GOOOOOD MOOOOORNING, VALE OF TEARS!

Things are going great, aren’t they? All those problems we were having, the problems that were so bad, so intolerably painful, so fucking urgent we just HAD to turn to Insane Clown Fascism because there was no time to lose waiting for actual policy to work, those problems are all gone now, right? Inflation, crumbling infrastructure, cost of living, wages and the jobs that hate them, Gaza, Ukraine, broken immigration system, broking electoral system, broken media, broken real estate market, broken educational system, broken healthcare system, inflation again, AI creep, homelessness, mass shootings, the Epstein files, gas prices, ancient and crumbling husk of a President, and also inflation?

All fixed, right?

No? Absolutely all of that is way, way worse and no one is even working on any of it, nor will they ever? It’s just been nine months of arresting and torturing random people, yelling fucking cartoon nonsense at microphones, cancelling things that are so basic and fundamental ten years ago hardly anyone realized you could get rid of them, like vaccines and rights, various incredibly famous people clearly and obviously stealing huge sacks of money and data then tip-toeing off with a dramatic shhhh like old-timey bandits, and people wandering through it all in a daze while the media just COMFORTABLY FUCKING RETIRES FROM BEING A THING I GUESS?

Oh, man, that’s so fucking crazy, because I was repeatedly told, by people of all socio-political-economic persuasions, that these issues were so disastrous and so pressing we simply could not elect anyone but…the guy whose only plan for anything is to lower his own taxes, then murder an immigrant.

And I feel like…oh, gosh, it’s just so hard to remember, but I feel like the idea that the President was dummy old, couldn’t speak right, and might secretly be dying was a huge deal a year ago. And also a few months ago. And also Jake Tapper is still yelling at random passers-by about it—because not so very long ago, the age and health of the President of the United States was so cosmically fucking important a household-name national newscaster kicked his own entire career down a well about it, well after that guy wasn’t even President anymore.

Oh well, at least you guys over there festering on the right got your super duper massively important issues addressed by Big Daddy, right? You got Disney to only make exclusively and only Big Strong White Boy Uber Alles media, trans kids banned from JV softball in all 50 states, all women executively ordered to stop excelling and do a pregnant with the nearest 8chan shitposter, and the Epstein files released for all to see, right?

Oh, none of those, either, really?

SO WEIRD.

It’s almost like this whole Ten Years at Donnie’s ride through the fucking Wonka Tunnel of Nightmares wasn’t about anything real whatsoever, apart from securing the freedom to act like a total dick to everyone at all times, which we already had. At least nothing philosophical, ethical, moral, or even particularly political.

Now don’t get me wrong, Project 2025 is a thing and it has been for a lot longer than it’s had a name. Progress has been made on the “what happens if we just take everyone’s rights away?” front. Shit has been going down, and it is terrible, reeking, authoritarian, bugfuck bonkers shit.

Look, if I said today the administration announced it’s banning all vaccines because vaccines are gay wokeism, you wouldn’t immediately dismiss that at all. You might not even fact-check me. And there’s a whole strain of conspiracy theory that definitely does insist vaccines make you gay and trans, and since the country is by and large being run according to the contents of early internet chain emails and misspelled grandpa memes, that’s not even a particularly wild possibility. Certainly not for RFK (the F stands for fucking brain worms!) who looks and behaves like a mini-Thanos just super excited to snap them kids.

But most of it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump himself. You know he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of that (other than mild interest in the murder parts) He clearly cares most about the monumental task of spray-painting every available surface with Home Depot brand metallic “gold.”

And he’s, you know, pretty obviously dying.

Or at least having some kind of allergic reaction to existence. Seriously, this guy is stumbling around puffed up like a demonic shar-pei that ate several thousand bees and his entire government keeps growling shut the fuck up he’s fine and anyway the bees were Democrats we’ve already begun construction on Bee Buchenwald and yes we are officially calling it that you’re a Democrat bee aren’t you, admit it, admit it! at anyone who so much as peruses the Get Well card section at CVS too long, except for J.D. Vance doing the chicken dance on camera and yelling I’m feeling fantastic, thanks! every time he does the stupid wing-flap.

Truly, you have done a spectacular job at life if the entire world starts putting champagne on ice and warming up the fireworks because you didn’t post on social media for a few days.

But something bothers me about how this is all going down—other than the 3-5 obvious things.

