Trump’s doing a number on us

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Guy goes to prison for the first time. In the cafeteria, he picks a table where older men are quietly eating. After a while, one man clears his throat, says “twelve.” A few others smile. “Thirty-two.” Some chuckling. Looks right at the new guy, growls “eight.” People crack up.

The new guy whispers to the man next to him: “What’s going on here?”

“Jokes. After a few years, you’ve heard them all so we just tell them by number.”

Ah. New guy collects his courage, calls out “seventeen!” Dead silence, and some awfully nasty looks.

“Eh,” says the man next to him, “it’s all in how you tell ’em.”

So, with nothing new under the sun, here we are at “ten,” for how many long weeks into this new Time of Trump we are. “Thirty-six,” for his approval rating as the same numbers he worked crowds with as a pitchman and reality-TV “mogul” and candidate fall flat now.

Transition troubles aren’t unique to Trump, of course. Most politicians, like most public personalities, repeat what’s worked for them before even as they fear the spell will break. Every past President, though, worked out their persona first in government office or high military service.

So with his second shot at a travel ban again suspended by the courts and his only “repeal” success so far walking away from the Obamacare replacement he promised to deliver, Trump is rethinking “his chaosand-loyalty theory of management,” Mike Allen reported Friday at Axios, since “the chaos dimension has created far more chaos than anticipated.” Rimshot: Joke’s on us! It’s hard to distinguish the show-business disaster from the substantive one, as Trump keep telling disgusting jokes and botching their delivery, too, even before the coming 3 a.m. phone call (and I shudder to think of the 3:05 tweet) that will inevitably test and shape his presidency.

While we hold our breath for that, Trump’s mired himself in crises of his own making — not least the sprawling Russia probes spurred on his needless tweets falsely claiming President Obama had wiretapped his phones during the election. “This is Nixon/Watergate,” Trump said, breathing new life into the old line about how the coverup is always worse than the crime.

“Sixty.” Welcome to open-mic amateur hour, featuring House GOP “intelligence” chair and Trump transition team member Devin Nunes sneaking into the White House in his best Groucho Marx mask to gin up alibi material from “secret” sources to then “brief” the White House about it, and starring Trump tweeting a stream of wild threats that suggest a man of his years can’t really control his flow anymore.

Ever since the American Carnage inaugural and the President’s furious complaints about accurate reporting that his crowd was much smaller than the one that turned out the next day to protest him, I’ve been flashing back to the 1990 Playboy interview where Trump called post-Soviet Russia “a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing” and then praised China, by contrast, for its “firm hand”:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak . . . as being spit on by the rest of the world.”

I flashed back to that last week, when many tens of thousands of Russians bravely took to the streets to protest the kleptocracy controlled by strongman Vladimir Putin. The state-swayed media ignored the marches, even as hundreds were arrested, for days, until Putin called out “one” — accusing the protesters of “selfish political goals,” suggesting a harsher response to any further “unsanctioned” demonstrations and telling his citizens to choose between the power of his strength and bloody anarchy.

An old joke, but one Putin knows how to deliver. Trump, who ran on a none-too-subtle promise to put the Occupiers and the Black Lives Matter set and all the other college-town nerds and urban thugs back in their place, keeps screwing it up.

While Trump yells “forty-two” to insist Clinton vs. Jones means the opposite of what the Supreme Court actually ruled and that the law doesn’t really apply to him so long as he’s President, the last laugh here might be “forty five” becoming the new “thirty seven.”

You know, the one about the Oval Office resident getting the hook midway through his act.