Wiretapping at Mar-a-Lago?

Wiretapping at Mar-a-Lago?
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March 4 - 5, 2017 (Weekend Edition)

Dear Mr. P,

I gather from your early morning tweets that you were in a sour mood as you started your weekend at Mar-a-Lago.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

And this, a half hour later --

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

Whew! That’s toxic stuff! What a shame. I’d hate for your weekend in south Florida to be a bust, especially as your estate may be underwater in the future. More on that later.

FYI:

  • It’s “tap”, not “tapp”. But I’ll give you a pass, because perhaps you were sleep deprived when you tweeted.
  • Remember the old adage, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?” You may recall that Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, was the guy who came to the rescue when you and your dad were hit with a federal housing discrimination lawsuit. He also taught you “The Art of the Suit” (and I’m not talking about the kind you wear at the White House). Besides, I thought you would be one of McCarthy’s admirers -- he was the ultimate conspiracy theorist, fantasizing commies lurking behind every door.
  • Nixon/Watergate? Are you trying to give ideas to the already-suspicious-minds of the lying press corps? (as if they aren’t already thinking, Watergate! Watergate!)
  • Dissing Nixon? I thought he was your role model. After all, he’s the one who gave you the idea of Press = Enemy of the People (well, it could have been Miller, Bannon, Sessions, etc). But it was Nixon who, in 1974, said that Watergate “would have been a blip” except for [journalists] “who hate my guts.”
  • The “very sacred” election process? Hey, wake up, Donald! You’re the one who lied about the enormity (Nope!) of your win -- not to mention your suggestion to the Russians that they look for more of Hillary’s emails. This Russian thing –those thoughtless sound bites at your rallies, your silly contradictory statements, your Putin-love, your fun in Moscow back in your Miss Universe days – that’s what started this whole mess.

So what happened Friday night? Those posts were especially nasty, a quantum leap worse than your usual. Maybe your own [brain] wires are crossed (Ha! Ha! Get it? Wires? Just trying to keep you on your toes. . . . Hmmm. . . . I wonder if your toes are as tiny as your fingers?).

Were you awake all night, haunted by ghosts? Joe McCarthy? Roy Cohn? Richard Nixon? Barack Obama? (Small detail. President Obama is very alive, very well, and very busy doing lots of things, although wiretapping isn’t one of them. And, FYI, most people don’t believe he’s either sick or bad.)

Perhaps Marjorie Merriweather Post, the billionaire who designed and built the extravagant edifice in which you now reside, dancing around your private living quarters all night long, taunting you. Was she really richer than you? There’s only one way to know for sure – release your tax returns. But we – the amateur conspiracy theorists – suspect the tax returns will remain hidden, as they might contain some unpleasantness, such as your debts to Russia and your not-so-huge net worth.

Marjorie Merriweather Post was an astute businesswoman, and not saddled with bankruptcies, either. Through her business acumen (and, some fortunate choices in spouses), she built up her wealth to become the richest woman in the world.

In contrast to your real estate schemes, Marjorie’s businesses were real products that people needed – food! She developed her father’s Postum Cereal Company into the world-wide General Foods Corporation that provided us with the first packaged breakfast cereal (Grape Nuts), Post Toasties, Jell-O, Sanka, Maxwell House coffee – the list goes on and on. She also is responsible for the success of the frozen food industry. The story goes that one night she and her husband dined on a previously frozen goose. Marjorie was so enthralled by the concept of frozen food that she visited the man who invented the process – Clarence Birdseye – and bought his business.

She was a dedicated philanthropist, giving millions of dollars to charities, including the Kennedy Center, The Salvation Army, and the Red Cross. During the Great Depression, she set up a soup kitchen in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen that for five years served hot meals to around 1000 woman and children. This mission earned her the name “Lady Bountiful”.

She subscribed to Christian Science doctrines to which her father, Charles William (C.W.) Post, attributed his health. C.W., after a prolonged illness and nearly killed by a stay at Dr. Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, saw a Christian Scientist practitioner who is said to have cured him. C.W. became a health fanatic and, believing that caffeine was evil, developed Postum, a non-caffeinated alternative beverage. Little Marjorie helped him promote the drink (although in fairness, it only really took off after a newspaper advertising campaign), and learned business skills from him. Her father’s influence also led Marjorie to believe in the virtues of a healthful lifestyle, and imparted her with a philanthropic attitude. It’s said that Marjorie followed a regimen of daily exercise, good diet, and eight hours of sleep, retiring by 11 every night.

