In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, miserly money lender Ebeneezer Scrooge is confronted with his two symbolic “children,” Ignorance and Want, two fearful urchins representing society’s worst, most self-destructive traits. An ocean away and 173 years later, America is currently dealing with its own modern-day Scrooge in the form of billionaire and unlikely GOP front-runner Donald Trump. And it is now time for Trump to meet his own fictional, symbolic child, the product of every racist and xenophobic statement he has made along the campaign trail. That child is Ayesha Ali Trump.
Created by actress and satirist Fawzia Mirza, the blond-wigged Ayesha is an aspiring Uber driver and off-the-books caterer (“I don’t pay taxes!”) with a story she desperately wants the American people to hear. While Trump has been riling up the electorate with hateful, fear-mongering Islamophobic rhetoric, he’s been covering up the fact that, back in the ’80s, he fathered an illegitimate daughter with a Muslim flight attendant he met before marrying Ivanka. A new mock documentary short captures this evasive but passionate young woman at a pivotal moment in her life. Emboldened by her illegitimate father’s recent political triumphs, Ayesha decides to brave the “tundra-like conditions” of Chicago in January and make a speech of her own, standing in the shadow of the Trump International Hotel and Tower for maximum effect. As the speech demonstrates, Ayesha has certainly inherited her father’s talent for loud, attention-grabbing spectacle, as well as his aversion to facts.
Crucially, Mirza does not make Ayesha into a heroine. The fictional young woman is depicted as self-serving, shallow, and easily distracted. Just like her dear old dad. The press is taken to task here, too, in the form of Sammy Swizzle, a journalist and “sensationalist” who thinks he might be onto something with this story. By all indications, Ayesha is an attention-seeking flake with no hard evidence to back up her outrageous claims. But she makes for good television, so Swizzle has no problem pointing a camera in her direction and giving her a bully pulpit.