4167 - Trump Takes a Mulligan

Speaker 1 I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

Speaker 1 If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

Speaker 1 And I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December.

Speaker 1 And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January. The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd.

Speaker 1 My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andysoltzman.co.uk

Speaker 3 the bugle audio newspaper for a visual world

Speaker 2 hello buglers and welcome to another installment of well this is going well the weekly assessment of planet earth's slide down the rankings that is the bugle podcast i am andy zoltzmann fear my power, for I am a pitiless destroyer of worlds.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I promised myself I'd never use those words again after it failed as a chat-up line for the 837th consecutive first date. It is Monday the 28th of September 2020.

Speaker 2 This is issue 4167 of the Bugle, which by coincidence is a number of times the following things have happened in the past week since we last spoke to each other.

Speaker 2 The average British person has watched the news and said, what now? Boris Johnson has muttered the words, this is the worst Faustian pact ever.

Speaker 2 Football pundits have said, that is never a handball, this game is killing itself.

Speaker 2 Football supporters have responded, you have a point, but maybe try addressing the cancerously exploitative, destructive plutocracy of the wealthier clubs when you're trying to work out exactly how football is really killing itself.

Speaker 2 So there we are.

Speaker 2 There we are, another week on as we all wait expectantly for season four of The Handmaid's Tailless and light, frothy escapism, whilst quietly thinking to ourselves, I expect the end of civilization to be a bit more exciting and spectacular than this.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 instead, here we have a bugle to keep you going joining me for the latest week of Joy Around the World from Australia, Alice Fraser.

Speaker 4 Hello, Andy. Hello, buglers.
How are you all?

Speaker 2 I assume they're all fine.

Speaker 2 Let's go with fine. Yeah, on behalf of all bugle listeners.
Everyone is absolutely fine.

Speaker 4 Well, how can you not be fine when you're listening to world-class satire?

Speaker 2 I've no idea. I've never really tried it.

Speaker 2 How's Australia?

Speaker 4 Australia seems to be doing comparatively well in the stakes of

Speaker 4 collapsing. We're collapsing at marginally slower rates than other major countries, partly because we are not a major country, though we like to think of ourselves as such.

Speaker 4 But yeah, it's not bad. I spent the weekend looking at some cows.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 And how does that work out for you?

Speaker 4 They looked back.

Speaker 2 Classic, classic human-cow confrontation. Also joining us from rather closer to where I am in the shed in South London, it's Mark Steele.

Speaker 3 Hello, Andy. I'm so jealous of you, Alice, in Australia.
Well, it's just we're just awful here. We're going to have a second wave and a third wave.
And

Speaker 3 even if you get locked down, you've got a desert each out there, so you always

Speaker 3 wander up. Oh, no, I can't be confined to this 900 square miles.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, this is just awful. It's all just so miserably, predictably wrong.
And when a lot a few weeks ago, when they went, no, go Boris Johnson, no, go out once again to the pubs and off.

Speaker 3 And I just thought,

Speaker 3 I clearly, I honestly did think there must be something I don't understand because the reason that the R number's gone down is because we've all been indoors, not meeting them.

Speaker 3 So when we all go out, it'll go up again, won't it? It's like,

Speaker 3 oh, there's a drip from the tap. We turned it off.
Let's turn it on again and the tap won't, but it's going to start dripping when you turn it on again, isn't it? No, don't be too miserable, we got.

Speaker 3 And here we are, all fucked.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but the thing is, Mark, you're looking at this from a different perspective to the politicians.

Speaker 2 You're looking at it from a

Speaker 2 cause and effect perspective. Whereas politics likes to separate cause and effect.

Speaker 2 The cause is someone else's fault, and the effect is your manipulation of the statistics to prove it to be what you want it to be. Evidently.

Speaker 2 On the 29th of September in 480 BC, the Battle of Salamis took place.

Speaker 2 The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeated the Persian fleet under Xerxes I, who had no answer to the Greek barrage of strongly flavoured cured meat sausages, if I remember the details from my degree accurately.

Speaker 2 On this day in 2008, well, on the 29th of September 2008, the Dow Jones fell 777.68 points, its largest single day loss following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual.

Speaker 2 It's funny, isn't it?

Speaker 2 That seems almost charmingly nostalgic now, doesn't it? Just a massive global banking collapse.

Speaker 2 Kind of happier, simpler times where, you know, catastrophe almost seemed just like a little lark in the financial markets.

