Sep 2, 2026

We are currently navigating a massive, highly volatile military crisis in the Middle East. The U.S. military is actively striking targets. Global energy markets are panicking. The consequences are life and death, but our Rust-stained, former Reality Show Star-turned President acts like we’re in a fucking cartoon.

So, how is Trump, who should probably be living out the rest of his days in a sanitarium for demented narcissists—or prison— handling the immense pressure of this geopolitical powder keg?

By figuring out how to slap his name on it.

This morning, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social and posted this:

Normally, that would be considered a joke, and rest assured, somebody from his base, if not half of his base, has likely taken to social media to boast about how much they love how Donny Diapers trolls “the left.” But this sub-human anomaly is almost certainly NOT joking.

This is staggering.

Men and women in uniform are in harm’s way, and his immediate, overpowering psychological impulse is to treat an international waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman like a bankrupt casino in Atlantic City.

He wants to rebrand it.

It reminded me of the movie Coyote vs. Acme (Will Forte = Fucking Legend).

If you know the Looney Tunes universe, you know the Acme Corporation. They are the fictional, monolithic company that makes giant, flashy, absurdly dangerous products—rocket skates, giant anvils, earthquake pills. And every single time Wile E. Coyote buys an Acme product to catch the Roadrunner, it is completely defective and blows up in his face.

Donald Trump is the Acme Corporation of global politics. Unfortunately, he’s real and not fiction.

Trump is absolutely obsessed with slapping his giant, gaudy logo on everything he touches, regardless of whether or not the product actually works.

Look at his history in the private sector.

It is a graveyard of defective, Acme-style products. Trump Steaks (sold exclusively at The Sharper Image for some reason). Trump Airlines. Trump University. Trump Vodka. Trump Ice. The casinos that literally went bankrupt despite a casino’s entire business model being based on people walking in and handing you their money.

Every single thing he put his name on was a cheap, broken, defective facade designed to look luxurious while fundamentally failing to operate.

And now, he has brought that exact same business model to the Oval Office.

When he was losing a trade war with Canada, he tried to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Now, he wants to brand the “TRUMP STRAIT.”

But here is the crucial difference between the cartoons and reality.

SPOILER ALERT for Coyote vs. Acme (if you care):

In the fictional world of Coyote vs. Acme, the company was intentionally using defective products on cartoons as a test to eventually make human products better.

In Trump’s world, the defective products are the entire point.

He doesn’t care if the policies work. He doesn’t care if a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East spirals out of control, causing massive inflation at home and putting American lives at risk. The government’s functionality is completely irrelevant to him.

All he cares about is that his name is on the side of the rocket. He just wants the branding. He wants to make sure that while the entire region burns, his family can somehow license the naming rights and pocket the cash.

The “TRUMP STRAIT” is just another defective, gold-plated product from a man who has never built anything that lasts.

The problem is, this time, he isn’t selling overpriced mail-order steaks. He is selling American foreign policy. And we are the ones standing at the bottom of the canyon, holding a tiny umbrella, waiting for the anvil to drop.

Sep 1, 2026

The President of the United States is sleeping through his own administration.

Meet Trump Van Winkle.

Yesterday, Donald Trump hosted a meeting in the Oval Office. He was surrounded by his cabinet, including his health and science czars, Dr. Oz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as his Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick.

As RFK Jr., Lutnick, and Oz were presumably trading notes on the medicinal benefits of raw milk, brain worms, and whatever magical weight-loss coffee beans are currently keeping Oz’s bank account afloat, the Commander-in-Chief did what he does best these days.

He fucking fell asleep.

Right there in the Oval Office, on camera, the 80-year-old President of the United States dropped his chin to his chest, closed his eyes, and drifted off into deep, mouth-breathing REM sleep.

It is the visual equivalent of a flashing red siren, but the sycophants in the room treated it like a completely normal Monday. You could almost see the cabinet members frantically calculating how to pretend they were fascinated by the carpet fibers, terrified to acknowledge that the man with the nuclear codes was catching forty winks in the middle of the workday.

That stinks. Literally. At one point, judging by the expression on Lutnick’s face, Trump was probably farting.

Let’s pause and appreciate the sheer, unparalleled absurdity of this moment, especially when you factor in the staggering, hypocritical projection.

Donald Trump spent a decade branding his opponent as “Sleepy Joe.” He built an entire political machine around mocking Joe Biden’s stamina, age, and cognitive fitness.

Yet here we are in 2026, with an 80-year-old Trump turning the Oval Office into a day room in a Nursing Home.

And the ultimate kicker? As of yesterday, when his team wasn’t frantically coughing to wake him up during cabinet meetings, his administration was still blaming the Biden administration for their current geopolitical and economic failures. They are pointing fingers at a guy who hasn’t been in office for nearly two years, all while the current guy literally cannot keep his eyes open during his own workday.

If a CEO fell asleep during a board meeting, the stock would tank before he woke up, and he’d be shitcanned by Friday. If you fell asleep at your desk while your boss was talking to you, you’d be boxing up your stapler and your favorite coffee mug by lunch.

But when Donald Trump turns the Resolute Desk into a La-Z-Boy recliner, his enablers just hold their breath and pray he doesn’t start snoring loudly enough to wake up the press pool.

And speaking of the press pool… Where is the wall-to-wall, Murphy-bed coverage?

If any other politician on the planet fell asleep in the Oval Office surrounded by their cabinet, it would trigger an immediate constitutional crisis. CNN would have a countdown clock to the 25th Amendment. The New York Times would publish six op-eds in an hour demanding cognitive tests. Consumer Reports would compare the most comfortable executive chairs to fall asleep in, noting that the article contains affiliate links and Consumer Reports will get a small commission if a chair is purchased through those links — but that’s not important right now.

Instead, the media treats Trump’s narcolepsy as just another quirky feature of his presidency. They don’t even grade him on a curve… they just pass him.

Because this isn’t a one-off event. It is a documented, chronic pattern of physical collapse. And keep in mind, these are just some of the documented naps we actually know about. Insiders report this is rapidly becoming a daily occurrence.

