Good morning, afternoon, or evening! How was your weekend? Mine was ... taxing. But now we have to ease back into the normal rhythm of the week, so let me take a big sip from my mug and take a look at what's transpired in the last few oh my god.
USA TODAY
Charlie Warzel
And so that is where we are this week, in the continued humiliation of America: President The Antichrist has turned one portion of the White House grounds into a gaping hole in the ground, and next to it, where a broad green lawn once grew, cranes are erecting an "Ultimate Fighting Championships stadium" that towers over the White House itself, the scaffolding for the lights that will shine down on President The Antichrist's own personal Thunderdomeâa cage match for his amusement and his birthday, an ostensibly patriotism-themed gladiatorial fight in which shirtless brawling men will beat the shit out of each other for a small crowd of White House guests and a much larger television audience.
Because that is America now, at least according to all the lunatics supporting the head lunatic turning our shared national fabric into his own play-acted superhero cape.
And they might be right. There is admittedly something that feels too on-the-nose about the White House lawn being turned into a bloodlust-fueled spectacle meant to fuel the cravings of degenerate gamblers, all within easy sight of a hole in the ground where soft-power infrastructure used to be, in a city in which a violent reactionary cult leader's mugshot-themed face now glowers down from government buildings, and his name is chiseled into buildings that he doesn't own, and at the center of the gyre a single oval-shaped room now turned kitsch.
It makes sense that the Thunderdome would loom larger than the White House itself, doesn't it? And be better lit? And be wrapped in a flag motif, in case the more drunken audience members forget, in the moment, which great nation sponsored the spectacle?
Sigh. I swear to you, I know as well as you that there are a great many events happening in the world of far more consequence than thisâbut the human brain is wired to respond to visual cues above all else, and there is something about seeing Washington, D.C. turned into a Jim Jones theme park and concessionary that brings home this great national decay in ways that $6 gas and talk of slush funds cannot. You can smell this picture. You can taste it. It smells like Death of a Salesman, carnival adaptation. It smells like old man and lavender and a crippling fear of death.
This one man's ability to deface the national character with relentless Biff Tannen-styled goofing off is profound.
As an aside, I'll make a confession: I disliked that movie, Idiocracy. It felt too smotheringly cynical. Too mean spirited. Too obviously meant to offend and demean. And now it reads as all of those things plus holy prophecy, so I dislike it even more.
Over at Da New Republic, Greg Sergeant writes that Trump's presidency is in "free fall," and he makes a good case for it.
Now look at whatâs happening inside the GOP. At a private lunch Thursday, many Republican senators unloaded angrily on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over Trumpâs new $1.8 billion slush fund. They questioned the legality of the fundâwhich will hand out taxpayer money to Trump allies, including the January 6 rioters, pursuant to a corrupt âsettlementâ of his lawsuit against the IRS. Some Republicans objected to giving taxpayer money to January 6ers who attacked police officers.
This comes just after Republicans dropped their quest to give Trump $1 billion in taxpayer money for his ballroom. And House Republicans just shelved a vote on a measure to end his Iran war because they lacked the votes to defeat it. These too saw serious GOP defections from Trump.
None of this is to suggest that the Republican Party has grown a conscience, mind you. They have been gleefully fascist when it seemed that their voters wanted fascism; they had no previous objections to ten years of Trumpian corruption, if corruption boosted election chances, and were willing to let bygones be bygones after the frothing lunatic sent a mob to either coerce them or kill them. No, these men and women are all cowards, cowards down to their very cores, and if there is a new reluctance to embrace Trump's brutalist stupidity it is because the poll numbers have changed, not them.
Itâs no accident that this comes as Trump is hemorrhaging support from both base groups and 2024 converts. To be a viable political project, Trumpism likely needs a combination of hypercharged core voters (the low-engagement Americans directly energized by Trump and only Trump) and non-MAGA voters sporadically attracted to him by economic dissatisfaction and his lingering cultural aura.
Yet it now looks plausible that these constituencies canât hold together in a plurality coalitionâlet alone a majority oneâunder the conditions unleashed by Trumpist governing. Recent events drive this home with fresh clarity: Itâs precisely the conditions wrought by the policies most associated with Trumpism and âAmerica Firstâ nationalism that are alienating voters the most.
