Tributes and Criticisms Mark Donald Trump's 80th Birthday

Cory Doctorow

Dear Comrade Trump: On this, the occasion of your 80th birthday, I write to extend my sincere thanks for all the work you have done. After decades of deadlock, you have inspired the world to action! You have done more to de-dollarise the world than any American leader in history. Without you, there would be no way that Ethiopia would be revaluing its national debt in yuan. You have done more to end the global dependence on oil than any leader (except, perhaps, for Comrade Putin). Without you, there would be no way that India would be chucking out its gas hobs and replacing them with induction tops. And, of course, you have done more than any president in history to end American dominance over the internet. Without you, there would be no way the EU would be racing forward with projects such as Eurostack and European Digital Infrastructure Consortium, with whole nations ditching American tech exports like Microsoft Office 365 in favour of free, open, auditable, transparent alternatives running on servers within the EU’s borders. Comrade Trump, you are, at long last, ushering in the post-American world, and a grateful planet salutes you!

Cory Doctorow is a journalist, author and internet activist.

Piers Morgan

Happy 80th, Donald! I think I can be that familiar, Mr President, given we’ve been friends for 20 years.

The world will doubtless mark your big day in myriad good, bad and ugly ways.

But birthdays are celebratory occasions, so I will focus on the one aspect to your character that surely everyone can agree on: your extraordinary resilience.

You’ve been shot, prosecuted, impeached (twice), endured two scandalous divorces, survived a financial crisis that took down many of your friends, bounced back from ignominious political oblivion to dramatically win back the White House and been the subject of more mockery, abuse and vilification than any public figure in modern history.

Yet here you are, alive, surprisingly well (that’s what never touching alcohol, drugs or cigarettes can do for a man), and still bursting with astounding energy for someone entering their ninth decade.

When we spoke a week after you were nearly assassinated, you’d just come off another big rally stage.

“Were you not apprehensive?” I asked.

“I couldn’t let myself think about that,” you replied. “I had to get straight back out there.”

There aren’t many people who would do that a few days after a bullet bloodied their ear.

You may be the most polarising, divisive, controversial and inflammatory president in US history.

But nobody can deny you have the resilient skin of a thousand rhinos.

Piers Morgan is a journalist and broadcaster who grew close to Trump after winning the US celebrity version of The Apprentice in 2008 (Trump called him “ruthless, arrogant, evil and obnoxious”). Morgan was granted Trump’s first international broadcast interview after becoming president, and has interviewed him on three subsequent occasions.

Jennifer Egan

Happy birthday, President Trump! By any measure, you have racked up a staggering number of accomplishments in your 80 years. You’ve managed to nullify the bulwark against fascism that our three branches of government were meant to provide. You’ve transformed the presidency into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing that would make last century’s robber barons blush. You’ve erased whatever goodwill and respect America commanded internationally, and ceded our relevance in the realms of science, medicine and climate technology for the foreseeable future. You’ve elevated racism and xenophobia into law, hobbled higher education and gutted women’s rights. The sheer quantity and variety of your assaults has rendered your detractors punch-drunk, faced with a daily choice between trying to confront your lawless Hydra and maintaining some semblance of normal life so that our kids will believe they still have a future.

I like to think that your rampage has exposed areas of weakness in our government that needed exposing – that, when you and your minions are gone, we’ll know what steps to take to ensure that your like will never again be able to hijack and ransack our country. But then, I’m an optimist.

One thing is certain: having been effective beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, you’ve more than earned an early retirement. Take it! Enjoy your remaining golden years on the golf course, buoyed up by the knowledge that you’ve exceeded the expectations of virtually every person in the world.

Jennifer Egan is a Pulitzer prize-winning author.

Greta Thunberg

My initial thought was to give you a one-way ticket to The Hague as a birthday gift, but that comment would probably go above your head. I will instead give you a can of alphabet soup; the sentences you poop out will be more coherent than anything you have ever said. Now you can finally take part in meaningful public discourse.

Greta Thunberg is a climate activist, about whom Trump tweeted, after she was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019: “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem … Chill Greta, Chill!”