To prove just how egregious the media’s silence and complacency is, I have brought the CVS-sized receipts. Here is a timeline of just a fraction of the times the President of the United States has fallen asleep on the job in public, you know, where everyone can see him:

1. The Hush Money Trial (April 2024): Infamously nodding off repeatedly in court while his own freedom was on the line.

2. The RNC Convention (July 2024): Dozing in the VIP box during his own nominating convention.

3. The Funeral of Pope Francis (April 2025): Dozing off during the solemn international ceremony.

4. A Global Security Briefing (December 2025): Falling asleep while his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, praised him.

5. The Venezuela Military Briefing (January 2026): Repeatedly closing his eyes while top military officials outlined a massive international crisis.

6. The Regeneron Agreement (April 2026): Leaning forward and appearing completely unconscious at the Resolute Desk while pharmaceutical execs spoke right behind him.

7. Memorial Day Ceremony (May 2026): The absolute most disrespectful: dozing off at Arlington National Cemetery during remarks honoring fallen soldiers.

8. The UFC Freedom 250 Event (June 2026): Nodding off at the highly hyped South Lawn fighting event he demanded be held around his 80th birthday.

9. The World Cup Final (July 2026): Falling asleep behind the glass screen during the match.

10. The Mining Sector Meeting (August 10, 2026): Seen slumping in his chair while officials droned on behind him.

11. The Oval Office Health Talks (Yesterday): Passing out while RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz spoke.

He is completely exhausted. The man has the stamina of a morbidly obese 80-year-old man with a plethora of health issues because he is a morbidly obese 80-year-old man with a plethora of health issues!

His physical and cognitive decline is accelerating right in front of our eyes, to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts showing up to meetings in a pair of sunglasses flanked by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman.

He doesn’t have the energy to do the job. He doesn’t have the mental acuity to follow a conversation about policy (even when that policy is being delivered by a former daytime TV doctor and a guy who dumps dead bears in Central Park).

The terrifying question the press needs to be asking isn’t why he’s sleeping. It’s who is actually running the country while Grandpa takes his afternoon siesta?

Because while Trump Van Winkle is busy dreaming about embellishing his golf scores and enriching his family through market manipulation, the most dangerous, unqualified sycophants in American history are wide awake, quietly dismantling the republic right in front of him.

When you think about who’s behind Project 2025, and who Trump’s surrounded by, maybe that was the plan the entire time?

Aug 31, 2026

The President of the United States is playing with himself again.

This time, it comes in the form of digital toy soldiers.

Over the weekend, the U.S. military struck Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island.

Iran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Jordan.

We are in the middle of a highly volatile, incredibly dangerous escalation in the Middle East.

Trump handled the tremendous weight of this global crisis by logging onto Truth Social and posting a fake video… an AI-generated video depicting Kharg Island—Iran’s most critical oil export hub… Being obliterated from the point of view of a U.S. aircraft. The anthropomorphic, bloated rust stain captioned it, “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

He didn’t actually order a strike on Kharg Island. He, or probably Natalie, just asked a computer to generate a cartoon of what it would look like if he did.

The mainstream media and his sycophants are already scrambling to normalize this.

Vice President JD Vance went on CBS this morning and claimed the fake video was Trump “sending a message to Iran.”

What exactly is the message, JD?

“We have a Higgsfield subscription, and we aren’t afraid to use it?”

This administration’s geopolitical strategy is a staggering, terrifying psychological coping mechanism.

Donald Trump is an idiot’s idea of a strongman. He desperately craves the aesthetic of a ruthless, conquering wartime president, but lacks the intellect, attention span, wherewithal, basic common sense, and guts to navigate a global conflict. So, he retreats to the one place where he has absolute power: a McDonald’s a completely fabricated reality.

His actual reality is entirely fake, so why wouldn’t his military victories be fake, too?

Just look at his behavior over the last few days.

When he was losing a trade war with Canada, he crammed his gelatinous posterior behind the Resolute Desk and signed a meaningless piece of paper to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” as if the stroke of a Sharpie could magically alter his profoundly sad political legacy.

It’s as if he attended the Acme School of Diplomacy, which has all the credibility and efficacy of Trump University.

He went on Fox News over the weekend for a rambling, unhinged interview with proud District One Citizen and Caesar Flickerman understudy Trey Gowdy, and claimed that Iran’s navy, air force, and anti-aircraft systems were “all wiped out.”

A complete and total lie.

Even Trey Gowdy’s face, which looks like Max Headroom had a baby with a Disney Princess who was dressed by the cast of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” couldn’t hide the absurdity of the moment.

Throughout the interview, Gowdy was caught on camera making a series of bizarre, constipated, agonized facial expressions, which pretty much reflect the facial expressions the entire anti-Trump movement makes multiple times per day or every time we watch him.

Trump cannot cope with the physical, tangible world because it requires accountability. In the real world, if you bomb Kharg Island, you trigger a massive global energy crisis (I mean, worse than what’s happening now), exacerbate a regional war, and American soldiers come home in flag-draped coffins.

Good or bad, he’s not bothered by the consequences of a war… Or doesn’t want to deal with the consequences at all. He just wants the dopamine hit of watching explosions on his iPhone while sitting on a golden toilet at Mar-a-Lago, while receiving a squirt of Diet Coke up his sphincter from his platinum bidet gifted to him by the Saudis (Probably).

He wants a distraction from the questions about the Epstein files.

Which brings us to the mainstream press.

Stop covering this as a “provocation.” Stop having panels of think-tank experts debate the “strategic ambiguity” of an AI video.

When you treat his digital tantrums as legitimate foreign policy, you are participating in his ineptitude and delusion. You are validating his fake reality.

Your job is to look the American people in the eye and tell them the truth: The President’s cognitive grip on reality is so severely fractured that he continually uses artificial intelligence to self-soothe.

He is a pathetic, deeply insecure man who has to generate fake videos of military victories because he is fundamentally incapable of achieving real ones.

