My Fair Trump
President Trump gets schooled on how to pronounce country names
(With apologies to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion)
Colonel Hugh Pickering, U.S. Secretary of State, enters the Oval Office with his friend, Professor Henry Higgins.
Pickering: President Trump, sir, this is Professor Henry Higgins. His specialty is phonetics, the study and classification of speech and sounds. I thought it might be useful to practice pronouncing countries, capitals, and world leader names, given your press conferences lately.
Higgins: The science of speech! That is my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!
Trump: Nobody has more hobbies than me, that I can tell you! Believe me, I’m doing very well with the hobbyists. Everyone is saying that! We’re going to make a lot of hobbies for the American people! Great, bigly, biggliest, unbelievably phenomenal hobbies! Hobbies that no one has ever seen before!
Higgins (to Pickering): You see this creature with his curbstone English? The English that will keep him in the gutter to the end of his days? Well, sir, in three months I can pass this man off as the leader of the free world!
Pickering: I don’t think we have that long…
Trump: FAKE NEWS! HOAX! RIGGED WITCH HUNT!
Higgins (to Pickering, again): It’s almost irresistible. He is deliciously low, so horribly dirty! (To Trump) Let’s start with something simple. Repeat after me: ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.’
Trump: No it doesn’t. It stays in France, that I can tell you! I’ve been to France and it’s always raining. How come Emmanuel Macaron has a cookie named after him and I don’t?
Pickering: It’s Macron, sir, not ‘macaron.’ M-a-c-r-o-n. Not a cookie. And remember, you still have ‘Success by Trump’ deodorant.
Higgins (again, to Pickering): He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby ‘taking notice’ eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief!
Pickering: Let’s try some other world leaders. The leader of Saudi Arabia?
Trump: King Salmon.
Higgins: Um, no. It’s S-a-l-m-a-n. Sal-MAN.
Trump: That’s what I said — Salmon.
Pickering: The Prime Minister of Luxembourg?
Trump: Beetle.
Higgins: Xavier Bet-TELL. B-e-t-t-e-l.
Pickering: How about the Prime Minister of Egypt?
Trump: Mustash Madbody.
Higgins (pronouncing it phonetically): MOST-afa Mad-BOO-ly. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech! That your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible.
Trump: Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Best I.Q. Fantastic I.Q. Stable genius!
Higgins: Um, okay. No.
Pickering: Perhaps we can move on to country names.
Higgins: Why don’t you read from this list, sir.
Trump: Yeeman, Nipple, Cater, Seashells, Button, Mad-at-NASCAR…
Higgins: Mr. President, that’s Yemen, Nepal, Qatar, Seychelles, Bhutan, and Madagascar.
Trump: We don’t know! A lot of people tell me I’m right! We’re looking at it. We’re looking at a lot of things. Oh, I know this one!
Pickering: Which one is that?
Trump: Thighland!
Higgins: It’s pronounced ‘TIE-land.’ The ‘h’ is silent.
Trump: Believe me, they should leave out the ‘h.’ Right? Okay? Not many people know that two Miss Universes came from ‘Thighland.’ They had fantastic, incredible thighs, I can tell you that. The best thighs, tremendous thighs. Thighs the likes of which no one has ever seen before!
Higgins: What about these countries?
Trump: I’m sure there are very fine thighs on both sides. (Realizes he needs to read from the list) Oh…England, France, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Sweden…
Higgins (Feeling victorious): I think he’s got it! I think he’s got it! By George, I think he’s got it! The great secret, Mr. President, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. Okay, let’s try one more: This is a tricky country in Europe: Monte….
Trump (phonetically): …NEEGRO!
Pickering: Oh, bloody ‘ell.
Higgins (To Pickering): I guess we’ll be skipping Niger and Nigeria, then.
Trump: Shit-hole countries. BUILD THE WALL!
Pickering: I think we’re done here.