Speaker 2 Could anyone have foreseen those bankruptcies happening in the collapse around it? Well,

Speaker 2 no,

Speaker 2 unless they'd had one of the following rare qualities, foresight, hindsight, or basic arithmetic. On the 28th of September 1066, William the Conqueror landed in England, beginning the Norman Conquest.

Speaker 2 Of course, it's been downhill ever since, really. He landed in Sussex, of course, if he'd landed in Kent, we'd have kept him out easy, no problem.

Speaker 2 On the 28th of September 1066, William the Conqueror landed in England, beginning the Norman Conquest. It's been downhill ever since.

Speaker 2 But to mark this, we have this week's section in the bin, a free new part-by-part audio tapestry chronicling Britain from 2020 in the style of the Bayer tapestry that charted the Norman conquest.

Speaker 2 And to construct your first audio panel of the history of Britain 2020 onwards, construct your own scene from the following component parts.

Speaker 2 A smug leader sitting on a throne, a group of fawning courtiers, a sinister-looking bald man, a crowd of people holding their heads in their hands in despair, a naughty-looking virus, a confused doctor, and a very disappointed baby.

Speaker 2 That section in the bin.

Speaker 2 Top story this week. Well,

Speaker 2 let's just have a closer look at

Speaker 2 the latest in Britain. We'll turn to the Trumpian tax issue

Speaker 2 later in the show.

Speaker 3 Are we off on this now?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, it's hard to. I mean,

Speaker 3 lockdown is, I think the government is probably about to say that lockdown is a spiritual state and we are all free within our souls and um and just shut up and it's so yes and it's so unpredictable who could have predicted that when students went back to university that they would stand close to each other because before freshers week has always involved students just getting in a canoe and say going out into the greenland

Speaker 3 what about the the thing with the app right so you know the nhs app the NHS app that is not, that is working.

Speaker 3 But it's not an NHS app because they've given it to this private company, Serco. So it's an NHS app in the same way that Kentucky Fried Chicken does NHS buckets of chicken wing.

Speaker 3 And that mental Dave in a nightclub does NHS skunk and collapse in the corner of the toilet. It's nothing to do with the NHS, but he just wants the NHS to take the blame for it.

Speaker 3 And then, oh, and also, so the track and trace that in April, track and trace, he said, World beater will be a world beater again,

Speaker 3 changer, track and trace by the end of May.

Speaker 3 And then it was the end of June, and then July, and then September. And now he said this week, he said, it doesn't really matter,

Speaker 3 it doesn't affect the thing you've said

Speaker 2 for six fing months.

Speaker 3 You've been going, this is what's going to know, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 And that and it's like a child losing losing a race at school isn't it yeah it didn't want to win it didn't want to win yeah

Speaker 3 yeah and they got this surco company you know they've sub contract i was reading about it they've subcontracted the work hundreds of millions of pounds worth of of contracts that they've got and they've subcontracted it out to companies such as debt collecting agencies

Speaker 3 and you've got but with track and base you've got to be really sensitive right we want to find out where you were. And debt collecting agencies of all companies are known for their sensitivity.

Speaker 3 Were you round at Bill and Eileen's on Saturday for a barbecue? Were you? When we're clamped in your car and taking your finging tilly, you slag. Give us your jewelry.

Speaker 3 I think, well, here's my shred of optimism. When you listen to the conspiracy theorists, all you know what they're doing.

Speaker 3 They're trying to kill all the old people because they're too expensive expensive for their pensions or something. I think, oh no, they are then.
This is the darkest thing.

Speaker 3 They are utterly, uselessly incompetent. If they had an inconspiracy, they couldn't.
And John Boris comes to when he does his no,

Speaker 3 whatever it is, no more than six people can gather anywhere unless it's at a gathering.

Speaker 3 And of these, four out of every three must be outside during daylight and must hover like a hummingbird in a bubble where 1.5 people extra are allowed as a bubblet and you are only allowed two extra people in a house if you murder two of your family to make space with a maximum of nought people in a room at any time.

Speaker 3 So if you find yourself in a room, you must leave. immediately

Speaker 2 that's actually a lot clearer than anything I've heard from the real Boris Boris Johnson.

Speaker 4 Unless you're hunting grouse.

Speaker 3 Oh, yes!