Our safety is contingent upon the ill-advised whims of a malignant narcissist with the temperament of an angry four-year-old, who is also, very clearly, in cognitive decline.

This is a sick individual, and that’s not an epithet or metaphor. This is a President of the United States with so many health issues that his My Chart app would probably require its own iPad.

If the press doesn’t start aggressively calling out his descent into infirmity and virtual reality, he is going to continue to get people killed in the real world and inadvertently plunge us into World War 3.

An Open Memo to the White House Press Corps and Mainstream Media:

12 days from today marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. It is a profound, somber milestone: a quarter-century since the darkest day in modern American history.

We already know that Donald Trump won’t be at Ground Zero.

He is skipping the ceremony in his hometown. Because the National September 11 Memorial & Museum has a long-standing, nonpartisan rule prohibiting politicians from giving speeches, Trump cannot turn a site of mass murder into a campaign rally or a televised spectacle with a microphone in his hand – as the tacky tyrant has never met a tragedy he couldn’t find a way to make about himself. So, he is going to the Pentagon instead.

He is prioritizing his own ego over standing in solidarity with the families of New York, the place he used as a prop to propel himself to fame by manipulating the local gossip columns and dotting the skyline with his name on buildings he didn’t even necessarily build, but leased the name he built into what has become one of the most dubious brands in the world: Trump.

You need not be a former journalist to see the trap you are about to fall into. Many of you are preparing to politely cover his speech at the Pentagon. Most of you will treat his absence at Ground Zero as a simple scheduling quirk.

Please don’t do this. Please do your jobs.

It is your responsibility to explain why he cannot show his face at Ground Zero, and I don’t mean whatever bullshit he spoonfeeds you at his specious press gaggles, where nothing he says is substantive or reliable.

This is an opportunity to bring the receipts regarding Donald Trump’s truly staggering, decades-long history of lying about 9/11. Because his refusal to attend isn’t just about the microphone. It’s because the site is a physical reminder of the grotesque, self-serving mythology he built around the tragedy.

Here is the blueprint for how you need to cover this anniversary. This should lead all major newscasts on September 10th. To help you out, I’ve provided links to each diabolical lie and exaggeration.

1. Play the WWOR Tape While the towers were still burning… While millions of hearts were breaking… While we were just starting to comprehend the gravity of what was taking place… While Americans were looking up at the sky, not sure if their city was next…. While lower Manhattan was on fire, the air thick with dust and ash, Trump called into local New Jersey television station WWOR. He was asked if his building at 40 Wall Street had sustained damage.

Do not summarize this. Play the audio. Let the American people hear that in the midst of an unfathomable catastrophe, his immediate psychological reaction was to brag.

He said on live television: “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan... And now it’s the tallest.”

Thousands of people had just been incinerated, and he boasted that his real estate portfolio had moved up in the rankings. (Which was also a lie—70 Pine Street was still taller).

2. Expose the Stolen Valor For years, Trump has aggressively claimed he sent “hundreds of men” from his company to aid in the rescue efforts and clear rubble.

BULLSHIT.

There is absolutely zero administrative record of this.

There is zero human record of this; not a witness to be found.

Speaking of finding: find Richard Alles, a former FDNY battalion chief who was at Ground Zero, and put him on camera. He is on the record stating definitively that he never saw Trump there, and that no such crew existed. Report the truth: Trump inserted himself into the heroism of first responders like a parasite looking for good PR.

3. Roll the Tape on the Jersey City Lie Remind your viewers, listeners, and readers of 2015, when Trump stood on a stage and claimed he watched on television as “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheered as the towers came down.

Call it what it was: a complete fabrication designed to stoke xenophobia and incite racial hatred to fuel his campaign.

4. Ask Howard Lutnick the Hard Questions Finally, you need to turn your cameras on Trump’s Secretary of Commerce and sycophant, Howard Lutnick.

Few people lost more on September 11th than Lutnick. As the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, he lost virtually everybody who worked for him in New York City—including his own brother. He lived the unimaginable nightmare that Donald Trump only pretends to have been part of.

And yet, Lutnick is constantly on your networks, praising Donald Trump’s character. How does a man who lost everything to the mass murder of 9/11 pledge blind allegiance to a man who treats that exact same mass murder as a narcissistic photo-op?

It seems bat-shit crazy. But it’s beyond bat-shit. It’s diarrhea from a bat that has IBS, is lactose intolerant, and ate a pint of ice cream the night before.

Your job is to sit across from Howard Lutnick and ask him how he reconciles this.

You have a choice to make over the next few weeks. You can let the 25th anniversary of 9/11 be hijacked by a man who has spent two and a half decades lying about it, or you can finally lead with the truth.

Trump has done everything he can to strip you of your ability to hold truth to power by undermining your credibility. His base is cracking. The rats are fleeing the ship.

On this 25th anniversary of one of the country’s darkest moments, be the fucking light and expose this fraudulent monster for who he is.

Don’t let us down.

(On my 8th birthday, following a keg stand and multiple bong hits)

Today is my 54th birthday. Google estimates that the vast, overwhelming majority of humanity didn’t make it this far.

That’s a staggering accomplishment. Pat yourself on the back today. Play loud music, have a drink, do something horny, or just stare at a diorama you made in 3rd grade. (Impressive that you kept it for 46 years without your fastidious partner forcing you to throw it out).

I was born in 1972. I’m a tried-and-true Gen Xer. In fact, I’m even in a Netflix docuseries about an event that turned to absolute shit, thanks to the very worst of Gen X. (Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 – if you haven’t seen it, as Gen Z would say, “it’s gas.”)

We love to use celebrities to gauge where we are in our existence. The class of ‘72 includes Eminem, Dwayne Johnson, Cameron Diaz, Maya Rudolph, and Biggie (RIP).

Because of my career, I’ve spent an unnatural amount of time around those types of people and events. It was cool. But the truth is, a lot of it lacked substance and any real connection to reality. Meeting famous people is great if your primary goal in life is to meet famous people. But I’ve learned that creating things that move people is infinitely more satisfying.

