Tag lines for US presidents if they were on The Real Housewives

Today I’m looking back at the evolution of a chapter in my debut satire collection This Won’t Help. To celebrate Presidents’ Day, you should order yourself a copy of my book, and then stop celebrating Presidents’ Day. Who cares about those guys? They all got to be the literal president, we don’t have to give them anything else.

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Almost exactly a year ago, I published a short piece in this very newsletter called “Catchphrases for Presidents if They Were on The Real Housewives.” As you can see, great care was taken to change the term “catchphrases” to “tag lines.” Wow. Incredible. What an evolution.

I did make some hefty changes, though. The original was a brief, one-joke piece of humor—not quite 200 words long. The idea was simple and silly: Combine famous presidential quotes with Real Housewives tropes. Groundbreaking.

Jokes included:

George Washington
“I cannot tell a lie—so don’t ask me what I think about you.”

Abraham Lincoln
“Four score and seven years? With my top hat on, it’s more like four score and seven inches! I may be tall, but my temper is short.”

The Washington joke found its way into the book. The Lincoln one, like the man himself, didn’t make it.

At the time I wrote the initial piece, I was facing an impending deadline for my manuscript. As anyone who’s ever faced a deadline knows, the worst part of having a deadline is the part where you have a deadline. As I stared down the reality of my deadline’s deadline, I began to feel that the project of the book was incomplete—so I went about trying to create the missing puzzle pieces.

The week after I published the Presidents/Housewives newsletter, I re-read it and I hated it. The jokes were funny, I didn’t hate those. But the piece was a series of jokes and nothing more. It felt toothless. It had nothing to say. It had simply found a clever way to mathematically stitch together Old + Topical.

But I didn’t want to trash it. I could see this piece had a purpose that I hadn’t yet written—to investigate the destructive ways we mythologize supposed “Great Men,” sanitizing history and dooming ourselves to repeat it. But, you know, funny.

If you’ve never watched any Real Housewives series before (you should), some background: The housewives are constantly “breaking the fourth wall” during their to-camera confessionals. We see their daily lives, and then we hear each of their own commentary as they look directly at us.

But they’re not really breaking the fourth wall, because they all know that they need to be making good TV. So do the producers, editors, and everyone else. Their “confessionals” serve to further plot lines and often include soft-scripted quips. They’re also filmed after-the-fact—the cast is shown clips of their lives from weeks or months ago, and then told to react as if it’s all happening at that very moment.

Truly breaking the fourth wall, ironically, isn’t really the point of reality shows. The point is viewers. Which isn’t all that different from politics, where the point is so often votes—not a dissection of our ills and a better tomorrow. So I decided to break my piece, a few times over.

First, I wanted to shatter my initial mistake: ignoring the destructive mythos of the “Great Men.” To be president of the United States is to be commander of the world’s most powerful armed forces. If the buck stops at the Oval Office then so, too, do war crimes. Andrew Jackson sanctioned genocide against Native Americans. Nixon authorized the carpet-bombing of Cambodia. Reagan secretly sent US weapons to Iran so he could fund the Contras. George W. Bush misrepresented intelligence to justify an invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. None of this is funny, so the humor has to lie in criticism of our lack of honesty about history.

In updating the piece, I decided to let these men say exactly who they were. Here’s how I reworked the opening:

George Washington
“I cannot tell a lie—so don’t ask me what I think about you.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt
“I may have created social security, but there’s nothing secure about my social life.”

Ronald Reagan
“If you’re my friend, I’ll build you up. But if you cross me, I’ll make sure you trickle down.”

Richard Nixon
“A man is not finished when he is defeated. A man is finished when he quits. And honey, I can do both.

Ronald Reagan
“Oh also, I committed war crimes.”

Nixon
“Same.”

There they are, the first two real confessions. Short, sudden, surprising. Their staccato darkness is juxtaposed with the preceding wacky wordplay. But they won’t be called out by their peers or a producer yet. They’re true and horrible, but also funny in their brutal and abrupt honesty—which we’d never see or expect in real life. So they’re followed immediately by more jokes, then another confession, and then the first pushback against the confessions:

Theodore Roosevelt
“Speak softly and carry a big stick… if you know what I mean.”

Joe Biden
“They say fifty is the new thirty. Which makes me sixty. And that’s the new forty. So that makes me sixty again.”

John F. Kennedy
“Ich bin ein enigma wrapped in a riddle and cash!”

Andrew Jackson
“I committed genocide”

John F. Kennedy
“That’s not a tag line.”

Andrew Jackson
“Sure it is. I just said it, so now it’s a thing I like to say, which makes it a tag line.”

John F. Kennedy
“Our quotes are supposed to be similar to the tag lines the cast members of The Real Housewives say at the beginning of each episode. Have you ever seen it? They’re not supposed to be, like, an admission of guilt.”

