Show caption Illustration by David Foldvari. Opinion How Donald Trump let loose the dog of war Stewart Lee Breeding opportunities now available with the hound that helped take down the Isis leader Sun 3 Nov 2019 10.00 GMT Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email 10 months old

Last week, Donald Trump falsely attributed admirable human qualities to a dog. Many Trump supporters have done the same to the president. The hero dog, Trump explained on Monday, had played an important part in the operation that saw the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “die like a dog”, the president managing to both praise dogs and use them as a metaphor for cowardice, in the same speech.

An American journalist friend has told me, confidentially, that the heroic Belgian malinois has been put out to stud, touring puppy farms in the key Republican-voting states of Trump’s supporter base. Patriot puppy farmers can breed their bitches with the canine assassin, who is priced at $10,000 per penetration or $300,000 for a day’s companionship in a private kennel. Extra canoodling time increases the chances of impregnation incrementally, with profits given to Trump’s legal defence fund. You couldn’t make it up!

Supportive breeders will be able to charge proud puppy purchasers top rates to own a dog spawned from the semen of the very hound that left Baghdadi, in the words of the president’s official press conference statement last Monday, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way”, an emotional state the virile sex-animal is also expected to induce in satiated bitches.

I should have seen this unbelievable state of affairs – the post-rationalised monetisation of a military operation – coming. The American novelist Jarett Kobek, who wrote to me years ago asking if he could quote a bit of my standup in a book, is now a regular correspondent. While Kobek’s 2017 opus The Future Won’t Be Long shows he could have spent his life writing the kind of classic New York novel critics love, 2016’s superb content-form fusion I Hate the Internet and this year’s ecstatically disorienting Only Americans Burn in Hell explode ideas of literary taste and style to slice open his homeland’s poisoned abdomen. But real life seems to have a habit of providing Kobek with experiences that confirm his paranoia.

On 1 September, Kobek emailed me from New York to say: “I had the strangest experience of my life the other night. I was at the Comedy Store and watched the guy who shot Osama bin Laden do his tight five about shooting Osama bin Laden.” I assumed Kobek, who has written extensively on jihadist terrorism, was using me as an unwitting pawn in some satirical experiment understood only by him, but he confirmed the experience.

“He [Robert J O’Neill] came out years ago, against Navy Seal protocol or whatever, to take credit, and has sort of gone through the entire gamut of celebrity, but I assure you none of that was as weird or as surprising as seeing him come up and do his material, which absolutely 100% killed.” Kobek, you will not be surprised to learn, is, like me, a virtue-signalling snowflake.

Perhaps the first-born spawn of the soldier-hound could be offered to dog-loving 10 Downing Street

Three weeks later, the same story drifted across my digital consciousness. The internet, now a sort of digital camera obscura, showed me a clip where, as a prank, the American comedian David Spade had secured Bin Laden’s assassin a slot at the Comedy Store. He and another American comedian, Whitney Cummings, fed the likable former Seal lines through an earpiece (like Frankie Boyle and Russell Howard, O’Neill used writers), and secretly filmed the show. This was the very same performance Kobek had attended.

O’Neill tells the crowd he shot Bin Laden because he was “tired of taking my shoes off at the fucking airport”. In his military service, O’Neill continues, he got “two silver stars, four bronze stars of valour and a ton of pussy”. While trading on a certain amount of jingoism, the act also works, perhaps unintentionally, as a parody of normal comedy. How, for example, would the SAS man who shot three IRA members in Gibraltar describe his experiences, were he obliged to do so on Live at the Apollo in the style of Chris Ramsey?

In closing, O’Neill’s puppeteers allow him the blackly comic observation: “My favourite thing about killing Osama bin Laden is that it finally ended all the wars in the Middle East.” One wonders if, as O’Neill exits past a bewildered looking Kobek sporting a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, he is at all traumatised by his past and whether his assassination-induced celebrity acts as any kind of balm? Perhaps Spade and Cummings intended to explore this idea. I don’t know. I didn’t feel culturally equipped to decode whatever was going on and no criticism of the piece is intended.

Meanwhile, in a White House press conference on the subject of the hero dog, defence secretary, Mark Esper, who will tour the animal sex farms with the national canine gigolo, said the assassin hound could be guaranteed to “perform a tremendous service”. And in the unlikely event that America’s sex-dog is unable to rise to the occasion, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has confirmed that he will personally hand-milk the malfunctioning malinois into whatever receptacle the customers provide and that he will get the job done however long it takes. God bless America!! We are through the looking glass here, people!!!

Perhaps the first-born spawn of the soldier-hound could be offered to dog-loving 10 Downing Street, to live alongside Dilyn dog, as a sweetener to stop Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-Frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Johnson making too much fuss about that unfortunate incident in Northamptonshire. After all, as President Trump said: “Driving on the wrong side of the road happens.”