Nearing the End of the Whole Mess: A Trump Pre-Mortem

Well, America finally did what was goddamn necessary and flipped Congress. We, collectively, as a world, are now officially “over the hump,” as they say. More specifically, we’re over the Trump hump. We are home stretch on this decade-long nightmare. Make no mistake—I’m not the type of pessimist who thinks that Trump is going to be able to wrangle his way past the constitution to establish himself for a third presidential term, but even if you are that pessimist, understand that while he might be able to bypass the laws of the land he will never be able to slip past human biology.

In short, pardon my crassness, this fat asshole is going to fucking die soon. No matter what else. No, Elon Musk can’t build his stupid god machine fast enough to upload the frayed scraps of what’s left of Trump’s sundowning brain to the cloud. The man is on his way out, soon—of the government, and of this plane of reality, and let’s hope there’s no God so that we don’t bump into him in Hell.

 As we prepare to enter the lamest phase of Trump’s lame duck period, let’s sit down and do a little pre-post-something-or-other-mortem of this whole sorry historical episode, shall we?

 Natalie Wynn got in a spot of trouble recently for doing a Bad Tweet. Wynn (am I supposed to call her “Contrapoints?” I don’t know, it feels a bit like calling Rick Deckard “Bladerunner”) said that she wakes up every day with a “euphoric sense of relief” that Trump’s second term isn’t as bad as it could have been.

And yeah, I do think that the invocation of “euphoria” does make this a bad tweet even though the prime reason that people are Big Mad about it is because they’re missing her actual point, which isn’t wrong—Trump certainly started out trying to smash evil records set by last century’s most notorious European dictators, but one can’t deny that his capability to actually pull anything off has, over time, become smothered to death by overwhelming incompetence. Like, seriously staggering ineptitude.

 I want to be clear that I don’t use the word “staggering” often because it’s such a great word that elicits such vivid and specific imagery that the last thing I would want would be to dilute its power through overuse. When I say that Trump is staggeringly incompetent, I mean that I want you to imagine walking across a room; maybe you’re going to the bathroom or getting up to check on half a leftover burrito you put in the microwave for a midafternoon snack, but then suddenly it strikes you just how phenomenally hogfuck stupid the president is and the weight of that thought smacks you so hard that your knees give out for a second and you stumble into a wall and hopefully you’re alone so that nobody witnessed it.

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Stupid and incompetent don’t imply inconsequential, of course, and there are ways in which Trump’s incompetence may have resulted in worse evil than even what he intended. The obvious example here is his ruinous war in Iran.

 A sobering fact rarely stated outright is that we are never, ever going back to the situation that existed in the Strait of Hormuz before this war. Iran has been a massive geopolitical thorn in America’s side for almost a century, and that wasn’t even Iran’s fault to begin with. Iran’s thorn was just kind of hanging there bothering nobody until 1953 when America suddenly screamed “Leeroy Jenkins!!!” and launched itself side-first into it. What followed was several decades of understanding that there was no way to further fuck with Iran that wouldn’t spin around and turbofuck the rest of the world as a result, and maybe you should have just let them keep their democracy in the first place, but after botching that up, it was understood that America needed to put kid gloves on its kid gloves.

 Closing Hormuz was the nuclear option that Iran really had no choice but to use it and it should be relatively clear why they can never fully reopen it again if you think about it for a bit—the entire reason this maneuver is scary is because it’s permanent. And I don’t know, I’m not a geopolitics major and I could be completely wrong about this, but I do suspect that this is just how things are now, or certainly for the rest of this presidency.

So yes, the war, the blown up schoolchildren, the dead protesters, the deportations of legal residents to foreign gulags, USAID, Cuba—there’s a lot that Natalie deserves a bit of roasting over when it comes to words like “euphoria,” but where she’ not wrong is that, well you can’t deny his heart just isn’t in it.

 Trump’s number one most important goal on this planet by orders or magnitude has been to be remembered historically and, through sheer single-minded resolve, he’s made this a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a way, he won. Not in precisely the way he wanted, but like it or not, Donald Trump is going to go down as one of the most important political figures and certainly one of the most important presidents in American history. I’m talking top-three important. I mean it’s going to be like Washington, Lincoln, and this bozo.

