A conversation with Andy Borowitz on how he believes the current Trump Administration will end.
This discussion is excerpted from The Funny Times Podcast, which explores the history of humor and the relationships and stories our paper has cultivated over the past 40 years in print.
Andy Borowitz is an acclaimed humorist whose column The Borowitz Report appears in every issue of Funny Times. In his recent discussion with Funny Times co-founder Ray Lesser, Borowitz shares how the current presidency is like Weekend at Bernie’s, the difficulties of changing leaders, and his prediction for how the current administration could end. Here are some excerpts from their discussion.
How the Administration could end
Ray Lesser: I do have one question for you about this administration. I’d like to ask you, how do you think the regime is gonna end?
Andy Borowitz: F*ck.
Ray Lesser: Will he just keel over choking on a chicken bone or will he get sucked up by a UFO to be anally probed in some zoo in Alpha Centauri? We want to know when this is going to end and how is it going to end? And you, I think, are the expert at this, because you follow it so closely. What do you think, Andy?
Andy Borowitz: Well, I guess one option you didn’t mention was that he might be teleported to a Waffle House because that’s happened to other people in his administration. But I don’t know. I’m so bad at being Nostradamus. Although I should probably qualify that a little bit, because sometimes my news is eerily predictive, and with Trump generally speaking, I will write things that are so insane of something he will do and or say and then within minutes, he will do or say that thing. So, my news in that scenario isn’t really fake, it’s just early, which isn’t really my goal. But, if you put a gun to my head, or a seashell and make me predict what’s going to happen, I think there are a number of things, and to be totally serious, the health issue is real. He’s clearly not in good health.
Ray Lesser: Are we looking at Weekend at Bernie’s? Is that where we’re looking at?
Andy Borowitz: I feel like we’re already at Weekend at Bernie’s because he’s barely sentient. He almost always says the quiet part out loud now. He was giving a speech the other day, and he said, “The war in Iran is going swimmingly” and then he says, “Well, I shouldn’t call it a war, I should call it a military operation, because then I won’t get in trouble legally.” That’s really not the thing you’re supposed to disclose. That is a euphemism that you’re using as a disclaimer at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial on CNN. You’re supposed to keep that little secret between you and your corrupt DOJ.
But he clearly is infirm. He has these weird bruises on his hands, he’s got the cankles, he looks very, very ill, and he really has clear signs of dementia. I’m not a doctor or a neurologist like George Santos, but I can assess just based on looking at him, he doesn’t seem healthy. The corporate media tends to kind of skate over that and treat him as he’s just any other president, which I think is an absurd, abandonment of their duty as truth-tellers or fact-finders. So that’s option one, he dies in office. I don’t know enough about his current health to know how likely that is, or when it might happen, so I’m just gonna put that out there as a possibility. I think he will be impeached but I don’t think he’ll be convicted.
We’ve made it so hard in our system to get rid of these guys. In the UK, they have the parliamentary system, like most of Europe does, and they go through prime ministers like summer underwear. Liz Truss in the UK lasted 40 days. Daily Star, the tabloid in the UK, put up a live feed of a wig and a head representing Liz Truss and a lettuce, and the lettuce lasted longer than she did.
So, because of our stupid system, it’s so hard to change leaders. I think even the Republican Party, if this were a parliamentary system and they were looking at a leader who had 30% popularity, they would be talking about having a leadership contest. The reason I say that is because that’s what’s currently going on in the UK. Keir Starmer is very unpopular and even though they don’t have great candidates to oppose him, there’s a lot of rumblings in the Labour Party about doing that. And the Conservative Party, the Tories in the UK, it’s just serial regicide. They will get rid of people within weeks. Liz Truss is a great example. Ever since they got rid of Maggie Thatcher they’ve been a little trigger-happy over there.
So, I don’t think he’ll be convicted, and I really think this talk about the 25th Amendment is a fantasy because that’s never been invoked before. It should be invoked here but the people who have to invoke it are the vice president, everybody in the Cabinet, and Congress. Although I can see a Democratic Congress certainly supporting it, I don’t know if you’ve taken a good look at Trump’s cabinet recently, but this is not the most independent-thinking group of people. These are not renegades.