It’s all about connection. Because outliving billions of people also means you stick around long enough to watch the people you love leave early. In 54 years, I’ve buried a father (when I was 30), a brother, and two sisters, all at unnaturally young ages.

It’s ok. They all had it coming.

...I’m kidding! Only one of them truly deserved it.

Still joking.

But when your family is held hostage to heroin addiction for three decades (my brother), and you had two sisters severely mentally ill with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, it fundamentally changes the calculus of your existence.

It strips away the VIP ropes and leaves you with what actually matters.

The most satisfying moments of my life haven’t come from a red carpet. They come from the pure, biological rush of oxytocin produced by actual love.

Love is the fucking best.

Understanding your own mortality is instructive. It makes you realize how urgently important it is to excise hate from your life. Don’t ignore hate. Fight it. But fight it knowing that when it’s gone, everything else is undeniably better.

The idea that we’re all going to die can be depressing, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s the ultimate shared experience. So while we’re still here, winning the demographic lottery against 92 billion ghosts... stop worrying about inconsequential, superficial bullshit.

Go chase the substance, connections, and oxytocin.

Every network should’ve led their broadcasts with “Ted Cruz’s Tiny Dick.”

I get it. Who wants to see “Ted Cruz’s tiny dick?” Nobody, really, and based on the description, it’s probably hard to see, if it’s hard at all.

Really, though, it’s the type of absurd story that deserves absolute maximum oxygen.

If you missed the funniest thing on the internet this week, here is what happened. Ted Cruz attempted to eulogize the late, great Dolly Parton by quote-tweeting a vintage video of her that a random user posted. He captioned it “Legend” with some crying and prayer emojis.

But the user realized who shared their post. So they used a basic platform feature and changed their display name. For hours, Cruz’s touching memorial to an American icon prominently featured a giant, bold header reading:

“Ted Cruz’s tiny dick.” (This, let’s not forget, is the exact same U.S. Senator whose official account famously “liked” incest porn on the anniversary of 9/11).

When I saw the screenshot, it immediately reminded me of the famous scene in Ghostbusters. Bill Murray’s character, Peter Venkman, is trying to convince the Mayor of New York not to listen to the bureaucratic antagonist, Walter Peck. Venkman looks the Mayor dead in the eye and says, “It’s true. This man has no dick.”

Now, there’s no way to know about Cruz’s actual genitals, nor have I ever wanted to write about them. But politically speaking? The man is completely dickless, and more importantly, has no balls.

He is the very definition of a terrible, feckless leader.

Just look at his history with the leader of his own party.

Donald Trump stood on national television and told the world that Ted Cruz’s wife was ugly. He stood in front of cameras and wildly accused Cruz’s father of being in on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

How did Cruz respond to this world-historic level of public humiliation? Did he defend his family’s honor? Did he show a spine?

No. He bent the knee. He sat in a folding chair and made phone calls on behalf of the man who degraded his wife and father. He has spent the last decade cozying up to Trump, desperate for scraps of approval.

Ted Cruz is the political equivalent of “Reek” from Game of Thrones—a man who was psychologically broken, stripped of his dignity and manhood, and who now subserviently follows the very person who tortured him.

And when his own constituents actually needed him? When the Texas power grid failed, and his state froze, resulting in citizens dying in their own homes? The so-called “alpha male” packed his bags and fled to a Ritz-Carlton in Cancun.

The traditional press has a bad habit of treating stories like the “tiny dick” retweet as silly, harmless internet pranks. They treat them as distractions from “real policy.”

But as a former journalist, I’m telling you: the media has it entirely backward. These moments aren’t distractions. They are a feature, not a bug. They are diagnostic tests.

Trump’s Republican Party, comprised of “Reeks” like Ted Cruz, demands absolute, unchecked control over the global economy and the military. Yet they are entirely digitally illiterate, fundamentally spineless, and completely incapable of handling even the mildest adversity without fleeing to a beach resort.

They deserve to be exposed for the inept, sniveling, power-hungry, attention-starved betas that they truly are.

When Peter Venkman was standing in the Mayor’s office, he didn’t know what he would eventually be up against. Right now, we’re dealing with a President the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but who’s doing more damage to our Republic than Stay Puft did to New York City.

Aug 27, 2026

If you want to perfectly encapsulate the accelerating collapse of Donald Trump’s entire political myth, you don’t need to look at a complicated policy paper. You just need to look at what happened on the internet yesterday.

The U.S. government accidentally compared the President to Adolf Hitler.

It was a spectacular, embarrassing, undeniable self-own. Yesterday, the Department of Education posted a hype video on X trying to make Trump look like a tough, fatass badass. To do this, they used a dramatic clip from the movie Darkest Hour where Winston Churchill passionately yells, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”

Then, the video aggressively cut to footage of Trump.

The problem? In that exact scene, the “tiger” Churchill is referring to is Adolf Hitler.

The people running the communications for the executive branch are so culturally and historically illiterate that they accidentally published a fancam equating their boss to a guy whose entire brand is “history’s most notorious genocidal dictator.”

Or, maybe, it was a Freudian slip.

Regardless, it is the ultimate “Try Hard” failure.

But this sheer, staggering incompetence isn’t just digital. It’s not just contained to terrible social media edits. It physically manifests in how he treats historical landmarks and American history, which is the same way a house party of drunk frat boys treats a bathroom.

Donald Trump sold this country on a very specific myth: the “blue-collar billionaire,” the strategic, deal-making genius, the ultimate “Master Builder.” But he doesn’t actually build anything.

He vandalizes.

Just look at the actual, physical footprint he is leaving on our institutions.

Look at the Kennedy Center. He is currently threatening to demolish parts of the iconic arts monument. Why? Because they forced him to take his gaudy ego name off the building.

It’s petty, mafia-style retaliation from a man who cannot stand to see a monument in Washington that celebrates someone else’s legacy.

Or look at the White House itself. The Rose Garden has been gutted of its history and paved into a sterile, soulless corporate courtyard.

