🔒 Who is Running the United States?

On Wednesday, apparent president Trump did the most bizarre thing he’s done since the last bizarre thing he did and until the next even more bizarre thing which will probably happen before I publish this. He stood in the White House rose garden and gave a long, rambling, largely incoherent speech that culminated in him announcing crippling import tariffs against every nation on Earth. And I’m using the word “nation” very liberally here because the order specifically includes such, uh, “nations” as the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited Antarctic islands under the jurisdiction of Australia, and Diego Garcia, a remote island under the jurisdiction of Britain but solely inhabited by, uhh, the American Navy. It's allllll right here if you don't value your free time:

Through the entire painful bloviation you never get the impression that Trump knows what he’s talking about, and analysts whose eyes didn’t glaze over too much to see their screens were quick to point out that the numbers he was quoting make no sense, in many cases seem completely made up, and it sounds like Trump legitimately doesn’t know what tariffs actually are or how international trade agreements work.

So that’s a little scary, but let’s wind back the clock.

 After Joe Biden’s humiliating first and final 2024 debate against Trump, when he repeatedly seemed to forget what words were (and when they came to him, he used the wrong ones) former credible journalist and Platonic form of smug Matt Taibbi was over the moon. Vindicated again! It proved, as he’d long suspected, that Biden is a vegetable, and he’s been rattling on about it ever since. He’s dead serious (excuse the pun) when he insists that Somebody Else was secretly doing all of that president shit the entire time his presidency served as the bitter filling in Taibbi’s delicious Trump sandwich.

 Or maybe not so bitter, because the Biden years were a career highlight for Taibbi who won’t criticise Republicans for Reasons and so he had forty-eight good chewy months of raw meat to throw to the gnashing jaws of his new hungry audience of reactionaries, from the Twitter Files to the Covid conspiracies and cringe anti-vax stuff, and now this. And he has to ride this for as long as it takes because what else is he going to do now that his audience’s guy is in charge? I mean besides this weird Men’s Rights activism thing he’s dabbling with now.

 No, Sleepy Joe was really Sleeping With the Fishes Joe the whole time and now we need to find out who the actual president was, and arrest them.

Because if there is one thing Matt will not abide it is when somebody who is not the president is secretly making president type decisions and attributing them to the president… when that president is a Democrat.

 Now I’ll be straight with you: Joe Biden was too old and exhausted to run for a second term. That was a fuckin’ goof. I also happen to believe the explanation that he and his people gave for his catastrophic debate performance—that he had a bad cold that night.

 Don’t scroll down to the comment section yet. This isn’t really the important thing about my piece today and if you want to yell at me I’m not going to argue about it. I will say this: The debate always felt like an anomaly to me. People will throw a whole bunch of other gaffes at me, I’ve seen them all. Some of them were deliberately manufactured by the media. Not all of them were, but for one thing, not only were there were fewer Biden gaffes than Trump gaffes during Trump’s first term, but there were far fewer Biden gaffes than George W. “King of the Gaffes” Bush gaffes.

For another thing, most of these gaffes, combined with the softness of his speech and his slow, sloth-like movements always gave off “old” much more than “senile.” I just don’t see anything that indicates he wasn’t totally doing a presidency for four years.

 But Matt thinks the evidence is overwhelming.

I don’t pay Matt so I can’t phase past his paywall and it’s entirely possible he does have overwhelming evidence that Biden was fully mentally incapacitated for four years and somehow nobody but Matt noticed until midway through the fourth. If so, I hope it’s more compelling than the evidence of senility he leads with, which is that Biden misuses the word “literally” an awful lot.

This opens up a lot of exciting possibilities, such as Pseudo Biden’s pardons not being valid, which means we can immediately arrest Deep State Commissar Anthony Fauci and sentence him to death by lethal injection (fitting).

But thank God Biden’s reign is finally over with his tyranny of boring national stability. People need a release valve for their directionless rage, so in comes Donald Trump to smash the country to pieces for no good reason and deal plenty of collateral damage to the rest of the world because Europe is a cuck or whatever.

 So here’s the thing: If Trump is such a stable, focused, mission-oriented executive, then why does this feel like seasickness? Why does it feel like there are ten people at the wheel and none of them are the captain?

 It’s been an open secret even during Trump’s first term that he wanted the prestige of being president without the nuisance of actually doing the job, and now is no different, but last time at least he abdicated his responsibilities to a bunch of establishment conservatives, so, while it was a shitshow, it still felt mostly like a bumbling Republican administration.

 This time, the entire administration is made up of people like him. Cranks, con-men, opportunists, narcissists, and gutter fascists. The Trump White House is the Island of Misfit Toys. All of them want to be in charge and none of them work well with other people.

 Combined with the extraordinary—effectively limitless—power that the Republican controlled Supreme Court and Congress have decided to award Trump in particular, what we’re left with is a situation where one man, this disinterested king, has near absolute control over the government and cherishes that in and of itself, but doesn’t want to be bothered making any decisions himself. So he delegates that power broadly and equally to a dozen different men who do not, themselves, want the spotlight of the presidency, but do want to make decisions.

 And they all hate each other.

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