Why I Wrote “The Liddle’est President”
It was a chilly Saturday September morning…
It’s hard to forget days like that, because I was up MUCH earlier than usual, as our daughter was participating in a track and field club, “Girls On The Run,” and we had to be at the field by 9:00am – a full hour earlier than I usually arose on a Saturday morning.
Wifey insisted that she would be more than happy to take her to running practice and let me sleep in, but I wasn’t having it. What kind of #GirlDad would I be if I couldn’t be there for her very FIRST time participating in a run practice? I had already successfully raised 3 boys, but was entirely new to being a #GirlDad, so I had to log in some meaningful hours. You can’t just sleepwalk through some life experiences, so I grabbed by coffee, my phone, my spiral notebook, and a pencil and poured myself into the car.
When we arrived at the field, there were hardly any other participants there, as I made a point of ensuring we were there at least 5 minutes early. My daughter (Tiny Pops is her nickname), eagerly hopped out of the car and ran to the field entrance, where she was quickly greeted by her friend Gabby, whose Mom was also coaching this thing. I leaned over to kiss Wifey, grabbed my coffee thermos, and climbed out of the car to have a smoke and a tweet. It used to be that coffee and cigarettes (bad habits, I know) were like the inextricable Reese’s chocolate and peanut butter combo, but my Twitter habit had wedged itself in there too.
The Liddle’est President by Majid M. Padellan. Available here.
Autographed copies of the book are available here for a limited time.
Saturday mornings tended to be the prime time to catch one of the bizarre rants by Adolf Twitler, so naturally I had to check in and see what he was up to. He had recently come under fire for having attempted to extort the government of Ukraine in exchange for some much-needed military aid, so naturally he blamed the gambit on everyone BUT himself. His target of choice these days was the very excellent Rep. Adam Schiff, who brought the whole sordid affair to light with the help of an anonymous whistleblower.
trump had an unusual fixation on Schiff…
…who likely reminded him of one of those super-smart “eggheads” in school who used to make fun of how he spoke, and walked, and spelled; he was a walking, talking reminder of those days before the golden toilets, when he was a mere mortal, and not the occupant of the White House.
Whenever he felt threatened by someone, trump lashed out at them the only way he knew how: childish schoolyard nicknames. And they were BASIC. Words like “crazy,” “sloppy,” “crooked,” and “sleepy” seemed like they jumped right off the pages of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and into his own dwarfish vocabulary. With Schiff, he tried out “Pencilneck,” which sounds like one of the jock bullies harassing a nerd in an after-school TV special. This was how the so-called “President” of the United States interacted with Senators, House Representatives, heads of State.
But, just a day earlier, he uncorked one nickname that struck my funnybone in a way that I never really recovered from. He called Schiff “Liddle’ Adam Schiff.” And no, that apostrophe after “Liddle’” wasn’t a typo. Nor was his replacing the two “T’s” in LITTLE with two “D’s.” My guess is that it was a more phonetic spelling, of how he was enunciating the word in real life. But, what really clobbered me was that he INSISTED that the apostrophe was a HYPHEN, and that CNN had intentionally left out this magical hyphen. He tweeted “I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong.”
And so…The Liddle’est President was born…
I laughed so hard and so long about this, I knew it was my duty to share the laughter. This grown-ass man was so ridiculous, it defied logic and reason that he was in a position of great power and responsibility. One hundred years from now, looking back, nobody would believe that millions of people would elect such a spoiled brat man-baby to be in charge of our arsenal of planet-killing nuclear weapons.
I decided the best way to tell his story was to ensure that he looks as ridiculous as he acts: he is a child in a man’s body, so why not put this neanderthal in the body of a homunculus, with the same tiny hands, and a MASSIVE cranium? Just the thought of it made me LOL. And my first sketches of this character had me holding my gut with laughter, so I knew I was onto something.
Spanky Merch Available here.
But the name, Spanky McDumbass?
That was over a year in the making. Ever since Stormy Daniels went on 60 Minutes to tell her story about how trump wanted to be spanked by her with a magazine bearing his face, he immediately became Spanky in MY head.
2019 was such a brutal year in terms of the insanity emanating from the Oval Office. It was a daily onslaught of improper, inexcusable, inarticulate, impossibly imbecilic behavior that we had never before witnessed, and I felt like it was time for us to have a laugh. A good HEARTY laugh at his expense.
On paper, his story is pretty unbelievable: A racist guy who bankrupted a casino and 4 other businesses, but was supposed to be “good at business”; who pretended to be someone named John Barron calling reporters to say what a good lover he was; who had a bizarre and unnatural fixation on his own daughter; who represented the very worst attributes – lying, cheating, insulting – THIS was the guy who was sitting in the seat of power? This was a story that deserved derision, with pictures, and an ending of MY choosing.
Tiny Pops was just trotting back to the car now, as that hour of “practice” had gone pretty quickly, considering that they hadn’t done much running and were mostly sitting in a circle on a blanket in the grass talking with the coaches about confidence and stretching or whatever. But I had gotten a lot done in that hour.