Speaker 3 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 4 Kill or be killed. You know, they've got these lockdown protests.
What they should do is just ritually sacrifice a grouse at the end as a post hoc. That's so justification.

Speaker 3 I was doing one of my in-town recordings, which I last was allowed to record, in a field in Stratford-upon-Avon, right?

Speaker 3 So the town, Stratford-upon-Avon, we were only allowed to do it in a field with 30 people in this massive field dotted around while I was trodden on the stood this is all true stood on a tree stump right as the stage and how Shakespeare began yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's the only time I've ever done a radio recording where a punchline was twice interrupted by geese so

Speaker 2 it's true

Speaker 3 bless them and I thought if I had a gun if I had a gun and I shot one of the f ⁇ ers it could have been a proper shooting party we would have been allowed to have 4,000 there, wouldn't we?

Speaker 3 Well, this is the other shred of optimism, I think,

Speaker 3 buglers, is that

Speaker 3 I think people in Britain, more and more people are sort of thinking this has all gone horribly wrong.

Speaker 3 The terrible thing sort of six months ago was all this madness was going on and people were thinking, well, the government's doing the best it can in killing more people than in doing worse than any other country in the world.

Speaker 3 But even now, the thing, because it's Britain, so Boris Johnson was asked the other day why have we had a worse record than almost any other country in the world and he said because we are a freedom loving nation.

Speaker 3 That's why we've been worse because we can't help it. We go up the co-op and we're doing our shopping in our mask and we rip it off because we can't help it because it's in our jeans

Speaker 3 because we stood alone in 1940 so I'm not wearing a mask when I'm buying custard powder.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's just, how can they die?

Speaker 3 And I'll go with the other one, he said, for 300 years, every major innovation in the world has come from Britain.

Speaker 3 And that's why we, of course, the virus is going to spread more in Britain than anywhere else, because we invented the steam engine.

Speaker 2 It's all Stevenson's fault.

Speaker 4 Speaking of the steam engine, I highly recommend, I have a few suggestions for people who are trying to avoid COVID in these troubled times.

Speaker 4 One is everyone should start vaping so that we can see other people's breath and dodge away from it.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 I think that's very good.

Speaker 4 The second thing is that everyone should have extremely loud air horns. because no one wants to come near anyone with an air horn.

Speaker 2 Like Beethoven.

Speaker 4 And the third is...

Speaker 2 He never got it, did he

Speaker 2 yeah you can't argue with the science

Speaker 4 and the third is to avoid uh anything happening after 10 p.m.

Speaker 4 because that's when the vampires come out and spread covert they're like yeah they're like the thing about vampires that everyone forgets is that they're essentially very large mosquitoes yes everyone does forget that um

Speaker 4 and i just

Speaker 4 you know it's all that silent movie stuff where you watch them going to piano music and you don't hear the sound effect of the vampires floating around going,

Speaker 4 much more annoying, much less sexy.

Speaker 2 Yep, that's why you don't get

Speaker 2 you don't get mosquitoes in Italian restaurants because of all the garlic.

Speaker 2 And the crucifixes, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, France, no, none in France.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, you're quite right. Running water.
They're the most useless things, aren't they, vampires?

Speaker 2 It should be easy to get rid of a vampire.

Speaker 3 i am deadly the only thing that can stop me is garlic and running water and the daylight and anything that happens to be cross-shaped even accidental twig

Speaker 4 consent

Speaker 2 yes yeah yeah fucking useless aren't they

Speaker 2 some more annoying

Speaker 2 well i'm glad we're taking down the big threat to humanity one by one in this show um

Speaker 2 there's been uh a lot of criticism from within the Conservative Party of

Speaker 2 the Johnson regime's latest diktats.

Speaker 2 Some of the Tories have been saying they're doing more harm than good, which is not really the issue to be honest.

Speaker 2 Doing more harm than good because A, that's basically what they were elected to do. B, because every possible solution to this situation does more harm than good.

Speaker 2 The issue is the margin of victory for harm over good

Speaker 2 under Johnson's mentorship.

Speaker 3 Yes, it's a threshing.

Speaker 3 209 days in a row, harm has beaten good.

Speaker 3 Where does good go from here?

Speaker 2 Yeah, fans of good have called on the phones.

Speaker 2 Rest bang out of order.

Speaker 4 Look, as a comedian surrounded by the furious agreement of the educated lefty intelligentsia, it's very easy to make fun of Boris Johnson because he's got a very difficult job and

Speaker 4 he makes makes it look easy to be good because you look at him and you think, God, any idiot could do a better job than that underwater with one hemisphere of their brain tied behind their back.

