This may be a good sign. Last week, I was getting as many as twelve fund-raising e-mails a day from Donald Trump and his alter egos. Increasingly, they didn't convey any message about reversing the election or fighting to win Georgia or anything of the sort. Most simply told me to send money.
Yesterday, they all stopped. I haven't had one in twenty-four hours. Now, maybe after I failed to respond after several hundred of them, some computer finally decided not to waste the micro-second it took to send me between two and four copies of each one. Perhaps they're still going out to those who sent Donald money he could use to buy steaks or pay for some hooker or even take up heavy drinking, which wouldn't surprise me. He sure didn't spend it on a competent legal team who'd tell him his case was hopeless.
Maybe the demands for cash — which have sounded increasingly like a Mafia Capo threatening you to pay your gambling debts or else — are still going out to those they worked on. But maybe The Don's just not getting much return on them lately so he's got his crew working on other ways to extract bucks from his loyalists.
Hey, are you as impressed as I am with how rapidly and well Randy Rainbow puts those videos of his together? Even if you hate the message — and one lady who keeps writing to tell me they're not funny sure does — you've got to wonder how he does it. For this new one, he probably already had the music track but where does he get those costumes? How does he gather such clear news footage? How long does it take him to shoot the video of himself and layer them all and edit it all and put in the graphics and all the other elements?
Supposedly, he does all this himself from a not-huge apartment in New York…and he's got to do it quickly because these days, current news has — as Jon Stewart used to say of The Daily Show — the shelf life of potato salad. "Topical Humor" used to be about something that had happened in the last month or so. Now, folks like him and Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel are going on-air or on the web with material about what happened six hours ago…or less. No wonder MAD Magazine with its six-week lead time couldn't compete.
At the Randy Rainbow live show I attended, someone in the Q-and-A part asked him if he was ever in the middle of assembling a video and Breaking News suddenly rendered it obsolete. He said it happened all the time; that he'd tossed several videos that were 75% done because they were suddenly Too Late. I'll bet.
And by the way: If someone is laughing at something, telling them "It's not funny" is one of the stupider, most useless things you can do in this world.