In shortest possible form: Trump regained power thanks to a coalition of the hateful and the vapid, but now the hateful are getting a taste of his vapidity and the vapid are seeing the extent of his hatefulness, between tariffs and groceries and gas prices and state-sanctioned goon squads, and both groups are feeling remorse that he appears to be setting back their own agendas of being hateful or being gibbering bumblefucks, causing them to at least contemplate backing away again.
No, that is too harsh.
Looks again at picture of cage match arena being erected on White House lawn.
No, that isn't nearly harsh enough. Trump's "coalition" really did seem to be composed of people who think having cage matches on the White House lawn is what presidenting should be, people who want stupid violent vulgarians running the country because they themselves have always been stupid violent vulgarians and harbor a bottomless hatred for everyone who has ever asked them to become anything more.
But now their small business are collapsing just like everyone else's, and they are seeing soaring prices hoover up everything they ever scrounged up, just like the rest of us, and even though they are now among the people getting hurt the great and glorious Trump, who was supposed to be ushering in a new age of helping them by hurting everyone who was not them, is still shuffling around putting gold on things and planning cage matches and quite visibly not giving a damn about them.
Do you remember the bicentennial? If you are above a certain age, you do, and I think it was the great thinker Kearney who noted that "those tall ships really lifted the nation's spirits after Watergate." It was goofy and tacky, to be sure; during that year, a McDonald's promotion handed out small collectable state flags, a different state flag every week, about 3" tall on cheap plastic flagpoles and a notable percentage of them bearing the same symbols of the Confederacy. Government and schools went all-out on patriotic imagery, and towns boosted their 4th of July firework budgets to provide as much spectacle as coffers would allow, and you'd have thought John Philip Sousa had burst out of the Atlantic ocean, enormous and radioactive, to personally lead all the marching bands in the country in one triumphalist orgy.
And the tall ships, of course. That might have been the classiest part of the whole affair, because it is damn hard to make a three-master tacky in any instance, much less when viewing them from half a harbor away.
I am younger than Kearney, so I don't know if the nation's spirits were really lifted back then or if we simply made a choice to pretend at it later. But I've grown suspicious that the Trump-led "250th" version may have the opposite effect, simply because too much is going wrong, all at once, and this incoherent and forever-smug buffoon simply will not stop rubbing America's nose in it every chance he gets.
Judd Legum
Gothamist
You're suffering from soaring gas prices that won't be coming down anytime soon? Here, have a ballroom.
You can no longer afford health insurance, and have no prospects of ever again affording health insurance? It sounds like you need a ballroom.
Did the tariffs wreck your whole model of business? Hmm. Well you won't be getting a refund, but I will have a 25-story gold-topped monumental arch for you to look at.
Here, have some fireworks. Here, have a laser light show projected onto the Washington Monument. Here, take a look at the new Reflecting Pool, I've coated it in the color of classy hotel swimming pools. Here, have a ballroom. Here, have a cage match. Buy cryptocurrencies. Bet on things. Stop bitching, bitching is treason.
The Lincoln Project
If the timing were any different, or if Trump had been able to muster even the slightest desire to not wreck all of the nation all at once for the sake of his own pleasure, hosting a semiquincentennial (pfft) might have given the man the slightest sheen of borrowed class or valor. Americans love their showy displays of nationalism; we put flags on our fire trucks, even when it interferes with firefighting, and love to argue the finer rules of flag ownership and display when we want to have a fight about something and nothing else is at hand.
But Trumpism is so, so cringe. It is so obviously what it is, and only what it is. A mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn, beneath a towering stadium lighting rig that makes the White House look like the theme restaurant you're supposed to visit after your stomach has settled from riding the coasters, all of it hosted by the Mickey Mouse of grifting spite and bubbling vengeance.
Unless you are specifically a fan of watching shirtless men beat the snot out of each other for online gambling purposes, are you going to be impressed by this? Is anyone not matching that precise description going to feel inspired, looking at this new national tumor?
I really, really can't see it. Trump is too tacky, and his inner circle is too devoted to propping up his grotesque cult of personality to host any "celebration" not centered around his scowling mug.
It all looks like Trump is turning the nation into his own personal pleasure dome while even his own followers suffer. And it looks like that because it is that; there are pictures of it as it happens.
Lunatic.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.