Last night, the Washington Post published a piece delightfully titled “Did a 9-year-old called ‘Pickle’ really write that letter to Trump? Yep, he’s real.”
The article runs down Pickle’s introduction to the American people on Wednesday—you’ll recall that’s when Sarah Huckabee Sanders read aloud from a letter Pickle wrote to Donald Trump. We called Pickle “nonexistent,” because the reality of a child named Dylan, who goes by Pickle, seems subservient to “Pickle’s” function as a political prop.
The Washington Post, however, went all the damn way and talked to Pickle’s mom.
SueAnn does not consider herself to be very political. She was a little taken aback by her son’s sudden love for Trump. (“I know you love him,” she whispered to the interrupting Pickle.)
But she is always behind her children “100 percent,” so when Pickle asked for “a Donald Trump suit” for his birthday, she bought him one, and when he asked for “a Donald Trump cake,” she made him one herself, because she couldn’t find a bakery willing and able to do it.
“Do you think Donald Trump will live to be 100?” he asked her one day. She told him she didn’t know, and asked why he was asking. “Because then he can watch me be president,” Pickle told her. He’d been talking about writing the letter for at least a month before he got up the nerve to compose and send it.
Why would you do this! It’s not like the Washington Post are the ones that put Pickle in the spotlight, to be fair. They have simply taken Pickle-mania to its logical extreme. Pickle is a symbol—a symbol that, it must be said, really fucking loves Donald Trump and his suits.
“He’s real. He’s not fake,” Pickle’s mom affirms at the end of the WaPo piece. Now we can all rest easy that the White House did not invent a 9-year-old to use as a propaganda tool. They used a real one.