Artifice

It took several days for us to find out who the grand villain of the attempted White House Correspondents Association dinner shooting would be. It was never going to be the suspect himself—the man quickly proved too boring, in the way that most such attempted shooters prove boring: No grand conspiracy afoot, no extremist ties, just another troubled actor who looks to right the perceived wrongs of the world by picking up a gun and shooting at them.

We knew immediately that there would be no grand conspiracy, because the apparent grand plan the man decided on was "bum rush the Secret Service checkpoint and see what happens." That is the hallmark of the deluded "lone wolf" stochastic terrorist; we have enough instances over enough decades to now recognize it immediately.

So if the would-be shooter themselves is too inconsequential a target, a scramble would naturally ensue to choose a more significant enemy to rally against. It can't be guns, of course. It can't be a government and media culture that now openly celebrates violence as a useful means to useful political or cultural ends, whether it be in Minneapolis or the Gulf of Mexico or Venezuela or Iran—it would never do to speculate on whether the breezy murder of unidentified fishermen or a new "immigrations" enforcement regime premised on military ritual and neighborhood shock and awe might, by virtue of endless press conferences defending the violence as an honorable and efficient way to purge America of undesirables, send the message that violence is indeed an honorable and efficient way to purge America of undesirables.

Nor can we speculate on whether a new government and corporate partnership to declare the powerful not only immune to most laws but their keepers, the captains able to turn our laws to fire great broadsides against whichever of their less-privileged enemies has had the audacity to oppose them, is contributing to a larger national sense of Exactly That Thing I Said: A new and growing public suspicion that not only are laws useless when offering protections, but exist solely to give the powerful weapons to use against the rest of us.

The seeming immunity of all those who conspired with Jeffery Epstein. A Supreme Court so unmoored from precedent and plain readings that law professors and lower courts alike are now confessing that our laws appear to be not just malleable but unknowable, hinging entirely on the day-to-day needs of the Court's best-favored supplicants. The gutting of consumer protections, the giddy theft of the whole world's artistic output to benefit "tech" companies bent on turning all of it into a gray extruded mush; men chanting Hang Mike Pence as they hunt down lawmakers and loot the U.S. Capitol, only to be pardoned by the man who sent them there; the indifference, above all, of the whole of the chattering classes to the wholesale looting of government and its reconstruction as apartheid state dividing billionaire freaks from the impotent masses—

No, we're not allowed to ponder it. We cannot wonder if any of these things might be inducing a broad cultural confusion as to what America, the America we understood it to be when we were all twelve and gullible, is truly meant to be. We cannot ponder whether a culture now rendered nearly toxic by its own artifices may be producing, as cancerous byproduct, new cells of political violence.

So it must be Jimmy Kimmel's fault. That's probably it.

In a segment on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Thursday, the comedian delivered a mock White House Correspondents' Dinner roast. "Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow," Kimmel quipped. [...]

On Monday, Kimmel told his audience, it "obviously was a joke about their age difference, and the look of joy we see on her face every time they're together." He said it was a "light roast" and was "not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination. And they know that." Kimmel added that he's been very vocal for many years against gun violence.

Melania Trump didn't see it that way. "His monologue about my family isn't comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America," she wrote on Twitter on Monday. "People like Kimmel shouldn't have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate."

Yes, yes. We're to believe that Melania Trump believes a comedian making a tropey joke about a put-upon woman eagerly waiting the reading of her very old, very sick, very rich asshole husband's will was fomenting violence. And perhaps she does believe that, and perhaps she doesn't believe that, and perhaps her statement was aimed mostly at assuring dear Donald that no, no, she definitely was not frequently imagining the freedom that will come when he finally kicks the bucket. Who are we to know.

Do you remember Trump's first term, when Melania was tasked with doing the sort of vague do-goodism expected of First Spouses and spent time at least trying at it, with Be Best and other acts of theater? There is not much of that, these days. Melania has retreated back into being the Melania she was before and after those four years, a woman of wealth and sophistication and tremendous self-regard who can be roused to engage with the public only as advertisement.