Ai Weiwei

Life in the universe is the most precious common value we share. Anyone who regards it as a tradable commodity is harming the advancement of human civilisation and will be remembered only to be despised.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, documentarian and activist, and an open critic of the Trump administration.

Jon Sopel

Happy birthday, big man! I wanted to get you something really big – and hugely extravagant – for your special day. I thought about a gold bar, but the Swiss have already given you one. Or a jumbo jet, but the Qataris beat me to it. Then I thought about a gold peace medal, but your mate Gianni from Fifa has done that.

How incredibly thoughtful of your acting attorney general, Todd Blanche (remind me, didn’t he used to be your personal lawyer?), to announce that the tax authorities are “forever barred” and “precluded” from ever looking again at your tax returns. I mean, that’s amazing isn’t it? And it not only applies to you, but the boys as well.

How lucky, given the way the family has gotten so much richer off the back of your return to the presidency. Hope it was lucrative to have Eric accompany you on the state visit to China.

Can you imagine how much every American would love to fill in whatever they wanted on their IRS return in the knowledge that the tax authorities could never so much as arch an eyebrow? You could write: “Income, none. Gifts, none. Tax due, none.” And there’s nothing the auditors could do about it.

I have to say I did think it was kind of unusual when you announced you were suing your own government for $10bn over the leak of your tax returns all those years ago. But you’ve been proved right again.

That said, there’s nothing I can think of to buy you now as you seem to have everything any man could legitimately want. I mean, it is legitimate, isn’t it?

Jon Sopel is a presenter on The News Agents podcast and was formerly North America editor of BBC News.

Siri Hustvedt

Dear Number 47. You’re ageing fast, Mr President, plagued by bruising, memory holes, verbal incoherence and unwelcome fits of sleep. Although plain to many of us who did not vote for you, your age and inevitable death have been invisible in the Magaverse.

Maga magic transformed your real, fat, old man’s body into the spectacular body of fascism, American style: bulletproof, muscle-bound, eternal. The many superhero costumes worn by your 6 January terrorists were testament to that pathetic fantasy of invulnerability, no doubt helped along by the very real carnage of a global pandemic.

“White Americans do not believe in death,” James Baldwin wrote. He understood the belligerent blindness to history, the screeching howls of innocence, the mad belief in “racial” hierarchy as projections of self-hatred on to others. Ignoring the universal reality of death turns human beings into amoral monsters.

And yet, birth is also a problem in the Magaverse. The fact that you were born out of the body of your mother, a bloody, wet, helpless infant still attached to her by a gelatinous umbilical cord, must feel a bit awkward. The realities of gestation and birth are the realities of dependence and interconnectivity, whereas the Maga man is self-made, supposedly dependent on no one, and violently rejects all things coded as feminine – compassion, empathy, negotiation, ecology and democracy itself.

Not such a happy birthday, then. ICE murders, immigrant concentration camps, pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots for want of an abortion, measles outbreaks, huge numbers dead after USAID vanished, broken alliances and a war no one wanted are the veritable consequences of delusion. But time is inexorable, the citizens are restless, and your fantasy body is beginning to crack, just as your real body is showing the infirmities that come with 80 years of age.

Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist.

Jonathan Freedland

The temptation is strong to discard all convention and do what you would do on the birthday of someone you don’t like – to curse and mock you. Curse you for the poison you’ve injected into the bloodstream of the US and the wider world, for your corruption, for the damage you’ve done to the world’s most powerful democracy, for the tens of thousands of documented lies you’ve told, for the lives you’ve destroyed through your abolition of USAID and your failed fiasco of a war on Iran. And mock you for your absurd vanity, for your statues, ballrooms and arches, so obviously designed to fill a hole in your soul that cannot be filled, to compensate for the gnawing fact that, as Gavin Newsom, a would-be successor of yours, put it to me, “Trump’s not enough. And he knows he’s not enough.” That temptation is strong, not least because we know you care nothing for social convention. I’m thinking of the insults you directed at the beloved film director Rob Reiner, hours after his death, just because he was not a fan of yours. Or your reaction to the passing of the former FBI director Robert Mueller: “I’m glad he’s dead.” And yet, for that very reason, to stand against your erosion of social standards that have value, we should not give in to temptation. So here it is: happy birthday, Mr President.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and host of the Politics Weekly America podcast.

