The Haircut Who Would Be King

By Robert Trebor

Palindrome Press     2019

179 pages     Satire

It was a bizarre scenario yesterday—juxtaposing an occasional glance at the impeachment debates with reading the book The Haircut Who Would Be King by Robert Trebor. A bit surreal to say the least!

Trebor, an actor whose face I knew from television and the movies, has laced together the relationship between Putin and Trump into a giggly-style farce that is really spot on. Here is the summary of the plot—if you can call it a plot.

“A farcical sendup of Donald Trump’s rise to power and volatile partnership with Vladimir Putin...As a young boy, Donald Rump was less than precocious—a miserable student, prone to implacable tantrums, whose emotional intelligence ceased maturing at the age of 9. But the region of the brain responsible for egomaniacal self-assessment was prodigiously large. After some success and plenty more failure in real estate, he turns his attentions to reality TV and hosts a show called “Paycheck,” each episode of which concludes with Rump singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Meanwhile, Vladimir Poutine was raised by KGB agents during the early years of Khrushchev’s reign. Poutine, a latent homosexual who immerses himself in the self-consciously manly world of “physical culture,” reads magazines about bodybuilding. Crushed by the demise of the Soviet Union, he copes in the most peculiar way: “he would slip into a silver lamé gown, pop on a curly wig and perform Marlene Dietrich classics at a local drag bar.” Rump decides he’d like to try his hand at politics and recruits shock jock Alex Clamz from the popular but frothing radio show, “Disinfowarz.” He runs for president opposite Mallory Claxton, a sensible woman with a sterling career in public service. Despite a bizarre campaign and a trail of seedy scandals, Rump wins with clandestine help from Poutine. And then, the fun really begins.”

Rump’s election motto was “Make America Grate Again,” and believe me, my  teeth are “grating” today. Trebor’s antics are too close to the truth to be believed, and I gasped a couple of times as I read this paragraph following the news about Trump’s letter to Nancy Pelosi.

“Rump’s medical problem involves his digestive tract being wired backwards, so that everything flows in reverse. And that’s why he talks out of his butt, and nothing but crap comes out of his mouth!”

Read The Haircut Who Would Be King at your own risk. I found it a very funny and cringe-worthy satire. So did the Kirkus reviewer who says, “Debut author Trebor displays a sharp attunement to the politically absurd and a talent for making the already peculiar into the raucously silly. The first rule of parody is that it must be genuinely funny, and the author accomplishes that repeatedly.”