I should have known they’d get it all wrong. Oh, I’ve heard the woke socialists moaning and whining: “He doesn’t listen to people around him.” Listen? I listen. I’m the best listener who ever lived; my hearing is off the charts. But nobody listens to me! I never said I wanted a big beautiful bill, in the singularity tense. I said bills, in the plurality tense.

I wanted lots of big beautiful bills, bills to show my people, all the people, why they voted for me to be president for the next 10 years, at least. And it would have been easy — no wasting time in the Senate and House with all the speeches and votes and compromises — total waste of the good taxpayers’ hard-earned money ( and believe me, I know about hard-earned money. I’ve worked harder than all the slaves combined who took many many so many years to build the pyramids. I coulda gotten them built faster than lightning, quicker than quicksand.)

But no one listened. No one understood my vision for America. OK, I can’t blame them. It’s deep. It’s a deep vision, like if a well was my vision, that’s how deep it would be. Here are the bills I really wanted for our America the Beautiful:

— An Australian pelican, the bird with the largest bill in the universe. I was gonna put it in a huge cage on the south lawn, charge admission, and use the money to keep America great.

— A new, $100 bill, twice the normal size, with my face on both sides. They could have minted a million of them so fast no one in the world could believe it could be done so fast;

— A new red, white and blue cap with a huge bill in the front: MAKE some AMERICANS RICHER AGAIN!

— A spectacular eztrazaganza, biggest on the planet or, let’s face it, any planet, or even any star. The bill of celebrities woulda blown everyone’s socks and nylons off, people like Charlton Heston (if he’s still alive), Mike Tyson, Sylvester Stallone, Ted Nugent, Brett Favre, Kid Rock, Kanye West — basically anyone with talent and brains and big you-know whats. And the money we coulda charged! It woulda paid the national debt, or come very very close. Very close, closer than anyone’s ever come.

— And new bills for some Americans to pay. I know — no one likes hearing that, but stuff costs money, stuff like the imported pelican, the extra work at the mint to create my likeness, the hats — lots of other stuff, too, stuff that protects our great nation from hoodlums, thugs, socialists, lazy bums and many many more bad things. We all have to make sacrifices — you, your neighbors, people you don’t even know. And who knows? Maybe the president has to sacrifice something, too. We’re looking into it, we’ll see.

But here’s the bottom line: we can forget all those bills and focus on the one we got instead, by mistake: The Big Beautiful Bill that passed by a landslide — everybody loves my bill. It isn’t what I wanted, but it is perfect. It’s like a joke: even when I don’t get what I want, it turns out to be the best thing ever created. There’s money for bombs and weapons so America can be safe, money for Amazon to keep giving my people what they need, usually with free shipping, and we will finally stop wasting money on people who do nothing but pretend they know about job safety and the environment (hey, you want to know about the environment? Go outside and take a big deep breath) and we will stop helping people who won’t help themselves.

And I just had another brilliant idea (I sleep maybe four hours a night because the ideas keep dive bombing into my brain like what we did to the Iran-ists.) With all the money we’ll save by cutting whatever it is I’m cutting, we can still fly in the pelican from Australia and have a Big Beautiful Bill right here, forever, at the White House.

I mean, until the thing dies. But it should last until the middle of my third term, or longer.

Gene Stamell of Leverett wears a Red Sox cap with an average-sized bill. He can be reached at gstamell@gmail.com