In a new letter, Jane Austen recounts meeting President Trump
My dear Cassandra,
Knowing how anxious you are to hear the event of the president’s ball, I write directly upon returning to my lodging — which I must say is a really hideous place, made worse for bearing his name (though curiously frequented by the most generous Arabs). But I stray from my object.
Even for so thorough a collector of vice, the dinner afforded an embarrassment of new specimens. No sooner had I retired, with the other ladies, to dress in a gaudy, oval room, than I saw slip through one of its doors a figure whose bottom was of a fullness I then thought peculiar to our sex. It was only when I heard, over the screams of women, the harsh but thankfully retreating protestations of a man, that I apprehended my error — and began to revise my ideas of male anatomy.
You cannot guess how much my horror increased when I was introduced, not a half hour later, to the president — and recognised first his harsh voice and then, as he rose to embrace me, his full bottom!
This discovery so shocked me that I fear I misunderstood his greeting — something about how I am doing for England almost as great a job as Frederick Douglass is for America. (Finding no one at the dinner able to satisfy my curiosity to know what this gentleman does for them, or even who he is, I defer to your no doubt more extensive knowledge of their nation to explain the comparison).
Unluckily, this was not my last encounter with the rake-in-chief (as I have begun styling him since hearing him boast of his own talent for epithets).
Soon after sitting down to dinner at a table that easily fit every Englishman still in America, I saw him creep up behind and grab our Prime Minister (whom I must say I was more surprised to find a dullard than a lady). As she struggled to lure him into polite conversation, the despair I first felt on being seated near her quickly became the delight of now being near enough to catch their words.
But, alas, I was denied even my modest & regular expectation of overhearing at least two or three really silly things in an evening: he talked only of himself, she only of her cats.
Yet I soldiered through, conscious of your love to laugh & confident in my ability to gather even from this poor material a few amusing observations. The president’s fondness for words of two or three syllables, and his confusion of their order, show that while his English is little, his dementia is ample. Indeed, in sense I found him much the inferior of our late King George — which insight made me think how hard it must be for a people that fought a war to escape a mad king to now find themselves in the hands of another. Let us hope, against experience & precedent, they prove too small to do too much damage!
Yours affectionately,
J.A.
