You gotta love it. The United Nations, by a General Assembly vote of 164 to 1, adopted the use of a new projection for world maps, replacing the Mercator projection with one that more accurately compares the sizes of various land masses. No longer will Greenland, for example, look to be similar in size to Africa, which is 14 times larger in reality.

The single dissenting vote, believe it or not, was that of the United States. Quoted in the Washington Post, an American representative at the UN said that the change was just only part of a “radical ideological project” of the United Nations and that “resolutions like this, and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”

Take that, Lake America!

But it doesn’t end with the attempted renaming of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, it may not end at all until President Trump is out of office. Just yesterday, he suggested that he may rename the State of New Mexico and call it New America. Now, I don’t think even the Trump Court would permit the president to rename a state by executive order, but the Trump Court does many thinks that I would not think they would do. So, if I were Donald Trump, I would plow ahead and start calling the state by its new name, instruct the Executive Branch or maybe the entire federal government to use New America, the Court be damned. What is there to lose, especially since the Court has already said that the President can hardly be called into account for anything, outside of the ballot box?

Trump clearly likes to put his name on everything, not only buildings, but also on vodka, a university, steaks…..everything. Maybe, rather than fighting this, we should play along. Our prisons, the ICE detention centers, garbage dumps, super fund sites, forests after the fires and before significant regrowth, all of these things could be named after Trump. For example, everyone calls it the DC Jail, but it is really the Central Detention Facility of the DC Department of Corrections, and no one uses that name. Why not rename it Trump Jail – DC? It has a ring to it (unless it turns out that you can’t name a prison facility after a potential future resident).

There will be some who would object to such renaming. For example, I am sure that there is a wide swath of the American population who think that naming these types of facilities after Trump would simply feed into his ego, in the “no publicity is bad publicity” sense. They would rather we go with Drumpf, the beautiful name his grandfather abandoned so that Donald could accede to the presidency. I think that is something to be considered.

We have to remember that the Supreme Court’s rulings on presidential power do not only relate to Don Drumpf, but to all future presidents (until there is a Court willing to overturn them). So I am thinking about what I would do if I were elected president.

Some time during Drumpf’s first term, when I was posting letters to him on Facebook (which he never acknowledged), I pointed out how lucky he was to have so many English words which rhymed with his last name – making it easy to wax poetic about him (not that anyone yet has chosen to do that). I recall that I must have suggested the following words, none of which one would necessarily want to be associated with: bump, chump, clump, dump, frump, grump, hump, jump, lump, pump, plump, rump, and thump. And probably others. (Seriously, can you just imagine a worse group of words to be rhymed with?)

So I am thinking that I might rename the Palm Beach Airport (just to pick an example at random) the Trump Bump Chump Clump Dump Frump Grump Hump Lump Pump Plump Rump Thump Trump International Airport. I may use a similar name to rename all of the golf clubs, plus his Palm Beach get-away club. I know that they aren’t “public” properties, but I would argue to the Court that his conflation of what was his and what was ours was so complete that, in effect, he had converted all of his properties into public properties. Of course, the present Trump Bump Chump Clump etc Court would never entertain such a thought, but when the Democrats expand the Court to 13 (and why stop there?), they might just agree with me.

What about the Pledge of Allegiance, you ask? I know I am getting carried away, but I think that our fair Donald may be considering altering the words “under God” to “under God and Trump” or maybe even “under Trump”. I don’t think that, as president, I would suggest changing it to “One nation, under God and Trump Bump Chump Clump etc”, but I might for a transition period, and then suggest a celebration when we get rid of the umps, and go back to plain old God. I would suggest that be on June 14, Trump Bump Chump’s birthday. We will see how that works out.

Well, today is Labor Day. And of the 350 million or so Americans, how many are thinking of the centrality of the American labor movement to what this country has become (prior to the Trump Bump Chump era)? Not many, but we should. This should be a day where we praise the labor movement for all the things that they have brought about regarding ending child labor, limiting hours and adding overtime pay, paid holidays, occupational safety and all the rest. We should be having a true conversation about the effect of ICE on American labor, about the increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, about the future effect of AI on the labor market, and about the 25% of Americans who are not even looking for work. But we won’t. 

And that “we” includes me. I am going to get a haircut.