Trump's Appointments Are Like When You Buy Bread, Eggs, and Shampoo to Hide the Fact that You're Also Buying Porn and a Big Tub of Vaseline

Pretty clever, Don!

Built from a photo by Tom Werner via Getty.

The analogy in the title admittedly works less well now that we buy everything — including and especially porn — online, but gentleman of a certain age, back me up on this: It used to be possible to buy X-rated magazines at 7/11 and sometimes even at grocery stores. They had them at the airport, which always made me wonder: Who’s about to get on a flight and thinks “Ah, smashing — the latest edition of Beaver Hunt is just the thing to peruse during my journey”? The pre-broadband age was a dark, strange time in which the commerce surrounding people’s masturbatory habits was semi-public.

Of course, few people were brazen enough to stroll to the checkout counter with only a copy of Asian Fever and a six pack of Hamm’s, thus all but daring the cashier and everyone else to visualize their evening. The etiquette — which I believe was codified by Emily Post (though it’s hard to remember) — was that a gentleman doth always surround his wank fodder with a bulwark of mundane purchases such as food stuffs and household products. Thereby does said gentleman rationalize the presence of a family-sized jar of Vaseline — perhaps he’s just stocking up on toiletries! — and doth render the presence of copies of Juggs and Barely Legal hardly noticeable.

Trump is a man of a certain age — he certainly knows this trick. I don’t know when the last time was that he personally purchased stroke mags — though he strikes me as a “print media” guy even now — but his familiarity with this maneuver is evident in his cabinet picks. Because the nature and order of the picks makes it really, really seem like his main goal is to get Matt Gaetz through the scanners without anyone getting wise to his plans.