When you can’t tell the man from his impersonator

I spent a good part of yesterday morning having a cyst dug out of my back. What added to the overall irritation was driving home and listening to Donald Trump tell an army of reporters how “truly wonderful” and “really fantastic” Donald Trump was.

To hear the presidentelect without seeing him is very weird. I kept thinking, “Is this Donald Trump or Alec Baldwin?”

Seriously. All that braggadocio, all the disjointed selfabsorption coming through the speakers only seemed to crystallize the thought that our next president has become a caricature of himself.

But then I guess he always was.

Muhammad Ali perfected his “rope-a-dope” strategy to deal with annoying opponents. Yesterday, in his first so-called press conference in six months, Trump employed his personal brand of double-talk, or “Trumpspeak,” to toss a blanket over attempts by impudent reporters looking to drill him about the twin subjects of Russian hacking and those salacious, if dubious, intelligence reports of his allegedly wild nights in Moscow.

“Would a reasonable observer say that you are potentially vulnerable to blackmail by Russia?” one reporter asked.

Trump responded in ragtime worthy of Professor Irwin Corey.

“Lemme just tell you what I do,” he said. “When I leave the country, I am extremely careful. I am surrounded by bodyguards and I always tell them, ‘Be very careful because in your hotel rooms you have cameras in the strangest places. Cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know.’

“I was in Russia years ago with the Miss Universe Contest, which did very well,” our president-elect wanted these media maggots to know. “The Moscow area did very well.” Of course it did.

“And I told many people, ‘Be careful, because you don’t want to see yourself on television. Cameras all over the place.” Sage advice. For me, though, the most graceless, unseemly moment about our next president-elect’s performance had little to do with any dossier on BuzzFeed. It was when Trump started babbling like the huckster he is and always will be.

“Now, I have to say one other thing,” he announced. “Over the weekend, I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai with a very, very, very amazing man, a great developer from the Middle East, great guy. I was offered $2 billion in Dubai and I turned it down.” What a patriot. Of course, Donald’s two sons with the Gordon Gekko hairdos will most likely make up for their daddy’s sacrifice.