Speaker 4 The problem is that the skills required to be good at politics don't seem to be the same skills required to be a good leader of a country. And that seems like a structural problem, you know?

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, you're saying that this thing has revealed the obvious deep flaws in the way we conduct our democracy, Alex.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's like testing someone to be an airline pilot by having them run a hopscotch. It's not quite, it's like a skill set, but it's not the same skill set.

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, I mean, if you look at the things he said to

Speaker 2 the country, and clearly there's an issue of trust now, and there's a lot of disagreement, you know, basically different people saying we need more powerful local governments, less powerful local governments, more clarity from central government, central government to get out of it.

Speaker 2 People should take responsibility for their own actions, and they need strong definitive rulings from the government so everyone knows exactly what they can do.

Speaker 2 We need to support and close businesses. We need to panic and not let the virus control our lives.

Speaker 2 We need to do things better in the future and in the past and learn from Sweden, stroke Germany, stroke China, stroke New Zealand, stroke Australia, stroke Alan and Brenda from down the road who are fine, stroke wherever people are allowed to watch sport, we'll just follow them, or Antarctica, Pangaea or Venus.

Speaker 2 Or we just learn from Britain because we are Britain and instinctively our national common sense means we've automatically done the right thing.

Speaker 2 So it's it and Johnson's leadership, I mean he said that he made a speech last week, he said, said, I know we can succeed because we have succeeded before.

Speaker 2 The problem with that is,

Speaker 2 I mean, A, that logic is flawed. And because a lot of things succeed and then fail.
I mean, you know, you wouldn't line, you know,

Speaker 2 whenever the next Olympics is, you will not see Team GB at the 100 meters wheeling out Harold Abrahams in his coffee, the 1924 Olympic 100 meter champion, saying, well, he's a a proven winner.

Speaker 2 He is a proven winner. He's done it before.
He can do it again. And also, there's another flip side.

Speaker 2 If Johnson says, we can succeed because we've succeeded before, there's an obvious flip side to that logic, given the amount of times he has fing failed.

Speaker 2 So in terms of pure probability, it's not looking too clever. He said this, when the sickness took hold of this country in March, we pulled together in a spirit of national sacrifice and community.

Speaker 2 We followed the guidance to the letter, we stayed home, protected the NHS and saved thousands of lives.

Speaker 2 Now, I know people can use whatever pronouns they like these days, and that is overwhelmingly a good thing, but I don't believe Boris Johnson can use we in those sentences.

Speaker 2 That seems entirely inappropriate. He added, the single greatest weapon we bring to this fight is the common sense of the people themselves.
Well, thanks for the compliment, Mr. Johnson.

Speaker 2 But when you are Prime Minister, that suggests that British common sense has taken a bit of a back seat in recent years.

Speaker 2 And when the other weapons we're bringing to the fight are you, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, an overwhelming aura of confusion and an app that doesn't fucking work, that's not the most glowing of accolades anyway.

Speaker 3 I think, yes, all that's very true. But I think,

Speaker 3 and you were asking for little shall shards of optimism. I think, and I know as a statistics man, you will appreciate this,

Speaker 3 Britain did achieve a world record this week because during Boris Johnson's speech at one point he said

Speaker 3 it is absolutely important

Speaker 3 that we all

Speaker 3 keep to the rules we must not breach the rules and at that point the greatest number of people at a single moment said the same name when 40 million people in Britain went all that Dominic Cummins

Speaker 2 It was registered as an earthquake by those seismometers around the world.

Speaker 4 I think it's, yeah, 1.3 on the dicta scale.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Family shell. This is a.

Speaker 2 Just one, before we move on to Trump, one more quick British story. And, well, this is of particular relevance to Mark and me.

Speaker 2 Kent border. Now, of course, Kent Border, you instantly think, well, that's Australia's number five and well, Australia's five, numbers five and six batsman in the 1981 old Trafford Ashes test.

Speaker 2 Martin Kent, only played three matches for the Baggy Greens, of course, and legendary captain Alan Border early in his career. But

Speaker 2 Michael Gove

Speaker 2 announced essentially there's going to be a sort of de facto border for lorries

Speaker 2 entering Kent before they travel to the EU. Now,

Speaker 2 Mark, you're from, you know, you're a Kent cricket fan. Yes.

