Most newspapers overwhelmingly report news as their primary function, but the New York Daily News has ventured into another area: fiction that spews venom regarding Donald Trump in a serialized novel written by liberal columnist Gertz Kuntzman called Coup! in which Vice President Mike Pence deposes the Republican president and installs himself in the Oval Office.
Serving as the cover to the series, which has so far contains 10 entries, is a painting of George Washington leading American soldiers in a boat across a river in front of the U.S. Capitol -- except the leader’s face is actually Pence’s and he’s carrying a copy of the Constitution.
The story is a “memoir of a retired CIA operative” identified only as “Deep State” who discovers he has terminal cancer and decides to help Pence invoke the 25th Amendment, which states in part: “In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.”
The Web page promoting the tale calls it “a work of political satire” and states: “Mike Pence and a skeet-shooting pothead, Rick Perry's dance leotard, a waterboard and Ivanka save America from Donald Trump.”
In the novel’s Facebook entry, it is described as a “riotous satire” while Cory Doctorow on the boingboing.net site describes it as “a fun mix of fiction and fact … using all the material generously supplied by Trump and Co. as the backdrop for a sometimes-broad satire that is literally ripped from the headlines.”
Pence also receives aid from “a coterie of morally flexible billionaires who'd been bought off of Trump's cabinet with promises of special favors and steady leadership.”
The first chapter introduces the “author” of the book, who was present for Trump’s first speech at the CIA headquarters and deemed the president “nuts, truly diagnosable nuts” and capable of “full-blown lunacy.”
The site also provides a more extensive look at the book by stating:
Though Trump probably picked [Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos because he was attracted to her, Pence liked DeVos because her philosophy on schooling hewed very closely to Pence’s own: defund public education, use public money to support private and religious schools, break the teachers’ union, and inject religion into public life whenever possible.
"OK, send her in," Trump said. "And get [White House Chief Strategist Steve] Bannon in here, too."
“DeVos entered, visibly upset,” the text continued. “Bannon -- who looked like Robert Redford if the actor had been fed a 30-day diet consisting solely of doughnuts, then drugged and then dragged across the bottom of a river -- also entered, visibly annoyed at DeVos’s apparent exasperation.”
"'Madame Secretary,' Trump said grandiosely, 'what brings you to the Oval Office?'"
"'First of all, do you see how the blacks are always deriding me because I support vouchers?' DeVos stated. 'All day long, they’re under my office window with signs and chanting: ’A-B-C-D, With DeVos we disagree/One-two-three-four, she’s a private voucher whore!’”
In other chapters, Trump is waterboarded and sells outdated American military equipment to dictators in the Middle East.
New free segments in the satirical story are expected to be posted online soon, and those who read the “novel” are sure to get their money’s worth from the New York Daily News.