The East Wing? Leveled and destroyed. American history has been reduced to a pile of mistakes and poor choices, all so he can wage a petty battle to build a completely unnecessary ballroom.

And the West Wing? It has been stripped of its dignified, historical elegance and replaced with cheap, gold-painted decor that looks like a tacky retirement home in Boca vomited all over the interior and exterior of the Oval Office.

When he steps outside the gates, it doesn’t get any better. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a botched, leaking, peeling catastrophe — a $13 million disaster and public relations nightmare which he hilariously tried to pin on multiple, innocent American citizens, including a former American Olympian.

And the U.S. Capitol? The “People’s House” is now a permanent, militarized fortress because he couldn’t control his own mob of “good people” who, ya know, beat up cops to within an inch of their lives, with some of those cops spiraling from their depression, leading to multiple suicides.

“Stop the steal?” Correct. Stop this monster from stealing our Democracy.

This physical wreckage doesn’t even begin to cover what he’s done to gas prices, beef prices, inflation, the deficit, journalism, and our collective grip on reality.

He destroys everything he touches. And now, finally, that destruction has reached his own reputation.

The myth is falling apart. His base, a group of people who have spent years completely oblivious to the canyon-sized cracks in his competence, are starting to wake up. They are starting to see the rot in his nationalist, fascist, xenophobic, petty foundation.

They are realizing he can’t actually build anything at all, except his wealth at the expense of the American people, clearly manipulating markets and government contracts to line his family’s pockets.

He is the Wicked Witch (the original, not the sanitized “Wicked” version). Reality is Dorothy, and reality has thrown a bucket of water on him, and that cheap orange veneer is melting… MELTING… Right before our eyes.

And when the melting stops, what will be left? Just a pile of insecurity, bluster, and bullshit.

I want to float a theory. It might sound crazy, but in the era of Italian satellites stealing elections and Jewish Space Lasers starting forest fires, I think we need to keep our minds open.

I’m starting to think Donald Trump isn’t human.

I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean he just lacks basic empathy or human decency. I mean it biologically. I think he might actually be a different species. Extraterrestrial. An alien wearing a fat human suit.

Let’s look at the evidence.

Trump is full of projection. For instance, if you are deeply insecure about your intelligence, you constantly call other people stupid. If you’re insecure about your looks, you will point out aesthetic flaws in other people, perhaps call them names, like “piggy.”

If you are an actual space alien attempting to blend into human society, what do you do? You obsessively accuse everyone else of being an alien or different. You do your very best to strip them of their humanity, because, well, you’re not human.

Look at what the official White House account posted on X yesterday.

They didn’t post a policy update. They posted a meme. It was a mock-up of the beloved 90s children’s cartoon The Magic School Bus, but rebranded with bold red letters reading: “The Magic Deportation Bus.”

In the driver’s seat sits a smiling Ms. Frizzle and her cartoon lizard. But in the back of the bus, instead of a class full of kids learning about science, there are five men. Their heads are bowed. Their hands are cuffed in front of them. The official caption from the United States government read: “Please let this be a normal field trip...”

This isn’t just a tasteless joke. It is the literal dehumanization of human beings, published on the official domain of the executive branch. He is taking childhood nostalgia and weaponizing it to mock the suffering and physical restraint of marginalized people. He is stripping them of their humanity, treating them like props in a sick Saturday morning cartoon.

But why is he so obsessed with stripping away humanity?

Look at his rhetoric just from yesterday. He went on a rant claiming that public schools are secretly transitioning trans students without their parents’ knowledge. A complete, unhinged fabrication.

Notice the terrifying contrast. He uses childhood imagery (school buses) to make gleeful jokes about deporting handcuffed immigrants, while simultaneously making up sick, violent fantasies about actual schools to terrorize marginalized children. The goal is the same: take a group of human beings, strip them of their dignity, and paint them as terrifying “others” who must be eradicated to protect the species.

He has zero regard for human life.

How else do you explain his deep, abiding passion for murderous dictators? He openly admires Vladimir Putin, a man who has fed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens into a literal meat grinder in Ukraine for no strategic reason. He writes love letters to Kim Jong Un, a man who starves his own people to build missiles. He looks at absolute, unchecked cruelty and doesn’t feel horror. He feels jealousy.

A normal human being possesses empathy. A normal human being looks at a bus full of terrified, handcuffed people and feels a twinge of sorrow, even if they agree with the border policy. A normal human being doesn’t make up weird fantasies about teachers mutilating children.

But a creature from another planet, studying us from afar, mimicking our speech patterns without actually understanding the emotions behind them? That creature would act exactly like Donald Trump.

He doesn’t understand humor, so he bullies. He doesn’t understand grief, so he optimizes it for ratings. He doesn’t understand love, so he demands loyalty tests. He is a guy who stares directly into a solar eclipse, paints his face an unnatural shade of orange, and thinks human empathy is a glitch in the software to be exploited.

So when his administration posts memes of handcuffed immigrants and constantly refers to them as “Aliens”... I don’t think it’s just racist propaganda.

I think he’s projecting. He’s an extraterrestrial. Somebody phone his home and get him the fuck out of here. Send him back to Mos Eisley where he tends bar and throws droids out of the Cantina.

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Aug 24, 2026

Did you watch the opening of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington yesterday?

If you didn’t, you missed one of the most revealing, and frankly, deeply unsettling, thirty seconds of the modern political era. And the mainstream media, terrified as always of being accused of bias, is trying its hardest to pretend it was just a cute photo op.

It wasn’t. It was a Trump Tower-Sized billboard advertising cognitive decline.

Let’s set the scene. Donald Trump was given the honor of waving the green flag to start the race. A simple, ceremonial task.

But when Medal of Honor recipient Command Sgt. Maj. Matt Williams handed the flag to the Commander in Thief Chief, the placement was off, and he had to be corrected.

Now, anyone can fumble a handoff or need a quick adjustment. But it was what happened next that should have put our entire republic on edge.

