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

So this is a tricky one—Readers of this newsletter are split between paid and unpaid subscribers. If you pay, you get to read it just over a week earlier than everybody else. Usually that doesn’t matter much, but every once in a while some major world event lands in the middle. So if you’re a paying subscriber then, four days from now, you will know what free subscribers learned six days ago: Whether or not the Republican party will hold onto Congress or the next two years of America’s inexplicably continued existence.

 As I, the author, exist thus in a kind of Schrodinger’s cat situation, may I express my congratulations and/or condolences for the outcome.

 In any case, it will nevertheless be true that 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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