Speaker 2 You grew up in

Speaker 2 the sort of London part of Kent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I grew up in the disputed border town of Tunbridge Wells. And

Speaker 2 it's.

Speaker 2 How do you feel about our county becoming a...

Speaker 3 I'm all for it. I was brought up

Speaker 3 in Swanley in Kent, so it's sort of just outside the Londony bit of Kent.

Speaker 3 But yeah, I think that they should go further with this. I think that

Speaker 3 Swanley should actually become part of France. I think Margate and Ramsgate should both be called West Romania.

Speaker 3 And I think Sittingbourne should be placed within the disputed India-Pakistan border currently in the province of Kashmir.

Speaker 3 I think.

Speaker 3 I think there's something quite brilliant about the fact that most of Kent voted Brexit because they're sick of foreigners.

Speaker 3 And now the population of Kent is going to be 48 million, of which 47 million are Romanian truck drivers stuck on the ring road outside Mainstone. I think there's something brilliant about that.

Speaker 3 If Kent becomes a country, which it should do, we'll have a team at the Olympics.

Speaker 3 And we'll be marching right behind Kenya at the opening ceremony.

Speaker 3 And if there's anyone from my old school, that means Kenya will not win any middle distance medals because all the Kent ones will go up behind him and go, oh, deadleg my son!

Speaker 3 Get up, Kenyon.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 When you say 47 million

Speaker 2 Romanian lorry drivers, that's only a slight exaggeration.

Speaker 2 Michael Gove said there could be 7,000 lorries queuing in Kent. 7,000, that works out around about, I think, an 80-mile queue of lorries.

Speaker 2 He described this as a reasonable worst-case scenario, which by coincidence is my online dating profile.

Speaker 2 7,000. I mean, this is what taking back control was all about, wasn't it? Lorries.

Speaker 3 An 80-mile queue. So that goes right through London, then.
That'll go from Dover. That'll go right all through Kent, right up to London.

Speaker 3 But worth it, though, because we've got our passports back, haven't we? So I don't mind, I don't mind taking 47 years to get to France because I've got my passport back.

Speaker 3 Proper colour, what it never was in the first place. Same colour, what it never was, proper colour, nearly blue.

Speaker 3 Like what's what everything in Britain's nearly blue, nearly blue post boxes, buses, everything. What's our flag? Nearly blue, white, and blue.

Speaker 2 Back.

Speaker 4 I mean, even the Norman invasion had the sense to march through Kent quickly without causing trouble.

Speaker 3 When I did Hastings as part of the In Town series,

Speaker 3 everything there is 1066. There's a 1066 jazz club, a 1066 vets, everything.

Speaker 3 And then I came across a building company called William the Concrete.

Speaker 2 American presidential tax news now and well exciting revelations from the New York Times yesterday. They've published an extensive report into Donald Trump's tax affairs, an issue

Speaker 2 about which the usually forthright and gobshiteest Mr. Trump has been, well, demurely, almost coquettishly reticent over the years.

Speaker 2 He's the first president since the 70s not to publish his tax returns.

Speaker 2 And it turns out that, well, basically, he's been putting the racket into tax bracket, the OI into avoidance, and the shows total disregard for ordinary people and the overall well-being of America into the, he shows total disregard for ordinary people and the overall well-being of America.

Speaker 2 The investigation showed chronic losses in his businesses and years of tax avoidance, the extent where he paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and in 2017, and no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.

Speaker 2 I mean, you've got to admire the barefaced balls of it in a way, haven't you?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think the Americans will admire it. Like, this is a nation of carpetbaggers and religious zealots who are fleeing from the freedoms recently granted in England.

Speaker 4 These are people who are very committed to a cause, and at the moment, the cause is capitalism.

Speaker 4 If you can get away with doing terrible, terrible things financially, I think it'll be good for his poll numbers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, also, maybe the poor bastard has been skint the whole time. We should feel sorry for him.

Speaker 2 You know, struggling to put food on the table.

Speaker 3 He's down to his last tower.

Speaker 3 The trouble is now that all of these things, any, pretty much every day, he does something that 10 years you'd go, Well, that's the end of him then. Yes.
But now it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 He could sell his daughter to Putin for a dollar and Putin would go, yeah, sort of thing he does.

Speaker 3 He could just have sex with a badger on live during one of his rallies in Wisconsin. And most, you know, you'd go, is that what he's done now?