Once he was set right and told to wave, he began waving the flag fast and furious. And as he did, he flashed this wide, vacant, profoundly unsettling grin.

It wasn’t the normal cocky smirk of the arrogant narcissist we are so familiar with. It wasn’t the grin of a politician playing to the crowd.

It was the distinct, unsettling expression of a small child who had just successfully completed a mildly complicated puzzle and was legitimately proud of himself. Or, more accurately, the smile of an 80-year-old man with dementia acting childlike.

I am not a doctor, and I am not offering an official diagnosis. All of this is, admittedly, circumstantial evidence. But we are dealing with an administration that runs entirely on circumstance and conspiracy. If they can baselessly claim that the 2020 election was stolen via Italian satellites, we can certainly use our own functioning eyeballs to assess the physical reality playing out on live television.

Because the most telling part of the video isn’t Trump’s childlike glee. It’s the reaction of the people around him.

Watch the Secret Service agents. Watch Melania. They were on it immediately.

There was no hesitation. They pounced to correct him and guide him because they are clearly used to doing this. They are in constant, frantic “management mode.” His inner circle lives in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance, terrified of what he might do, say, or fumble when the cameras are rolling.

And they have every reason to be terrified. Because when they aren’t physically guiding his hands or telling him when to wave, his brain is left to its own devices, and the results are horrifying.

Just look at what happened on the tarmac on Friday.

A reporter asked Trump a very straightforward, albeit somewhat wonky, economic question. She asked him about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervening to bring down soaring yields in the bond market. She asked if Bessent had “another type of intervention” planned.

It’s a question about Treasury policy. About interest rates.

Trump’s response?

“We have many types of intervention. That’s one,” Trump said. “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.”

WTAF?

The President of the United States was asked how his administration plans to handle the bond market, and his brain immediately defaulted to threatening military action.

Is he going to threaten to “bomb the shit” out of a Treasury bill? Is he going to deploy the Marines to Wall Street to intimidate bond yields into dropping? Done strike Moody’s?

Obviously not (maybe not THAT obvious). What happened is much simpler, and much scarier. He completely lost the thread of the conversation. His cognitive processing couldn’t handle the complexity of the economic question, so his brain defaulted to the only language it understands anymore: violence and “strongman” posturing.

We saw this when they hid him on the backup plane in Turkey. We see it when they abruptly cut his microphone during rallies when he starts slurring or trailing off into bizarre tangents about sharks and electricity.

They are managing a decline.

If this were an elderly relative at a family barbecue who flashed a vacant, childlike grin while struggling to hold a spatula, and then randomly threatened to call the police on the potato salad, the family would quietly pull him aside and start having hard conversations about assisted living or a nursing home.

But because he is the President, surrounded by a sycophantic cult of personality and a terrified political apparatus, everyone just claps. They pretend the Emperor is wearing magnificent clothes, even when he acts like a toddler waving a flag, and even when he threatens to bomb the economy.

The Freedom 250 was supposed to be a roaring celebration of American dominance. Instead, it gave us a terrifying glimpse into the frantic, exhausting reality of managing an 80-year-old man whose cognitive grip is visibly slipping away in real-time.

Donald Trump had another meltdown on Truth Social yesterday.

This happens so frequently that we usually just tune it out. It’s the ambient noise of the Trump era. But every once in a while, in the middle of a narcissistic spiral, the mask slips, and this ill-advised rant should not, and can not, be ignored.

To call his blue-collar “man of the people” routine carefully constructed would be giving him way too much credit. Nothing he does is carefully crafted. It is designed to look carefully crafted, but much like his botched $13 million repair job on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the facade is full of cracks, the blue paint is peeling, and the entire thing is constantly leaking.

The fact that the illusion holds up at all speaks volumes about the profound vulnerability, gullibility, and blind cult of personality suffered by the MAGA base.

But yesterday, he didn’t just leak. He accidentally revealed exactly who he has always been, and I’m not so sure it was even an accident.

Yesterday, he decided to attack Tucker Carlson, Representative Thomas Massie, and his former super-fan Marjorie Taylor Greene (who he is now hilariously referring to as “Marjorie Taylor Brown”).

But it was his specific attack on Carlson’s intelligence that exposed the ugly core of Trump’s epic scam.

Trump wrote about Carlson: “He could barely get out of College, and maybe he didn’t, but only really dumb people can’t make it through that wonderful four year time in life!”

Besides the fact that most of Trump’s accusations are actually admissions (he was a terrible student and it’s been suggested that his father helped him get into Wharton—which is about as surprising as the wind being windy), let’s pause and actually read that sentence again.

“Only really dumb people can’t make it through that wonderful four year time in life.”

Who is he talking to?

He is talking directly to his base. He is talking to the millions of Americans who voted for him precisely because they felt looked down upon by coastal, college-educated elites.

According to demographic data, a massive, foundational chunk of the MAGA base consists of voters without a four-year college degree. These are the people who went straight into the workforce. The people who chose the trades. The people who couldn’t afford the staggering, crippling debt of a university education, or who had to drop out to take care of a sick family member or put food on the table.

And the man they treat as a savior just hopped on the internet and told them, out loud, that he thinks they are “really dumb,” and it would surprise no one outside of his cult if he has privately referred to them as “fucking stupid.”

It’s increasingly popular to refer to Trump’s actions as a “grift” or “the ultimate grift.” That is accurate, but we’re using it so much, I fear it’s losing its value. The breadth of Trump’s dishonesty and manipulation is beyond a mere grift… It is a scam of biblical proportions, in the sense that the entirety of the bible is unbelievable, and the way Trump scams his base is even more unbelievable.

Donald Trump is a billionaire nepo baby who grew up in New York high society. He didn’t build his empire with calloused hands; he inherited it. Yet he managed to convince working-class America that he was one of them. He put on a hard hat, ate a McDonald’s hamburger on a private jet, and played the role of the anti-elitist.

But he is the elite. The worst kind. The kind who measures human worth by proximity to wealth and institutional prestige.

