Cruz v. Trump: An Imagined Cage Match

On Friday, presidential contender Ted Cruz challenged his opponent, the pillow at the bottom of your linen closet Donald Trump, to a cage match via Twitter.

“The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match,” he wrote.

I can picture it now: two doughy men, forced to dress in athletic wear for freedom of movement, stand at opposite sides of an oily ring. Trump, self-conscious because his legs and arms are a markedly different color from his face and hands, fidgets in the corner, as Ivanka and Melania rub his shoulders. He brushes them off; he doesn’t need nurturing now. What he needs is to bash a face.

Cruz, in extremely large swimming trunks and an XXL t-shirt with a fake tuxedo on the front, waves at the crowd, points at no one in particular, and sends them a wink. Heidi Cruz brings the girls to give their dad a good luck kiss. “Get ‘em out of here,” Cruz growls. “They shouldn’t see this.”

Cruz and Trump make their way to the center of the ring. Trump raises an arm to wave to the crowd, then remembers his armpit and armpit hair are both a corpse-like grey, and quickly yanks his hand down by his side. Cruz shoots some fake bullets around the arena and chuckles to himself. And the bell rings—DING DING DING! The fight has begun.

The two contenders side-step around in a circle for a full 10 minutes, their hands in a limp fighting stance. The crowd grows listless; a man puts on a clown nose and begins to do a show in the hallway for the children. In a desperate effort to regain attention, Trump unleashes a torrent of racial epithets. The crowd boos.

Suddenly, Cruz bellows, “BLESSED BE THE LORD WHO TRAINS MY HANDS FOR WAR! MY FINGERS FOR BATTLE!” and rushes at Trump and hard-slaps him in the chin. Trump, stunned, looks around the arena to see who might have seen what just happened. Everyone saw.

Cruz follows up his successful attack with a firm poke in the belly, which causes Trump to start to shake. As he shakes, Trump’s face grows redder and redder, his golden hair quivers, faster and faster, until they reach a frequency that causes all the glass in the fight hall to shatter.

Cruz presumes himself the winner, and begins to do a slow victory stride around the ring, his eyebrows receding lower and lower down his face, neck, and chest, until they settle around his belly button. When! All of a sudden, Trump explodes, turning into one billion fire ants that skitter towards and up Cruz, biting him on the ankles and knees. Soon, his legs are so swollen that he topples over, allowing the ants to finish the job.

The Texas senator, now reduced to a human-sized bologna link, is rushed to Sibley hospital, where he is promptly de-swollen and pronounced dead. Trump’s ghost tweets Cruz’s obituary along with the message, “Huge win for me, but I’m not surprised. The crowd loved the fight. Thank you to @People Magazine for accurate reporting.”