Colm O'Regan: Your J1 could get you a job with Trump

Colm O'Regan: "Remember when Robert F Kennedy was our big worry, the guy with brain worms who once left a bear cub carcass in Central Park and will probably lead a retreat from life-saving vaccines?"Picture: Chani Anderson.

Parents be warned! If your children are headed on a J1, make sure they are aware of the risks from the Trump administration. Not from being stopped at immigration. But from being hired. By the looks of things, they’ll hire anyone.

In his first term, the people he hired, they were kind of common Bad Guys. You know, industry magnets, oil barons, defensive hawks. The kind of villains in a Disney movie who want to shut down the kids’ playground and build condos on it.

Or maybe the person in Murder, She Wrote who turned out to be the murderer. You know how each episode goes: the first person accused of the murder isn’t the murderer. He’s the Mexican gardener and a convenient patsy. But it turns out it was the wealthy son-in-law who wanted to get his hands on his beloved aunt’s condo, it’s always condos with these people.

Yes of course they were people who wanted to bomb countries that are poorer and cut taxes for the rich. But they were largely competent. But this shower… They’re not Murder She Wrote villain material. They’re a character from the Big Lebowski meets Fargo meets Duck Soup.

Remember when Robert F Kennedy was our big worry, the guy with brain worms who once left a bear cub carcass in Central Park and will probably lead a retreat from life-saving vaccines?

He’s barely making it into the top three these days. The new head of the FBI Kash Patel used to peddle vitamin pills to “reverse the vaccine”.

The Defense Minister’s only qualification is as a Fox News anchor who describes missile strikes with emojis. There’s the economic advisor who may be crashing the economy with tariffs because he thinks America was better in 1906 and the economic expert he cited in his books to support tarriffs is invented and an anagram of his own name — Ron Vara (Navarro).

The tariffs were worked out using a formula that makes Boris Johnson’s infamous Covid Alert equation look like E equals MC squared. And they may have put tariffs on penguin-only islands because they worked off lists of internet domains rather than actual countries with people in them. This led some to suspect they used ChatGPT to do it.

If you’re struggling to understand the rationale, imagine if you said you were going to force your dentist to raise their price because you had a trade deficit with them. And then when it was too expensive to go, you told everyone not to worry because their teeth will grow back. 

The only way to get Trump to change his mind is to whisper to him that in crashing the global economy, he’ll do more to fight climate change than Biden ever did.

And of course there’s the infamous Signal group debacle that has everyone paranoid about checking their own neighbourhood Whatsapp group to see has someone accidentally sent an invite to the local car-breaker.

In fact the only continuity from Biden is supplying bombs to kill civilians in Gaza. But all of the people responsible for this will eventually be fired.

Trump hates losers more than anything. When his policies fail, he’ll fire whoever is standing closest to it. Elon was moved on after spending $20m to make Wisconsin-ians hate him even more.

So Trump will need half a new cabinet. The J1 visa is infamous for enabling Irish 21-year-olds to shortcut the American dream and get great jobs. Seriously, a friend of a friend came back from a J1 having got a job managing an airfield. His qualification? Being a cousin of someone.

So if you don’t want your child being named Special Envoy to North Korea because of their spicy tweeting on the libs, act now. Know the signs.