Making the Hell's Angels Look Nice

Literary Corner

Désiré Ntwayingabo, a refugee from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo who settled in Dayton in 2010, and works there now for the city as a community engagement specialist, at a World Refugee Day event he and his team organized in June 2023, via Spectrum News 1 in Columbus.

From a fundraiser with Texas governor Greg Abbott  in Aspen,  Colorado, August 10, $25,000 to $500,000 a couple, of which The Guardian obtained a recording. For money like that, you get to hear the former president say "fuck". The first piece is about a party of 22 Congolese migrants to the United States he claims to have met at some point; the second his encounter with Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the first attempt to assassinate Trump, on July 13.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I. I Hate to Use That Foul Language

We said, ‘Where do you come from?’
They said, ‘Prison’.
‘What did you do?’
‘None of your fucking business what we did.’

You know why? Because they’re murderers.
I hate to use that foul language.
These are the toughest people.
These people are coming in from Africa,
from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts
the parts where they’re rough,

and the only thing good is
they make our criminals look extremely nice.
They make our Hell’s Angels look
like the nicest people on earth.

II. I'd Much Rather Have My Husband

So they’re going to get millions of dollars
but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman,
I handed her the check –
we handed her the check–

and she said, ‘This is so nice,
and I appreciate it,
but I’d much rather have my husband.’
Now, I know some of the women
in this room wouldn’t say the same.

I know at least four couples.
There are four couples, Governor,
that I know and you’re not one of them.
At least four couples here
would have been thrilled, actually.

There is obviously no reason to think Trump has ever interacted with a large group of migrants from Congo, let alone that they told him they came to America "from prison", let alone addressed him so rudely. The idea of Congolese must come from the story of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, accused of roasting and eating their neighbors' dogs and cats, for which Christopher Rufo found some video evidence, except it turned out that the migrants in question were not Haitian but Congolese, in Dayton rather than Springfield, and the video was an evident fake (sounds like a Radio Yerevan joke!).

All he's retained of the story is that there are Congolese somewhere in the US (there's a big community in Dayton in particular), which must have shocked him a lot, and he's made the rest up out of his congested head, probably mostly from the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba in 1980, the only time as far as I know when a foreign government really did "send them" to the States, and rumors flew that some of the boat people might be prisoners and mental patients, which was probably not true, though many of them were undesirable from President Castro's point of view, gay, ill-educated, political detainees, or Black. That was a time when a relatively young Trump was still capable of learning something—the wrong thing, of course—and the source of many things he thinks he knows now.

On Mrs. Comperatore, I can't find any evidence that he's ever presented her with a check, or met with her personally at all—he did speak with her on the phone at least once, and he may well have contributed to the gofundme, though he's not listed in the report of celebrities (Dana White, Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock) who did. On the joke about how some women would be pleased if their husbands got shot to death at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, four of whom were at the Aspen dinner, not including Mrs. Abbott, I have no words.