Is Trump actually at death’s door? Probably? Maybe? He looks like Violet Beauregard stuffed into a half-inflated rubber mask of James Austin Johnson, but evil just loves not dying when it should. Presidents have access to whatever Roswell-derived super serum medicine any lab could dream up, so he could go on for years as a vaguely human-shaped Franzia hooch-bag full of steroids, statins, stem cells, and probably adrenochrome, given the absolute state of GOP projection, that wobbles alarmingly whenever lightly grazed. (SCOTUS would decide that said wobbles constitute legally-binding Executive Orders, 6-3.)

Maybe that’s just what an old overfed vampire looks like past a certain point.

What bothers me is that if the last newsweek had happened in 2019, we’d know.

The first Trump administration was a constantly-rotating zoo display of monsters, to be sure. But they were, by and large, known monsters, who’d monstered their way through previous administrations monstrously, and rolled up their sleeves to kick it up a lil’ notch. They were creatures, but creatures of a long-standing system, invested in that system, with half an eye on where they’d stand in that system in the After Times. I mean, yeah, it’d be totally awesome if they could bring the whole thing down and crown themselves Kings of Eternity, but every step down from that goal was also a win, so they focused on partying while the party was hot.

Which is why they all leaked like fucking colanders.

They wrote tell-all books, they placed blind items, they whispered national secrets to anyone who even faintly smelled of social media clout. And as soon as they were fired, which was all the fucking time, they couldn’t repress their giggles about what an idiotic asshole Large Marge truly was for a second before running to blab it all to the first camera they could find. To the point that regular human people, neither part of the media nor the government, knew about a lot of things before they happened, things it’s literally insane for everyday citizens to know about, like January 6th.

Back a century or two ago when Trump was shot, I dismissed the various conspiracy theories about it being staged because I couldn’t believe a scheme that big wouldn’t instantly spew leaks like a football field full of sprinklers. None of them could keep a secret, surely we’d hear whispers the way we always did about everything.

But we didn’t. So it must have been real.

Oh and by the way, it’s sheerly astonishing how we’ve just helplessly accepted this empty-tabled no-chairs potluck of dork-ass potato-water-blooded failsons corralling us into a corner where we cannot even allow ourselves to consider any idea that remotely resembles a conspiracy theory, even when CONSPIRACIES SO MELODRAMATICALLY BLATANT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN IS OPENLY GIGGLING ABOUT DOING BIG CRIMES ON LIVE TV WHILST HIGH AS A CUMULUS CLOUD IN THE OVAL OFFICE are happening right in front of us, with only the most half-hearted attempts to hide them behind THE OCCASIONAL FUCKING HALF-DEAD POTTED PLANT. The President of the United States has repeatedly said Elon Musk secured the election for him with those gosh-dang computers he’s so good at and we just sigh and tell ourselves we can’t think about it or we’re just like them. Trump constantly panics, incredibly loudly, about the Epstein Files and hysterically screeches for people to forget they exist at least once a week, but we’ve voluntarily forbidden ourselves to even entertain the thought that, since he must know his base can’t stop slobbering all over him for longer than five seconds about anything, and everyone already knows he likes young girls, maybe there’s more to this than him being one of many customers. So now we just live like this, refusing to consider that several conspiracies might be underway from the exact kind of people who love doing conspiracies, and have done them before, over and over again, is a required demonstration of not being a fascist. So much so that I’ve almost deleted this paragraph three times because I don’t want to sound like those loose pinballs, either. FANTASTIC WORK ALL AROUND.

Anyway, the point is, that was my first tiny little alarm-bell ringing in the back of my head. It’s not 2019 anymore. It’s the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and this administration isn’t like the last one. Nobody’s been fired yet. I doubt they’re going to be. The people working for Trump Two: Apocalyptic Boogaloo mostly don’t have any real interest in government at all, unless you thought Linda McMahon just really passionately cared about education. For the most part, they don’t come from previous administrations. They’re not keeping their eye on a future in which the system goes on. They’re unearthly-rich tech oligarchs who are betting on AI removing the need for the masses entirely and parentless nineteen year olds named Big Balls and 80s celebrities trying out wildly off-label uses and a festive assortment of nepobabies and just Stephen Miller again because I guess he’s the squirrel-flaying little boy whose Christmas wish created this timeline in the first place or fucking something.