When he gets angry, and the script breaks down, he doesn’t reach for a working-class insult. He reaches for the ultimate country-club put-down: You didn’t even finish college. (Which, for the record, is factually incorrect regarding Carlson, who graduated from Trinity College. But facts have never been the point).

The tragic irony of the MAGA movement is that they spent a decade fighting a culture war against smug, condescending elites who think they are better than everyone else... only to elect the smug, condescending Emperor of them all.

But for the rest of us—for the Democrats, the Independents, and the anti-MAGA Republicans desperate to break his grip on the country—this isn’t just a tragic irony.

It is a massive, unprecedented political gift. Not a grift. A GIFT.

We are heading directly into the midterms. This single sentence needs to be weaponized. It needs to be plastered on billboards across the Rust Belt. It needs to be read out loud in union halls in Michigan and diners in Pennsylvania.

Every single candidate running against a MAGA loyalist right now needs to look the camera dead in the eye and say: The leader of their party just told you, out loud, that he thinks you are stupid.

If the opposition wants to actually win, they need to look at the media landscape right now and ask themselves: WWJOD? What would Jon Ossoff do?

Ossoff just gave the entire anti-MAGA coalition the blueprint. The inherent marching orders are clear: when Trump accidentally hands you an opportunity to show exactly how hypocritical, weird, and elitist he truly is, you don’t ignore it and politely pivot back to tax policy.

You use it. You exploit it for maximum damage.

When your opponent accidentally hands you the exact cheat code to shatter his “man of the people” myth, you don’t let the news cycle move on. He just handed his enemies the sledgehammer.

It’s time to swing it.

Aug 22, 2026

For eleven years, Donald Trump has waged a relentless, scorched-earth war against journalism.

And let’s just be brutally honest: journalism has been losing that war.

He didn’t just call the press the “enemy of the people.” He systematically degraded the entire concept of objective truth. He trained millions of people to look at hard, undeniable evidence and scream “fake news” simply because it bruised his fragile ego.

According to legendary “60 Minutes” Journalist Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted he lies about the media, stating, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

His plan worked.

People accuse Trump of being stupid, and in many ways – most ways really – he is. Except when it comes to this type of branding and propaganda. As dishonest as he admittedly is, it helped catapult him into, theoretically, the most powerful position in the world. Thanks to his dishonesty, he has undermined the power of the office, but his base refuses to see it. Instead, they follow him like unwitting children follow Pennywise the clown to hell.

How has the traditional media reacted? By bringing polite fact-checks to an exorcism, and they got slaughtered and, in more than a few cases, possessed. You cannot beat a fat, flatulent, orange demon with a statistic.

But then Jon Ossoff stepped up to the microphone.

If you look closely at Ossoff’s resume, before he was the erudite, sharp, perfectly tailored Senator from Georgia, he was an investigative journalist. He literally ran a company that produced hard-hitting documentaries exposing global corruption.

He knows how to dig. He knows how to verify. But more importantly, he knows exactly how a story catches fire in the minds of the public.

Ossoff looked at the barren, toxic landscape Trump created and realized something fundamental: You cannot beat the Tyrant of Tabloids with a moral lecture. You have to beat him with a better, weirder, more undeniable story.

So, the former journalist didn’t drop a policy critique. He dropped a tactical nuke named Natalie Harp into the heart of MADES (Maga Hades).

He injected her straight into the political zeitgeist. He took this bizarre, unsettling image; a grown woman, a White House aide, allegedly going a year without security clearance and literally riding in the trunk of a vehicle just to remain in Trump’s physical proximity – and he placed it dead center in the news cycle.

And then came a Wolff dressed in Journalist’s clothing.

Michael Wolff, the veteran author who has spent years documenting the chaotic, tabloid reality of Trump’s orbit, stepped up and published Harp’s letters via The Daily Beast.

The letters are staggering. They are dripping with psychotic, stalker-ish language, referring to a man who lies every time he exhales as her “Guardian and Protector,” and begging for his approval. Wolff provided the receipts that proved Ossoff’s narrative wasn’t just a political attack; it was an uncomfortable, pathetic reality.

It is an absolutely staggering piece of political judo that would make the legendary Gracie family proud.

Writers sit at their laptops for hours every single day, pulling their hair out, trying to figure out how to craft the perfect narrative hook for a story.

Ossoff just stepped up to a podium, said the word “trunk,” let Wolff drop the letters, and set the entire internet on fire.

He used a journalist’s razor-sharp instinct for the killer detail to drag Trump’s pathetic reality into the spotlight. He didn’t debate the strongman; he exposed the weird, creepy cult leader who demands sick devotion from the people around him.

It forced Trump into a panicked, defensive spiral because he has absolutely no defense against being mocked.

It is a beautiful, deeply poetic irony. The man who spent a decade trying to destroy journalism, who wrought so much negativity and danger upon the free press, might just get completely derailed by a couple of journalists who finally learned how to play his game.

Aug 21, 2026

Let’s be honest about what American politics is now.

It’s not about policy. It isn’t about infrastructure, healthcare, or the national debt. It’s a SURPRISE reality show, plain and simple, and whoever controls the storyline wins, and, in general, whether you agree or not, Trump usually controls the storyline.

On paper, January 6th should have ended Donald Trump. It was a violent, live-streamed attack on the Capitol, and for a few minutes, various Republican members of Congress forgot that Trump was keeping their balls somewhere in the depths of the White House, and they lashed out at his abhorrent behavior. That lasted for about two days before they fell back in line and normalized the whole thing.

In today’s media circus, January 6th doesn’t move the needle anymore. The cops who were beaten, committed suicide, scarred for life — mean nothing to this President or his base.

You can’t beat Trump by lecturing people about democratic norms when half the audience doesn’t care.

If you want to take down a guy who turned politics into “The Apprentice” on crack with a gaudy Cheesecake Factory aesthetic, you have to play by sensationalized reality TV rules.

Enter Jon Ossoff.