Andrew Jackson
“I famously don’t feel guilty.”

John F. Kennedy
“That’s more like it. That could be a Housewives tag line!”

That’s our first interjection from another “cast member,” JFK. But his problem isn’t so much with the fact that Jackson committed genocide, but with the fact that he said it. Therein lies the piece’s next critique of our glorification and remembrance of the powerful. To simply say that these men did bad things isn’t enough, nor does it address our collective responsibility. It’s those admissions that lead to the more sinister aspect of our collective memory. Shh, maybe that’s true, but we don’t talk about that.

This is where we begin to break from the reality show mold. When JFK tries to Shh James Madison’s reminder that many “Founding Fathers” owned slaves, Jimmy Carter (the most compassionate among them) starts to needle at the point of the piece itself.

James Madison
“I owned slaves.”

John F. Kennedy
“Now, see, what’s going on? First war crimes, then genocide, now slavery? This is supposed to be a fun little thing we’re all doing.”

Jimmy Carter
“Why?”

John F. Kennedy
“What do you mean, ‘Why’?”

Jimmy Carter
“I mean, most of these guys weren’t fun. But because of little games like this Real Housewives tag line stuff, everyone thinks they were just endearing, funny old men.”

John F. Kennedy
“But… shouldn’t we forgive me—er, them, now that they’ve admitted to it?”

Jimmy Carter
“Jesus, no—you’re missing the entire point. These are bad people. Power is corruptive and corrosive, and people who want power shouldn’t have it. By glorifying them, we excuse the predations of the powerful on the powerless. We encourage a march toward authoritarianism. We continue a vicious cycle of history, the nightmare from which we cannot wake.”

Richard Nixon
“You lost me.”

George H. W. Bush
“Same here.”

Donald Trump
“I understood every word.”

Jimmy Carter
“Yeah, of course I lost you two. And of course you would say that.”

Richard Nixon
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Donald Trump
“I know what it means, but I’m not telling.”

So Carter comes in with my own point of view. Another break. The author is here, folks, and he’s disguised as The Peanut Farmer. (Note the reference to Joyce’s Ulysses here, too: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It’s one of my favorites, and it could be argued that it has very little to do with what I wrote. Nice.)

There’s also humor in the context of the scene that’s playing out: this is a reality show taping. The visual of presidents arguing with each other over the sins of power on a TV set is, to me, funny. So too is the idea that they’re all stuck inside a reality show. (The Real Presidents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? If it’s not already a thing, I’m copyrighting it.)

Of course, the specific humor within the dialogue above comes at the “You lost me.” comment from Nixon, followed by the “I understood every word.” from Trump, who famously understands very little and has built a foundation for authoritarianism around it.

But as Carter soon points out:

Jimmy Carter
“See, now the guy writing this book is doing it—making the man who destroyed our Supreme Court look like an affable goofball. Let’s just cut the intros and roll the show.”

John F. Kennedy
“There’s a show?”

Jimmy Carter
“Yeah, we filmed an entire presidential Housewives series.”

Ronald Reagan
“That’s what those cameras were for!

This was the final way I wanted to break open the piece. I needed to critique the act of writing it in the first place. A piece about the sanitizing of history shouldn’t also sanitize it, but that’s often what acceptable caricatures end up doing. It’s why the most effective court jester isn’t actually allowed in the court. (The ones who make the court look affable, though, are often paid to be there.) Also, I liked the vague reference above to our one professional actor-president not knowing why cameras might be surrounding him day and night.

The piece’s denouement brings us nearly full-circle back to an admission, and then to a meta end as Carter yells “Cut!” Is he the director? The producer? Detached interlocutor? Either way…

Barack Obama
“Yes we CAN flip a table! Did I do it right? Like Teresa Giudice?”

Jimmy Carter
“No—no, we’re done now. We’re done!”

George W. Bush
“Whoever you are, don’t misunderestimate me.”

Jimmy Carter
“George, please.”

George W. Bush
“Right! Forgot. I’m also a war criminal.”

Jimmy Carter
“Cut!”

The above final version of the piece, which made it into the book, doesn’t cover every president, nor does it address the totality of ways in which they furthered American imperialism. But all-encompassing isn’t the point. The point, rather, is to examine our avoidance of an honest reckoning with our history. One way I know how to do that is through some Real Housewives jokes.

P.S.
The point is also to create IP for a presidential Housewives series. Brave studios, reach out!

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Order my collection, a New Yorker best book of 2023

Did you enjoy the above piece of writing, in its many parts? Then you’ll love my debut book This Won’t Help, available in stores and online right now. It’s a collection of satirical essays and stories, and it’s a New Yorker Best Book of 2023.

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That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon.