When Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich won a Pulitzer in 2012, I commented on the eclecticism of the columns that she entered. For instance, “There’s a poem written as a tribute to Richie Daley when he left office. (She writes two or three poems a year. She’s got a knack.)”

 “People responded,” Schmich says. So she wrote some more Trump verses on Facebook. “One day I thought, ‘I’m doing a thing here,’” she says. Another day she had a column due so she skimmed some of her Trumpies off Facebook, wrote a few more, and she filled the column. Basically, whatever she wrote in Trump’s voice was something Trump had said himself, and her slight alchemy was to turn this into mockery.

 Mocked me out in Hollywood
 (Never thought that she was good)
 Just another lying actor
 (Too bad Putin hasn’t hacked her).
 Lib’rls thought her speech was spunky
 Really? She’s a Hill’ry flunky!
 All those losers! Sort ones too!
 Can’t stop crying boo hoo hoo.

 Don’t you love my morning tweets?
 Very great my verbal feats! 
 Please discuss them please please please!
 And ignore my nominees.

Still, as she swears her ambitions mount, and a recent, trickier Facebook post finds Trump not just sounding like himself but actually thinking about what he sounds like:

 Old John Lewis is a hero
 My self-sacrifice is zero
 Lewis marched with Dr. King
 Helped us all hear freedom ring.

 Took the blows for civil rights
 Wore the blood of freedom’s fights
 Kept on marching through the years
 In the face of taunts and fears.

 So he says I’m not legit?
 I will rise above my snit
 Demonstrate what is essential—
 Show that I am presidential.

 Did I say he’s talk not action?
 Did I spark a bad reaction?
 Did I say his district’s awful?
 Horrid, poor and so unlawful?

 Yes, I did and I regret it
 Please forgive if not forget it
 Let him help me look ahead—
 This is what I should have said.

Or verse. Or simply doggerel—which might’ve been the judges’ view as well as the columnist’s. Maybe some thought it didn’t belong in a newspaper. But the boundaries of the business have stretched since then and naysayers should think twice. Schmich is writing exquisite commentary.