Speaker 4 I mean, people used to bemoan uh the hypocrisy of politicians who would pretend to be good people while secretly being bad people. And

Speaker 4 Trump's big selling point is his authenticity. And I,

Speaker 4 for one, long for the days of hypocrisy once more. Yes.

Speaker 2 Bring back hypocrisy.

Speaker 2 I've been following the

Speaker 2 betting odds for the American presidential election. And this story made absolutely f ⁇ all difference.

Speaker 2 As you say, it's hard to imagine anyone changing their mind on Donald Trump now.

Speaker 2 No, exactly.

Speaker 3 I trusted him before when he was putting babies in cages, but not.

Speaker 2 I mean, to change your mind on Trump now would be like being Rald Amundsen getting 200 yards from the South Pole before turning back and saying,

Speaker 2 weather today looks a bit off, lads. Let's can it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what are we doing?

Speaker 3 It's freezing.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 And then, well, two, three weeks ago, because you think I was slightly concerned that, you know, like an actor when they've just gone too mad halfway through a play and

Speaker 3 you think you've left yourself nowhere to go. How was he going to leave any space for a crescendo with the

Speaker 3 still five weeks? But he's managing it because then a couple of weeks ago he's done,

Speaker 3 see that one where he said we've got people

Speaker 3 that have spotted that Joe Biden is a dangerous man. He got on a plane with people wearing black.
The plane was full of people wearing black. That thing shaped.

Speaker 2 Is it a plane in Melbourne?

Speaker 3 Well, he wouldn't say because I was aware of that.

Speaker 4 That's a very funny joke if you know Melbourne.

Speaker 2 Oh, sorry. Oh, I'm sorry.
Alice, what?

Speaker 3 Oh, is it? But is it a fashion thing? Is it a thing? I don't get it. Is it?

Speaker 2 Yes, yeah. Very trendy people in Melbourne.

Speaker 2 Oh, right. I'm not with your sister.
You're making jokes about. Alice, you made a joke about what trendy people wear to me and Mark.
I mean, what?

Speaker 3 the other side of the world.

Speaker 3 If you made a joke about what trendy people wear in my road I wouldn't get it.

Speaker 3 But people in black and I did he that's just so mad there's a plane full of people. Has he watched men in black and got it confused? And now he'll say, Joe Biden's a dangerous man.

Speaker 3 He'll watch Godzilla. He treads on buildings.
I know people, fantastic people. He demolished Tokyo.
He just sat on all the buildings. And people will go, oh dear.

Speaker 2 I mean, there are possible ways of explaining why this

Speaker 2 supposed borderline billionaire has paid absolutely no tax other than the fact that he is a truly abominable human being who hates all humanity.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's possible that he found a legal loophole whereby he can be taxed on his spiritual wealth rather than his financial wealth, in which case 750 a year he's overpaid significantly

Speaker 2 there's also the issue of you know what what he's claimed as deductible expenses uh including aircraft and 70 000 for a hairstyling for his tv show now look i've done a little bit of telly very little bit of telly so i'm not going to judge him obviously the reason john got the hbo job instead of me uh was because he was happy to go with uh five hundred dollars an episode on the hairstyling budget and i wouldn't go under $1,000.

Speaker 2 So look, I'm not going to judge Trump for that. This is issue 4,167 of the Bugle.

Speaker 2 And by coincidence, that is also the number, as the old joke goes, of the total employees of the Trump organisation it takes to change a light bulb.

Speaker 2 One to change the light bulb and 4,166 to be listed as light bulb changing consultants. $1,400 per bulb change as a tax dodge.
The New York Times said that it had published these details.

Speaker 2 And I quote, because the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment allows the press to publish newsworthy information that was legally obtained by reporters even when those in power fight to keep it hidden.

Speaker 2 So that's the First Amendment. Trump clearly not a massive fan of the First Amendment and

Speaker 2 he plays a lot of golf, clearly firmly of the belief that the Mulligan's rule applies to amendments as it does apply to golf.

Speaker 2 That if you don't like the first one that comes out, you just move straight on to the second one and forget all about the first. And he loves that Second Amendment.

Speaker 3 Also, in golf, you mark your own card. It relies very much on trust, so you mark your own card, and it's you know, so that's the way the tax system works.
Perhaps he has borrowed it from golf.