You and Marjorie have a lot in common. When her father died, she inherited a fortune. And, like you, she had expensive tastes. She had a private plane and a HUGE yacht – the largest, privately owned sailing yacht in the world at the time. She was married and divorced four times – even more than you! She owned a pair of 20-carat diamond earrings that had belonging to Marie Antoinette. She commissioned and helped design and decorate luxury homes, including Mar-a-Lago. She held large lavish parties at all her homes, including hiring the Metropolitan Opera to perform at the housewarming of her Fifth Avenue triplex apartment, and putting up the cast of a Broadway show for a week at Mar-a-Lago to entertain the guests. And, like you, initially she was disdained by the New York high society crowd. But, her with charm, wealth, exquisite taste, fabulous parties, and philanthropy, Marjorie became one of society’s darlings. Unlike you, I don’t believe she played golf (but she did know how to box!). And, also unlike you, she was renowned for her interest in, and collection of, fine art and artifacts. (I understand that you go more for the cheap replicas.)

But wait! Here’s the really good part! Marjorie had a Soviet connection, just like you! Her third husband was international lawyer Joseph Davies, whom she married at age 48 in 1935. Davies, a friend and advisor to FDR, was appointed ambassador to Russia in 1937. Marjorie and her husband took off in their luxury yacht, the Sea Cloud, and docked at Leningrad. Stationed in Moscow from 1938 to 1939, Marjorie is said to have “charmed high ranking officials”, and procured innumerable Russian treasures during her stay (art seized by the Soviet government from the imperial family, aristocracy, and churches). Her husband was curiously and naively blind to the horrors of Stalin, whom he later described thus: “A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him”. Back home, Davies wrote a popular book, “Mission to Moscow”, made into a movie in 1943 that portrayed a whitewashed vision of Russia. Maybe you should make a movie too, something along the lines of Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Vlad Putin.

But back to Mar-a-Lago. Marjorie discovered the property in the 1920s by crawling through the swampy jungle on the Florida coast until she found the perfect location – between the ocean (Mar) and Lake Worth (Lago), now the Intracoastal Waterway. When completed in 1927, it had over 100 rooms and had cost of millions of dollars. Marjorie, like you, had a fondness for gold and decorated the house with gold leaf and gold bathroom fixtures. In her later years, Marjorie envisioned Mar-a-Lago becoming a Winter White House. Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall designated it a National Historic Site in 1969, and in 1972 Richard Nixon accepted Marjorie’s gift to use the structure as a Winter White House upon her death. She died in 1973, but less than ten years later, due to security concerns (are you paying attention, Donald? Security concerns!) and the high cost of maintenance, the property was returned to the Post family. It’s been yours since 1985. You obtained easements to transform it into a private club; open to members since 1985, it sports more gold than ever (including a new 20,000 square foot ballroom decorated with millions of dollars of gold leaf).

I’m just wondering. With such an immense property with thousands of square feet of rooms, don’t you worry even a teensy bit about security? Wiretapping, perhaps? After all, we all know the Russians are spectacularly successful at putting hidden cameras, microphones, and various spy devices inside rooms. Not wishing to alarm you or sound like one of those crackpot conspiracy theorists, but who’s to say your own Mar-a-Lago private living quarters are safe? This story could become a Breitbart News exclusive!

Back to Florida geography. Although you and Scott Pruitt insist that climate change is a trivial concern (“a hoax”, “bunk”, “scientists continue to disagree…” and similar invectives), your south Florida neighbors, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Coastal Risk Consulting (CRC) beg to differ. According to a CRC analysis, in thirty years the Mar-a-Lago grounds could be underwater more than half the year. Even now, extreme autumn high tides (King Tides) are bringing the ocean closer. Further south, water already laps at the front of the Trump Hollywood condos after storms. The swamp returns to Mar-a-Lago!

Here’s my advice, Donald. Leave the Mar-a-Lago grounds with its ghosts of the past and wiretapping of the present, and go play some golf. Leave your phone behind. Stop tweeting! For all we know, your phone is one of those models that some day will explode in your tiny hands and singe your un-presidential fingers. And while you’re working on your golf swing, perhaps you could devote a couple of seconds to thinking about the reality of climate change.

And about those tweets. Here’s another old adage, this one about “crying wolf”. I read the story to my first-grade reading student a few weeks ago. The gist of the story is that if you make false claims of mayhem too often, people will stop paying attention to you. You, of all people, don’t want that to happen.

Sincerely,

N

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