Episode Report Card Miss Alli: C- | 1 USERS: F YOU GRADE IT The court of public Trumpinion
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 17 | Aired on 05.18.2005
Now, Trump returns to the (I think) fairly idiotic matter of the American flag, which I think there are a million reasons not to be able to find, not to mention the fact that he already freaking asked her about it last week. I'm not sure why we're repeating the entire set of questions, as if he's giving them a second shot at explaining everything according to the new version of reality that they have had the chance to construct in their heads while watching themselves on television. Tana, for instance, has a new explanation for the flag. Her previous explanation was that she had believed the American flag would be in the box of world flags and it wasn't, but her new explanation is that someone stole it. She says she had a volunteer "assess all [her] flags," and the American flag was there, but then it was gone. (Incidentally, if you were one of those people who believed Tana had the harder task, which she probably did, keep that mention in mind. It's hard to know how hard the task was without knowing what the resources were, and I suspect Tana may have had a veritable platoon of volunteers to work for her that would never have been available to Kendra, since videogame championships don't so much bring out the philanthropists.) Anyway, Tana suspects flagnapping! And you know, if you call John Ashcroft, he will totally take some FBI guys away from their hard work polishing his guitar case to look into that. Because the flag is precious, and it's actually too precious to be squandered on anything as stupid as, like, rights. At any rate, in spite of having just deflected the blame for the disappearing flag onto someone else, Tana apologizes anyway for "let[ting] Governor Pataki down." She shouldn't feel bad. She did offer him a donut.
Now, Trump turns to Kendra. "I don't like crying," he declares. This in spite of -- say it with me -- having told her last week that he doesn't mind crying and there's nothing wrong with it. What the hell is going on with this? Is this just the alternative mix of the Boardroom from last week, where everyone says the opposite of what he or she said the first time? Is this Rashomon, and this is Tana's version? ["And I'm going to wonder, probably not for the last time, why they didn't show the Boardroom footage of the teammates instead. Because unless they used racial slurs while product-placing Hilton Properties and Pizza Hut, there's really no reason we didn't see that." -- Sars] For whatever reason, Trump now hates crying, and he asks Kendra if it's a sign of weakness. "Absolutely not," she says. "I've seen 300-pound linebackers cry as they raise a Super Bowl trophy." So now she's having to come up with a new way to defend something about which she was previously reassured by this same questioner in an episode we just saw. I am not taking the remedial class, here, people. God. I don't need a gold star just for not poking myself in the eye with a crayon. Anyway. The audience screams wildly at the linebacker thing, because Kendra's rehearsed line was way better than Tana's. For a split second, Kendra narrows her eyes at Trump and sets her mouth in a pouty line that makes me think she's about to do -- I am not kidding -- her Richard Nixon impression. Call me crazy; that's what I see. But then she grins, and Trump laughs, and Nixon is forgotten, and Trump's red tie bobs with this merry air of inevitability. Oh, Kendra. You had him at "300-pound linebacker."