So the first response to the alleged attempted assassination of top government figures is, apparently, an official government retaliation against ABC for allowing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to crack a vaudeville-era one-liner about Melania before any of this happened. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is again leading the harassment-premised efforts, because that is what the FCC does, in 2026: It seeks out individual instances of television personalities saying a thing that might upset Dear Leader and minions, and demands censorship so that it never happens again.

It is so small. So petty. So loser-coded. And so very Trumpian. The MAGA movement professed itself outraged by government meddling in entertainment, in social media, and in culture: It was fabulously fraudulent, all of it, and the Musks and Carrs immediately sought instead to make government the arbiter of all speech and the purger of most. It was all an act. It was all artifice, from the beginning.

Perhaps we cannot lay the coarsening of the discourse fully at Jimmy Kimmel's feet, however. Perhaps the real problem is that the glitterati class is still obliged to share space with the common masses at all. And that is the second Lesson being pumped forcibly into the discourse this week: None of this would have happened if Trump and his fourth estate had been hermetically sealed into The Ballroom.

The plans for The Ballroom become more elaborate each time we hear of them, but the notion that the White House's new, gilded, and massive ballroom will be surrounded by 7 inch thick glass makes it sound almost appealing. Seven inches! That makes the ballroom less a meeting space than a terrarium. It makes it sound like a gorilla enclosure, or a world-class aquarium displaying sharks and gape-mouthed groupers. The nation's elites will be able to celebrate in a secure habitat, surrounded by glass panes thick enough to protect against both bullets and glory holes.

This idea is picking up steam, with luminaries like Sen. Lindsey Graham now calling for $400 million in taxpayer funds for the Aristocrat Sex Palace that was previously claimed to be costing taxpayers nothing at all. We need the Epstein Allies Dance Club, America. We cannot do without the Wealthquarium. America will fall if journalists cannot fete America's worst and crookedest-ever political figure on the very bones of the murdered East Wing itself, rather than having to book a hall elsewhere.

None of this is new. This is the same phenomenon is always: A significant event happens, and political actors line up to claim that it is proof that we ought to urgently do whatever they say we ought to do.

And what's remarkable about the current iteration is that it is Just. So. Petty.

The enemies to be defeated: Jimmy Kimmel and people who object to Trump's The Ballroom. It is as if we've made vapidity the national pastime; it's quite possible we indeed have.

Are you doing duck lips? Shots were fired, people dived under tables in their black ties and ballgowns, fearing for their lives. You think someone just died, and you're doing duck lips at us?

Feeling cute. Guy behind me just died I think. Can't wait for the afterparty!

This is the aggravating thing about the White House "correspondence dinner" to begin with, of course. It has always been shallow. It has always been a celebration of the artifices of the profession, of specifically the artifices of the profession, a yearly get-together in which those tasked with uncovering government malfeasance have a great glamorous shindig with the potential malfeasers and none of us are supposed to assign meaning to it. There is no message, no lesson, we are assured, it is just a fun little night of duplicity in which press and government mingle freely, something which otherwise only happens when news personalities are hired into government to partake in malfeasance before departing again to appear on news panels insisting that nothing was malfeased—in other words, every moment of every day.

And this night, especially, was focused on the artifice. The tradition of hiring on a host to gently roast the assembled elites was ditched because the sitting president is a petulant child who flies into a rage at the slightest provocation; this time around the entertainment was to be a "mentalist"—a professional con artist skilled in using the psychological nuances of human behavior to manipulate audiences into believing incredible things.

Which is an even more on-the-nose invite than the usual roastmaster, when it comes to entertaining an audience of journalists and their assigned government hacks. What is Trump himself, if not a showboating mentalist?