Why? Because nothing is ever, ever, ever going to go back to the way that it once was. Politicians on either side of politics always maintained a culture of civility and playing by the rules, not because they had to or even wanted to, but because abandoning that was another nuclear option, like closing the Hormuz Strait—frightening specifically because it’s permanent.

 There’s a famously chilling quote attributed to Andrew Jackson in 1832 that, like many of your favorite historical quotes, is apocryphal and was probably never said by Jackson at all, but JD Vance loves it: In response to a Supreme Court ruling that he didn’t like, Jackson (allegedly) said: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

 Basically a fancy old-time way of saying “So what are you going to do about it? President Honeybadger does what he wants.” The Supreme Court can’t physically restrain anyone. The closest thing we have to cops that can arrest governments is the military, and it answers exclusively to the president.

 Again, this isn’t something that people just discovered—Jackson knew about it—but everyone had just decided to kind of play coy about the fact that the “rule of law” and the “separation of powers” are purely ceremonial concepts. There is nothing stopping the president from just doing what he wants unless the people who re supposed to follow his commands simply don’t. Which is unlikely, because the president hand picks most of those people.

 So now what? Is the next president just going to go back to doing what congress and the courts tell him he’s allowed to do? Lol, no. No! Why would they? Would you? After the last guy touched the stove and found that the stove wasn’t even turned on, and never has been?

 The system held up for so long because, I guess, most presidents up to this point actually wanted America to succeed as a concept? Even the super shitty presidents. Donald Trump is the first one who really and sincerely never gave a single wet shit about America for even one second of his miserable life on Earth.

 This was the price for which Trump ended 250 years of the American experiment into the rule of law: Getting rich and slapping his name on a bunch of stuff.

 Of course, this is mostly how things have always been. Trump’s big thing in 2016 was his “big, beautiful wall,” and those of us who had any notion of who this guy was because he’d been famous for this shit for our entire lives knew that this wasn’t really a wall—it was a pyramid. Erecting some grand architectural eyesore and slapping his name on it is a far more urgent concern for Trump than winning any Mexican deportations record, to the chagrin of his greatest supporters who have spent the past decade, for some reason, covering their eyes and ears about who Trump has famously been since 1970.

His second term was no different, just more desperate and without the conceit that his projects are somehow functionally necessary. As his clock runs down, he’s abandoning the pretense that he cares about anything other than this—the White House Ballroom and the Triumphal Arch have almost no chance of being built before his ousting, so his attention has shifted to renaming existing structures after himself. As even that project begins to fail, he’s taken to renaming anything after anything, hoping that enough bodies of water and technology concepts with flip names permanently enough for Wikipedia to list his contribution.

 And I mean he cares about nothing other than this now. Instead of campaigning for Republicans to keep congress in 2027, he’s fighting a losing battle to force newspapers to stop using the term “AI.”

 It has become such an explicit pattern that even brain donors like Matt Walsh have noticed it. This lightbulb over his head took ten years to blink on, and even then it’s not all the way on. It’s still kind of flickering and sparking.

Despite Trump having no real principles besides self-enrichment, his fake principles have somehow outshone everything else about him, and I think his strongest followers still cling to the mythology about what he could have been if he wasn’t simply playing a character. Even though Trump wasn’t the president between 2021 and 2025, it kind of felt like he was. He has always insisted that he won three elections and that he has served an unbroken run as the legitimate president since 2017, and the entire Republican establishment pretended that was true and slavishly obeyed him through the entire Biden years.

 It is thus plausible that he will still go on to run the party in absentia as a twice-exiled king after 2028, but to what end? He can’t ever come back. Mercifully, he can’t ever come back. Though his project to imprint his name forever on the future history of Western civilization has succeeded, it was a wish made on a monkey’s paw. He’s not going to get his stupid arch, and unless he does the most petty thing imaginable and bulldozes the Kennedy Center (and it’s depressingly plausible that he will) that fucking tarp is coming down the day after he vacates the White House in January 2029.

 But what he has done is permanently ended a concept of democratic governance that has stood up as the guiding light for Western liberalism since John Locke’s treatises of 1690, which is fucking impressive for the host of The Apprentice. I would like to be optimistic and think that it’s not as far gone as that. Maybe politicians of the future can agree that what we stand to lose is better preserved than the chaos of its alternative. Maybe, in time, something like it can be rebuilt. That will be nice. What’s important is that it won’t be up to him.

I'm writing a book about right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. I've been dropping parts of the draft as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers.

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