Late-summer political horror story - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

There are some ideas that begin in a newsroom and end in a courtroom. This one began in a medical waste bin.

 

Somewhere beneath the fluorescent lights of an underfunded hospital, a surgical team had apparently decided that what North America lacked was not affordable housing, sensible infrastructure or a functioning attention span, but one enormous political organism containing Doug Ford and Donald Trump in equal measure.

 

The operation was not performed so much as attempted. The surgeons opened the specimen and immediately regretted having gone to medical school.

 

Ford’s right shoulder had been attached to Trump’s left shoulder with a thick seam of purple surgical staples. Their torsos had been grafted together in a manner that suggested several chapters of a textbook on reconstructive surgery had been deliberately read upside down. One of Trump’s hands emerged from the creature’s abdomen, while one of Ford’s arms disappeared somewhere behind a damp-looking fold of tissue and occasionally came back out holding a Tim Hortons coffee.
The monster had two heads. This was not an improvement.

 

One head had the familiar orange complexion of Donald Trump, complete with a peculiar yellowish hair structure that appeared to have been transplanted using agricultural equipment. The other had Doug Ford’s face, although it had been stretched slightly by the surgical process.

 

Between the two heads was a shared neck. Nobody could explain the neck. It appeared to contain cartilage, scar tissue, several lengths of tubing and what a horrified pathologist described as “something that should not be making those noises.”
Eventually, researchers found that the creature could be pacified with cheeseburgers, breakfast sandwiches and a large quantity of television cameras. Whenever a camera was pointed at it, the beast would immediately straighten its jangly self, inflate its lumpy chest and begin speaking.

 

The two heads could never agree on what they were saying.

 

Trump would begin: “Nobody has ever seen a monster like this.”

 

Ford would interrupt: “Folks, this is actually a very reasonable monster.”

 

Trump would insist it was the greatest monster in history. Ford would say taxpayers were getting tremendous value for this blasphemous monstrosity. Then both mouths would open simultaneously and produce a wet, resonant sound resembling a clogged drain being interviewed on cable news.

 

And thus a business opportunity was born.

 

The Frankensteinian Ford-Trump glob of goo went on tour. It travelled from fall fair to fall fair in a refrigerated livestock trailer, accompanied by three medical students, a veterinarian and a man whose official job was simply “keeping the blob from touching the electrical system.”

 

For a nickel, fairgoers could approach the enclosure and poke the creature with a six-foot wooden stick.

 

Children loved it. 

 

Grandparents loved it even more.

 

The monster did not.

 

Whenever someone poked it, the creature developed a curious series of spasms. Trump’s head would shout about how unfair the poking was. Ford’s head would promise that the poking was actually a great deal for the public.

 

The medical textbooks were eventually updated. Under “Complications of Political Tissue Fusion,” the new edition included several photographs of the creature and the following warning: Avoid combining specimens exhibiting advanced levels of self-confidence.

 

Under “Postoperative Care,” it recommended keeping the patient away from microphones, manufacturing plants and polling stations.

 

Under “Long-Term Prognosis,” there was simply a photograph of the surgical team leaving the country.

 

The exhibition was eventually banned from several fall fairs after the creature escaped during a tractor pull and spent 40 minutes wandering through the midway, shouting contradictory opinions about tariffs while leaking a mysterious ooze from its left knee.

 

It was finally recaptured after falling asleep beside the butter tart competition.

 

Nobody was injured.

 

The butter tarts, however, were declared to be compromised.

 

And so, dear reader, we come to the important question: Is this the kind of Chaff you prefer? The hideous surgical blob. The medical-textbook horror. The fall-fair freak show where you hand over a nickel and get to poke a disgusting political organism with a stick.

 

Or is the “Betty White statue idea” the kind of Chaff that ain’t so bad?