It is all so cheap. So phony. So duck-lips-at-a-murder. So influencer-ish, so digital-ape-picture coded, so lavishly artificial. Donald Trump put America into a whole new war, one that experts now widely describe as unwinnable by any metric you can name, but it is Melania's faux-outrage at Jimmy Kimmel that gets more attention. It might be bad that the assembled American aristocracy had to briefly hide under tables like common elementary school students, but what it most shows is that our aristocrats need custom-designed terrariums for their parties rather than slumming it in the same venues used for weddings and trade shows.

The war is now, as we speak, causing the price of gasoline and diesel to soar; fertilizer and industrial chemicals are following behind; food prices will spike; world hunger will result in world unrest. There is no apparent exit plan, no apparent hurry to find one. No real urgency to do the work at all, when there are new extravagances to be chased.

Trump may be more ballroom than man, at this point. That is not bruising, on his hands. It's just the grout curing.

But it is all artifice. Everywhere. There is an obsession with aesthetics over reality, and with kitsch over competence.

What about the war itself?

Ah, Kid Rock. Again. Let us all sit down and learn about the military arts from Kid Rock. Again.

Ah. The new Secretary of the Navy, honed in not on military strategies he doesn't understand but on the centuries-old issues of crossdressing and leaf eating in the ranks.

Fascism is described as having a particular focus on the aesthetics of a thing rather than the substance of a thing, but whether artifice precedes fascism or fascism produces the artifice is a trickier question. I strongly suspect the first: You cannot have fascism without a base movement of people who are, broadly, Too Fucking Stupid to understand policy and outcomes and who instead engage primarily on knee-jerk spectacle and ostentatious nationalism. It is not an act, something that Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao only pretends at once he's given the job to do it. You have to have honed your stupidity to the point where the fascist goons seem clever to you, and you to them.

This is what we see in the interminable New York Times panels in which "regular" Republican voters are asked to justify their political stances, or even clarify their own beliefs, which results in the participants birthing another otherworldly and tentacled Cthulhuesque beast to unleash on the rest of us with nearly every answer. You thought Trump would fix what? You thought he projected what? Because why?

Ah. You saw him on television once or twice, and believed what you saw, and put no greater thought into it because nobody who appears on a reality show could be a tax-dodging bank-defrauding rapist with the intellectual capabilities of sourdough bread. The artifice was what was desired all along, because reality had gotten too muddy and There Are Too Many Languages These Days.

Everything is becoming disconnected. That's what I think. It has all come unwired. The aristocrats are fed up with us, and in their efforts to shut themselves into a new terrarium of wealth and power they have lost the ability to discern between crisis and construct.

Trump could skin and eat twelve of these "journalists" and they would still refrain from coming to conclusions about the man. The White House press is not there to speak truth to power, but to watch as power creates truth. And it remains galling, unbelievably galling, to watch this crowd of notorious sock-sniffers celebrate themselves for doing it.

Seven inch glass. I keep coming back to that Mike Johnson boast, the alleged lesson of yet another act of stochastic violence being a need to even more fully separate the powerful from the rabble so that we no longer need to risk the two groups intermingling. So we will put the powerful in a cage, a futuristic $400 million-plus cage of the sort that might contain Magneto, if we needed to contain Magneto, and the rest of us can just fuck right off.

As long as there is a monumental arch, the rest of us will be fine with doubled gas prices. As long as Dear Leader's visage scowls down on us from government buildings, there is no need to keep any staff inside them. As long as we accomplish The Ballroom, the rest of us can wallow in these acts of random violence and like it. As long as the bottom of the Reflecting Pool is painted a deep flag blue, an effort brought to us because Dear Leader knows a guy from the swimming pool trade, there is no need to think too deeply about where tomorrow's row crops will come from or how much they will cost.

Artifice. An indifference to reality, and the favoring of delusions. Government of the influencers, by the influencers, for the influencers. Kash Patel protecting us from photos of seashells. Pete Hegseth doing duck lips in front of his own failing and stupid war. President Ballroom being briefed on current events by the supplicating press, catching up on the details between evaluating paint swatches.

Kid. Fucking. Rock.

God, I am so tired.

Artifice

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