Bill McKibben

On the occasion of your birthday: It was unnecessary to launch a cruel, ridiculous war to convince the world of the benefits of wind energy, solar energy and so on. But you do deserve one small gold trophy as electric vehicle salesman of the quarter. Enjoy.

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist.

Anthony Scaramucci

I found this birthday message for you outside Trump Tower: “You sold me your soul. You got what you wanted. The tower. The power. The money. The name in gold. But you left a trail behind you, and it leads to the ninth circle. Goethe said any soul, while still living, can be saved. Will yours? Happy Birthday – Mephistopheles.”

Anthony Scaramucci was director of communications at the White House, 21-31 July 2017. He will be on tour in the UK with Intelligence Squared, 14-19 September.

Dom Joly

Hey Donald, You locked me out for insulting you on Twitter back in 2014 when it was still Twitter. I was right then and I’m right now: you’re a narcissistic, lying fraud who has somehow convinced a large number of people that you give a flying fuck about them when the only thing you actually care about is yourself. Enjoy your birthday while the world burns.

Dom Joly is a British comedian who was denied entry to the US because of his social media posts.

Afua Hirsch

Dear Donald Trump, You have reached 80, an age at which, in my culture, you should be celebrated as an elder. As an octogenarian, you should sit under the shade of the tree you planted and watch all the children given a chance by your kindness and wisdom flourish into adults who in turn will plant more trees.

But you are a man who has spent your life chopping down trees, figuratively and literally. The milestone you have reached is that of the ultimate anti-elder, a cautionary tale of age without wisdom, of cultivating hate instead of love. Instead of building up the village, you have tried to set it on fire.

This does not mean we don’t value your life. Every age needs its cautionary tale. For our generation, you have helpfully modelled what destruction looks like. You have taken us to rock bottom – rolling back gender equality, racial justice and judicial independence, promoting economic chaos, greed, corruption and even genocide. You have exposed the fragility of your country, a nation whose supposed democracy people once looked up to and admired, waking millions up from their slumber. The crudeness of your project has united once bitter adversaries. It is clear that your legacy must never be repeated. On your birthday, let’s take a moment to recognise that really is quite an achievement.

Afua Hirsch is a writer and broadcaster.

Edel Rodriguez

Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban artist behind satirical anti-Trump covers for Time and Der Spiegel.

Sidney Blumenthal

Donald: After writing nice little thank-you notes to your three wise men – Kash Patel for the bottle inscribed “President Donald J Trump Bourbon”, Pete Hegseth for the framed copy of the “President Donald J Trump Ten Commandments” and Bobby Jr for the “President Donald J Trump Cocaine Golden Toilet Seat” – please consider the practical and forward-looking art of Swedish death cleaning. Decluttering can save your family a world of trouble. In the coming year, the Democrats who assume control in the Congress will subpoena the records of your far and wide business dealings. And don’t forget the suppressed 3m documents in the Epstein files – especially any that have your name redacted. Avoid the chaos, the legal expenses, the accusations from the fake news that you are engaged in a cover-up. Organise your files now to prepare to cooperate. Don’t be a hoarder. Don’t pile boxes of documents in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom again. You can prove your simon-pure innocence, achieve retribution at last and prevent the crown jewel of your new East Wing from being renamed “The 8647 Joseph Robinette Biden Ballroom” through Swedish death cleaning. We know you appreciate neatness. Be best! Four more years!

Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

Oliver Bullough

Mr President, Your 80th year has been huge, not least because you’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars from cryptocurrencies. But, since it’s your birthday, I want to give you a little bit of history.

It’s no accident the US currency became central to how the world does business: your predecessors laboured hard to establish a dollar standard and thus to gain an effective veto over who does what. Anyone who wanted to move money had to do so via New York, and thus with th