WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sources within the White House are telling media outlets, that President Trump’s boastful comments belie the fact that his big red nuclear button is simply too large for hands of his size to push it. After making his threatening tweet, Trump reportedly went down to the Oval Office from the presidential toilet he’d just tweeted from, to check and see just how large the button is. To Trump, sources say, the button feels enormous, however, it poses the very real challenge of Trump’s diminutive hands being able to press it. Calls were quickly made to the White House Engineering Corps.
Dr. Susan Wickstrom of the White House Engineering Corps announced at a press conference this morning that her team was contacted directly by President Trump and ordered to begin work on downsizing the button.
“The simple fact as the Big Red Button was designed for men of average hand size,” Dr. Wickstrom told the media today, “and, well, anyone who looks at this president’s hands and fingers can tell his are much, much, much, much smaller than average.”
Dr. Wickstrom says her team estimated that the button would have to be reduced in size on a magnitude of approximately twenty-three times. That is to say the button needed to be made twenty-three times smaller than it was when President Barack Obama left office. Wickstrom said Trump mentioned his predecessor in his call to her.
“I’m tired of feeling inadequate every time I go to use something he had put in,” Trump said, “and I want my hands to feel bigly yooge when I launch a strike on North Korea or any of my enemies, like Chicago or California.”
The costs for redesigning the button into a smaller form factor are minimal, Wickstrom says. It doesn’t take much more raw material to produce a Trump-sized button than it does to produce a small coat button, she explained. The real difficulty, Dr. Wickstrom explained, is in routing the button’s signal path around the White House computer network and into an old Apple IIe computer in a basement somewhere in the Pentagon.
“When Trump won the election last year,” Wickstrom explained, “the Joint Chiefs all agreed his big red button should be special, different. So instead of actually launching a missile strike, it fires up that Apple IIe whenever he presses the button and starts up the old turtle application where you could enter basic commands and it’d draw shapes for you. Seemed more the president’s speed, if we’re being honest here, which we’re not because this is a fake news story, but there I go breaking the fourth wall again.”
Her team estimates that the newly shrunken button will be ready for installation just before Trump returns from his golfing vacation, Wickstrom told reporters. She says that it was “actually quite fortuitous” that Trump won’t be in the White House for a little over a week more.
“This way my team can focus on the button,” Wickstrom said, “and not defending their genitals from unwanted grabbing. It’s a real win-win.”
The White House did not issue a comment on this story.
Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.