Here’s a scenario where I could see him leaving early. Now I’m gonna really get into my Alex Jones conspiracy theory. We’ve sort of forgotten, because we’re engaged in the stupidest war in American history, that there is this thing called the Epstein Files that’s out there. They’re out there somewhere. I think they were on someone’s desk, and then she got fired. I assume the desk was fired as well, because it had those files on it.
So, the files are already very damning of Trump. They include very believable, credible accusations of rape of children. Children have gone on the record accusing him of rape, and the FBI never bothered to investigate those charges. But there’s plenty in there already that if you just believe the victims, believe the women, he would already be run out of town on a rail.
Let’s face it, I think among MAGA Republicans, child rape is still kind of taken seriously. A lot of them like tax cuts so that will override child rape, but let’s say, the ex-MAGAs like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, there is a cadre of people who still take that seriously in the Republican Party, and certainly people like Thomas Massey certainly do. So let’s say that in the next few weeks, some foreign government, I’m gonna pull a name out of a hat and say Iran; Let’s say Iran decides to hack the Epstein files and finds some stuff in there that’s been redacted and is even worse than what’s already out there or somebody else, some other actor, some other third party puts out their own WikiLeaks anonymously. Pick your usual suspects.
Ray Lesser: Maybe J.D. Vance’s grandma.
Andy Borowitz: J.D. Vance’s grandma, exactly. So let’s say one of these people puts out some video that’s pretty damning of Trump engaged in something that’s pretty terrible. Now, I’m not saying that I know that exists. I’m saying that there is a lot of video footage, kind of unaccounted for right now, that Epstein has stored in his storage vault. What it contains, no one knows. But let’s say there’s tremendously damning evidence, and Trump now is culpable. I could see a scenario where Trump, a la Richard Nixon, resigns but in his case for health reasons and for the good of the country. Trump hands off this ticking time bomb of an economy to J.D. Vance with the caveat that he gets a blanket pardon and then he skedaddles to Moscow or Pyongyang or whoever will give him political asylum. I could see that scenario happening.
Ray Lesser: That sounds like a perfect season ender.
Andy Borowitz: It would be a great season ender, and then you have the cliffhanger of “What will President J.D Vance do in Season 2?” But those are the scenarios. I think people are always saying, “Oh, this’ll bring down Trump.” I don’t think that even if Trump’s popularity right now, and I use the word popularity loosely, is very close to that of Richard Nixon at the very end of Watergate. Nixon was in the 20s, and Trump is now in the low 30s.
Ray Lesser: But his Checkers still loved him.
Andy Borowitz: Checkers still loved him. But Trump is in very bad shape, and for a couple reasons he’s not going to resign of his own accord. One is that, again, there aren’t enough votes in the Senate, even in a new Senate, to convict him. There were enough votes to convict Richard Nixon. When people say, “Oh, at least Nixon had respected the Constitution enough to resign,” that is not why he resigned. Senators went to the White House and said, “Dude, you’re toast.”
Ray Lesser: Not like what the British Tory party did.
Andy Borowitz: Exactly, like Margaret Thatcher, they went in one by one and said to Maggie, “It’s over.” So unless we get to that point, Trump is gonna hang on because he knows, just like Bibi Netanyahu knows, that the minute he’s out of office, he’s got a shit ton of legal problems including possible prison time. So he’s gonna hang on for dear life.
The good news is, just actuarially speaking, we’re seeing… we are in the end times, in more ways than one. We’re in the end times.
We are in the end times, in more ways than one. We’re in the end times.
I know that Trump is a big believer in crowd size, and I will say there is an event coming up in his life that will draw the biggest crowd ever. Because, again, I don’t want to be indicted in a seashell-adjacent crime, I’m just gonna leave it to your imagination to guess what that event is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This conversation is an excerpt from The Funny Times Podcast, a series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Funny Times. Listen to the full episode:
If you’re interested, click here to see more of Andy Borowitz’s work.