They don’t leak. Because they’re in this for themselves, not America or the GOP or even Trump specifically, except as the car the clowns came in. They’re all on their own individual grift and/or crusade for whatever (evil) cause they (evilly) dreamed about one time at (evil) band camp and felt a new tingly sensation suffusing their souls, which was all the evil.

Last time around, Trump was an unexpected limo appearing out of nowhere to pick up the hitch hikers of the old Republican party and get them to the church on time just when they thought they might have to change. The limo was rented, payments past-due, the muffler was barely holding on, and the floor was covered old stains everyone knew not to ask about, but no one really knew that yet, so they called it the best and most beautiful car ever and off they went.

This time, Trump is a crumbling meth-camper up on cinderblocks with a racial slur spray-painted on the side that will never move again but keeps pumping out product that keeps the addicts coming back: power, pain, and profit.

And I’ve started to wonder if the new Rogues’ Gallery knew it the whole time. That this was less an election than the handshake on a deal.

Because what’s happened here is REALLY odd. Trump is a storebrand freezer bag full of id-ichor, but he is actually the President of the United States, and the White House let rumors that he was fucking dead light up the planet for days before posting a hilariously hamfisted, half-assed, zero effort proof of life photo that made him look, somehow, more dead despite technically standing upright.

If you or I didn’t post on social media for a few days, and people started seriously speculating that we’d DIED, most of us would immediately log on and say we were fine, stop being weird. And the Trump we all know and hate would absolutely respond to any kind of rumor that he was anything less than the star of the new Superman franchise with a full-court media-barf of swaggering, pustulant Garbage Pail Kid villain-monologuing.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened, really. Other than things that made it worse, like clips of Trump whimpering about going to heaven and Vance volunteering that he was hyped to do Trump’s job, which, not for nothing, but Pence would never. Why, he’d rather actually have sex with his wife! And if by some chance his room-temperature water got spiked, there would’ve been severe consequences once Pizza the Hut heard about it.

But there weren’t.

It might’ve only been a few days, but that’s SUCH a long time for the Trump administration to let us laugh and rejoice at the prospect of his death. We all know they don’t care about the national security problems with that, but the psychological problems should’ve sparked some kind of response other than “nothing to see, it’s whatever” then “meh, here’s a shitty picture,” if Trump being active, in charge, or alive at all mattered to any of the people he brung to the ball.

The passivity of their side of it is genuinely remarkable. And I don’t think it’s about a distraction from Epstein or anything else, because Trump would never agree to look this weak, no matter how advantageous it might be. He hasn’t even done anything to punish us for openly cheering for his death for days on end. Anything he wasn’t already doing, anyway.

Then again, remarkable passivity seems to be a catching sickness. It would seem to be the motto of the era. It’s almost impossible to believe this quiet, unconcerned media is the same one that utterly detonated over Biden’s debate and continue to throw out wild theories about him even now. But the media is just…fine now. Fine with all of it. With their jobs being boiled down to copy-pasting social media posts for however long it takes for their bosses to figure out how to use ChatGPT and the President zombie-walking across the White House roof looking like RFK’s dead, decapitated whale isn’t even interesting enough to investigate.

If Biden, at any point, looked anything close to what Trump looks right now today, the uproar would blow out your fucking eardrums.

Instead, it’s already out of the news cycle.

Something isn’t right here, but not the way it hasn’t been right for a long time. Either he really is Reaper-adjacent or there’s some other reason he is or will be neutered enough that his own government (and their cute little three-legged rescue media) is acting like whether he lives or dies is none of our business, and barely theirs.

Look, I doubt he’s gone any time soon. I’m sure they’ll pump him full of orphan’s tears or whatever as long as possible. But it’s either bad enough that no one’s talking, or it doesn’t matter enough for anyone to feel like they have to talk.

That deal I was talking about? NOT TO SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT I wonder if, beyond the ego-wound of losing the last election, this entire downfall of America was a handshake between an already-dying old man who needed to keep his secrets secret, and a dozen different (evil) agendas crammed into an Amazon.com trenchcoat, who all knew that as long as the meth-camper crashed directly into the White House, it didn’t matter whether the driver lived. They weren’t going camping anyway. They never considered any of those problems up top, or any problems at all. They just wanted to get together with their internet buddies and steal everything, hurt some people, and have a go at forcing a future even they don’t want, but fancy they’d enjoy watching from afar.

And you know, much like those gay woke vaccines , now that I type it out, that doesn’t even seem like much of a leap.

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