Foolanthropy

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October 30, 2016

So tomorrow night, are you going trick or treating dressed as Baby DonDon? Yeah, I thought so. Make sure you get the hair right. You’ll get more treats that way. Or more tricks. Whatever.

Folks, I have to respond to today’s front-page story in the Washington Post-Apocalypse about my decades-long refusal to honor my charitable pledges. First thing you need to know is that the writer, David Fahrenthold, is now walking around with a small nuclear device in his underwear. It’s the least I could do.

Let me mansplain this to you. Baby DonDon practices the art of foolanthropy. I bamboozle people into thinking I’m generous, all the while saying, “That’s 10 for me and none for you, 10 for me and none for you, etc.” I practice tithing without the tithing. Makes life much simpler.

So the Fahrenthold story starts with one of my greatest hits. It’s 1996 and there’s a charity doing a ribbon-cutting for its new nursery school for kids with AIDS. Ah, education and AIDS, you’d think I’d want to cut a check. Not really.

So up on the dais you’ve got Rudy Giuliani (before his nervous breakdown), Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford and other worthies. I enter the room and go sit on the dais, even though I’m not a donor. But everyone thinks I am because I’m Baby DonDon and look where I’m sitting.

I’ve taken the seat of Steven Fisher, a real estate loser who pisses away his money on kids with AIDS. So Fisher gets a seat among the great unwashed and, because he’s so royally cheesed, it takes the charity months to get him to forgive them.

People, do I have a set of stones? This is the thinking that will make America great again.

So the Post-Apocalypse says I’ve given away $7.8 million since the early 1980s, which comes to $222,857 a year, chump change for a billionaire. But besides saving money to keep me in hairspray, I’ve hoodwinked almost everybody and that feels so good.

Hey, our great country is so strapped that we will have to practice a version of foolanthropy. We’ll need to fake it till we make it.

And I’m just the guy to do it.

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Andrew Feinberg is the author of Four Score and Seven, a novel that imagines Abe Lincoln comes back to life for two weeks during the 2016 campaign and encounters a candidate who, some say, resembles Donald Trump. It is available on Amazon. He is the author or co-author of five non-fiction books. His political journalism and humor have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, GQ, Barron's and Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

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