In the New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins columniated Trump, suggesting he had dreamt
that he inhabited heaven earning lots of money,
though heaven is an impecunious place which is exempt
of guilt-stained gelt. The dream-conceived conclusion was more funny.
The angels helped him reach his goal, enabling Donald to return
from an imaginary heaven to an as imaginary earth.
‘Never again,” said its inhabitants, for in the dream they spurn
a man whose morals are nightmarish, having zero worth,
but though he was rejected by all humans, angels did succeed
in helping him have yet another term on the by-him-imperiled planet.
A few of them were Jews who paradoxically still need
this great supporter of the Jewish state while many nations wish to ban it,
though God once promised Abraham that Israel’s survival would be far more perennial
than that of the New Yorker which has recently celebrated its centennial.
Gelt is the Yiddish word for money which I recalled while writing this poem on Hanukah, a festival on which many Jews give children make-believe money called Hanukkah gelt.
In “Centenarian: a diary of a hundredth year,” New Yorker, 12/22/25, Calvin Tomkins writes:
I dreamed that Trump died and went to Heaven, where he immediately set about changing things. He fired a hundred or more of the busier angels, and flew into a rage when they paid no attention to him. St. Benedict, the Angel of Explanation, took him by the arm. “There are no jobs up here,” he said, “so you can’t really fire people.” Trump fired St. Benedict on the spot and began to work on a financial system that allotted seventeen per cent of Heaven’s assets to Trump. The problem was that money was unknown in Heaven. It took him a while to realize this, and when he tried to will it into existence several angels patted his left arm so sympathetically that it dropped off. Having only one arm was a handicap, and Trump took to raising high his remaining arm and shouting, “Fight!”
After many more failures, Trump gave up on Heaven and decided to return to Earth. The angels agreed to help him do this, but nobody on Earth did. “Never again,” the people said. “He’s a really sore loser.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
