallest nation in the world, much smaller than Vatican City, but it was immediately recognized by all member nations of the United Nations, except for the unsavory man who thinks he was legitimately elected to lead our exceptional nation.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres (a first cousin thrice removed of Denver’s best letter carrier, Tony Gutierrez), a veteran Portugese diplomat, praised the brave BLM leaders who declared their independence from TrumpLand. “Tomorrow,” Guterres told ASRs de Maupassant and Vaucluse, “I will stand atop La Fayette’s statue in Lafayette Square and thumb my nose at Trump, who will easily be able to see me from his Oval Office, because Donald Trump is a total menace to the existing world order.”
As all this was taking place, associate solitary reporter Keith Coleman was having very friendly chats with the BLM protesters when ASR Johanna Jones, who is with Trump 24/7, texted him to say that Trump has ordered, not the DC National Guard, but the top brass at his Pentagon to come and whisk him away to a bunker anywhere in the US except for in the deep bowels of the White House.