Speaker 3 You just mark your own card. I earned nothing.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 4 Everyone, yeah, everyone in golf has to mark their own card because no one else can bring themselves to watch anyone else playing golf.

Speaker 2 It's such a fucking boring sport.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 the uh

Speaker 4 I run past a golf course occasionally and it's the only time in my life that I'm ever tempted to catcall just these old men hitting their golf balls around and I just want to be like, yeah,

Speaker 4 hit it. Put it in the hole, old man.

Speaker 4 I just think if a wife is encouraging her husband to play more golf, it's'cause she wants him to be as far away from her as possible.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's probably true.

Speaker 3 Well in Tiger Woods' case it was probably fair.

Speaker 2 The first presidential debate happens tomorrow as we record

Speaker 2 and well it's got could be quite exciting really Trump has recently smashed through the 20,000 lies in office mark according to the Washington Post's lie totalizer.

Speaker 2 He's gone through 20 he's broken the record set by William Henry Harrison who rattled out 19,004 lies in his 31-day presidency in 1841.

Speaker 2 Although 19,000 of them were him insisting that he felt absolutely fine and wasn't about to die.

Speaker 2 Three of him were saying I can juggle terrapins with my eyes shut and the last one was him claiming still to be alive.

Speaker 2 Other news now and

Speaker 2 Alice, this is very exciting news for you as someone who's always desperately wanting to go to the moon. But NASA has announced plans to have a woman on the moon by the year 2024.

Speaker 2 I mean personally I'm a bit as a man I'm a bit appalled by this because I mean is there nowhere left that men can call their own anymore.

Speaker 2 No safe sanctuaries for guys to just hang out the moon was basically the last male preserve

Speaker 3 I've settled a sea of tranquility having a nice afternoon. Now I've got her giving it all that.

Speaker 2 You know, just a place where men can be men. Because women are allowed to have women-only clothes shops, hospital wards, swimming pools, thrones, seating areas in places of religious worship.

Speaker 2 Men not even allowed a single moon as a safe.

Speaker 4 Poor men, all they get is male-only governments and silver rooms and

Speaker 2 green rooms.

Speaker 2 But also, let's not forget

Speaker 2 men invented the moon, Alice. As you can tell, because it is basically no use.
It's massively impractical and looks like a ball, I believe.

Speaker 4 They're planning it, yeah, they are planning on sending a woman to the moon, which I think is a nice move for gender equality and a terrible move for the equality of allocated resources to the problems of our own planet.

Speaker 4 I mean, what does it matter if there are hundreds of thousands of illiterate women living in poverty and dying by turns of preventable diseases and preventable husbands, if they can but turn their faces to the moon and think, well, some rich American woman had her period on that.

Speaker 4 I'm not denigrating the idea that representation in elite fields is an important and aspirational goal.

Speaker 4 I just think that people in general are less inspirable than they were in the 60s and we're in an age now where people will hate shit just because the people they don't like like it.

Speaker 4 And who wants to see the toxic pop culture discourse on the Ghostbuster reboot in space?

Speaker 3 Well, I think it's marvellous.

Speaker 3 I met a couple of astronauts.

Speaker 3 They're really pleasant, calm people. And then I thought, well, they probably

Speaker 3 would be, wouldn't they?

Speaker 3 You don't want an astronaut to go, oh, I've got a f ⁇ ing dog! I don't know if I've got the jitters, that'd be no good, would it be anything from rockets?

Speaker 3 Oh, jeez,

Speaker 3 oh! Oh, I get a

Speaker 3 shake like nothing on earth, but I've got anxiety, I've got panic attacks, but the slightest that'd be no good, would it? When you're re-entering the atmosphere, that's

Speaker 3 sounds terrifying. It's sweet, and when it as it comes back into the atmosphere, it swings from side to side, and it sounds like there's all explosions going around, and there's

Speaker 3 sounds terrifying. And it's um,

Speaker 3 uh, what was her name? Helen Sharman. Is that her name?

Speaker 3 Terrible, yes, woman astronaut, delightful.

Speaker 2 Yeah, first British

Speaker 2 female astronaut, yeah.

Speaker 3 And she just exuded sort of calm. She could go with the moon, she'd be brilliant up there, she'd do it.
Let's give it a go. They play cricket, let's give them a go.

Speaker 3 If some of them play five sets of tennis, let's kiss them up there.

Speaker 2 Can't be harder than that.

Speaker 4 I'm just jealous. I'm just jealous because I'm not an astronaut, really.

Speaker 3 Would you fancy it?

Speaker 4 Being an astronaut?

Speaker 3 Yeah, going to the moon.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I like a walk. I like walking.

Speaker 2 Well, it's always very important to get back to the moon, just to check that the 24 people who weren't there before were not mistaken in their collective summary at the end of the Apollo missions, which was there's fall here.

Speaker 2 There's been a very disappointing lack of aliens. The food is shit.
The golf course is in terrible, terrible condition.

Speaker 2 David Attenborough news now and Alice some exciting news about David Attema for those who don't know him well basically the UK's official national granddad

Speaker 2 and he's joined Instagrandpa

Speaker 2 basically enabling him to be a granddaddic presence in people's lives through the medium of whatever Instagram does.

Speaker 2 Best known of course David Attembra for his career making zebra snuff movies and hardcore insect porn, including some of the really kinky SM spider stuff.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 why has he joined Instagram now, Alice?

Speaker 4 Well, he's put out a few videos now.

Speaker 4 I mean, he has broken Jennifer, sorry, David Andrew has broken Jennifer Aniston's Instagram record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers,

Speaker 4 which is being reported as news. But, like,

Speaker 4 yes, obviously, he's clearly a much better and more interesting person to follow on instagram but he's come out and he said he wants to share information on this new medium he's come out and and and told some dirty stories with michael palin and uh he's doing some great stuff on instagram so far which mainly involves him being david attenborough and people thinking well if david attenborough is still alive it can't all be wrong yeah well i mean the government should be throwing all the money they've got at making sure david attenborough never dies and i think he has a he has a sacred duty not to pop his clog.

Speaker 2 Because I looked at some of his mostly the first few posts were him just pouting upwards at a camera held above his head, flatteringly lit, but

Speaker 2 no doubt he'll move on to more interesting.

Speaker 3 Oh, with a mirror, one of those ones.

Speaker 4 I just can't wait for him to start posting thirst traps.

Speaker 2 Oh, what?

Speaker 3 No, you've lost his skin there.

Speaker 3 I beg your pardon.

Speaker 4 A thirst trap, gentlemen, is a sort of a slightly coy but overtly sexy selfie, which is posted in order to induce thirst, aka arousal in your viewership.

Speaker 3 Oh, right. Oh, God, yeah.
No, I did all that and gave it up a couple of years ago.

Speaker 3 I've moved on to TikTok.

Speaker 2 No, you haven't.

Speaker 2 TikTok is an app that just reminds you of the inevitability of death.

Speaker 2 That brings the end of this week's Bugle. Alice, any shows to plug other than, of course, the wonderful last post, the Bugle's sister show from Another Dimension?

Speaker 4 Yes, I'm doing a show at the Opera House soon. I'd also like to plug looking at cows

Speaker 2 because they look

Speaker 4 and you look at them and you look at them and you go, Well, there shouldn't be any hard-hoofed ruminants on Australian soil.

Speaker 4 We don't have any native animals that have hard hooves, and you're breaking up the delicate topsoil and disrupting the ecosystem.

Speaker 4 And then the cow looks back at you and goes, Well, you're a fing settler here yourself.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 beautiful moment of being in touch with nature, you know?

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 3 Oh, bless them, yeah.

Speaker 2 Mark, when's your in-town series next on radio?

Speaker 3 Well, who knows? I've got the one in Stratford that the geese interrupted, and we could record one in Brighton, and now it doesn't look like we're going to be able to record the other ones.

Speaker 3 So, but there is a series that I can plug that will be broadcast in 2076,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 you know, so I really, really hope that people listen to that. Between now and then, I'll probably be driving Amazon vans.

Speaker 2 Good. Well, on that happy note, that's

Speaker 2 all there's left for me to say is to remind you, buglers, to take advantage of the new range of Bugle merch, which, as I speak, Chris is modelling

Speaker 2 very, very sexily for us.

Speaker 3 Very sexily it's your face, Andy.

Speaker 2 It's very hard to wear a badge with my face on without exuding a raw, almost animal eroticism.

Speaker 2 So, the new Bugle merch, t-shirts, caps, socks, badges, stickers, the Christmas jumper is available for pre-order. Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the merch button.

Speaker 2 There, you can also join our voluntary subscription scheme to help the bugle keep going and independent. Until next week Buglers, goodbye.