On paper and on camera, the Georgia senator is Trump’s worst nightmare. He’s young, sharp, polished, well-educated, intellectual, with a great head of hair. Basically everything Trump isn’t.

But Ossoff did something most Democrats never figure out. He didn’t bother trying to debate Trump on policy, nor did he issue another hand-wringing statement about institutional norms.

He just dropped a weird, trashy reality-TV storyline right into the middle of the news cycle and made Trump defend it.

Ossoff, also a former investigative journalist, threw a spotlight onto a staffer named Natalie Harp, and the whole thing caught fire immediately.

Calling Natalie Harp a “staffer” barely scratches the surface. She allegedly worked for a year without standard security clearance and once literally rode in the trunk of a car just to stay close to him when there were no open seats left.

And now, thanks to Michael Wolff’s releases, we have her letters.

The letters published by Michael Wolff reveal an uncomfortable level of devotion… The kind of pure sycophancy aimed at a man who routinely lies with a straight face. It paints a bizarre, desperate picture of someone who handed over her life to stay in his orbit.

Is it absurd that this passes for a win in modern politics? Of course. It has nothing to do with anything that actually matters to voters.

But this is the game Trump built. He runs on drama, epithets, memes, and constant spectacle.

Ossoff saw that, skipped the standard playbook, and flipped the script. Instead of framing Trump as a dangerous strongman, he made him look like the center of a bizarre, desperate circus. It undercuts the whole “alpha” image and makes the entire operation look pathetic.

It makes you wonder what kind of man demands that Natalie-Harp-level of sick devotion. Some people even say Trump is the devil.

I don’t know if that’s true, of course.

But you know... that’s what they say... and over the past week, Natalie Harp’s life has undoubtedly become hell.

My chopsticks slipped. A floret of broccoli splashed into a dark brown pool of General Tso’s sauce.

In my entire life, I had heard Rona Blaustein use the word “fuck” maybe three times. She didn’t swear. She absorbed.

If she was going to break character and drop an f-bomb, it made a twisted kind of sense that it happened at Chopstix on Nostrand Avenue, right off Avenue Y.

Before they bought the property next door and installed an expansive sushi bar with a useless wooden bridge over a koi pond, it was an overachieving shithole. Two rows of three sticky plastic booths. Two guys sweating over woks directly behind the counter. The air smelled like stale fry oil and duck sauce. It was frantic.

Somewhere along the line, Chopstix had a glow-up. It was the only thing in the neighborhood getting nicer. I was Chopstix. My mother and the rest of our bloodline were the decay rotting on the sidewalk outside.

We ate this food for years. It tasted like home. Unbeknownst to me, tucked in the unlit corners of her brain, my mother harbored her own awful secrets.

She sat across from me. A woman whose broken-brained mother descended into a schizophrenic stupor, leaving her and her sister to wander the abandoned basements of Kips Bay in 1942.

Her first husband, Erwin, suffered from severe mental illness and legally gave up his children. He died of the same rare form of Oculopharyngeal Muscular Dystrophy that eventually came for my siblings. Jimmy, a heroin addict, died homeless in front of the Bowery Mission from a heroin-induced asthma attack. Pastor Reggie didn’t even know Jimmy’s last name was Blaustein. Every single one of her kids survived multiple suicide attempts.

Over the white ceramic tea cups and the wreckage of our family tree, she leaned in.

“I was molested by my father.”

The clatter of the silverware stopped. The din of strangers conversing faded. The ambient noise of a busy Tuesday night in Brooklyn dropped out of the atmosphere.

My jaw locked tight enough to crack a tooth. A sharp, hot ache bloomed right behind my left eye.

She said it again. The words just sat there, suspended in the air over the steaming cups of oolong tea.

Julie.

My grandfather. Julius. The former bar owner and college football player. The guy who drove an hour from New Jersey Avenue in Brooklyn to Murray Hill to pick up his kids. The frantic father who searched the subterranean cellars near the East River when his daughters were lost in the dark, terrified they had fallen into the water and drowned.

Rona was seven years old. She couldn’t pee. A basic, biological malfunction.

Julie didn’t take her to a doctor. His solution to his daughter’s urinary retention was to stick his finger inside her. To stimulate something. To make the urine come out.

He did it multiple times.

Families are supposed to be safe havens. They aren’t. They are just groups of damaged people bumping into each other in the dark, passing off trauma as home remedies.

Up until this moment, my mother had spoken glowingly of her father. Suddenly, my mother’s behavior- the anxiety, low self-esteem, excessive loud talking, the hoarding, and aggressively prudish opinions- made sense, but in the most horrific way.

Was it an intentional, deviant, sexual act? We will never know, but my mother didn’t believe it was, and based on what I know, I don’t think so either — but words can’t really convey how deeply irresponsible and unsettling his actions were. While he thought he was helping, he partially destroyed my mother and gave her an awful memory she thought about every day.

At this moment in time, dementia has resurrected my father, brother, and sisters. She has forgotten any parent’s worst nightmare: her children dying. I assure you, she hasn’t forgotten what her father did.

I needed a minute. I needed to stand up and walk outside. I needed to throw up. No time.

It got worse.

“And then there was the cleaning lady,” she said. “The Polish one.”

Rona was five. Two years before Julie. The cleaning lady molested both her and Thelma. The details are horrific. Worse than what I have already described. I can’t even write it because it’s that nauseating.

My mother held onto that for decades. She didn’t say a word about it until she was in her forties. When she finally asked her older sister about it, Thelma just looked at her.

“That really did happen?”

A beat.

“I thought it was a dream.”

Rona just kept talking, her voice completely devoid of the horror it demanded.

I stared at her. The ice in my water glass shifted with a loud, hollow crack. A single drop of condensation rolled down the smooth glass, hit the tablecloth, and settled into a sticky ring.

I watched the water spread across the cloth.

I didn’t say a word.

It was my mother’s pain, but in that moment, all I wanted to do was die.

I looked at my mother; her eyes red, fraught with tears. She straightened up and said the most Rona thing she could possibly say…

“If you’re not going to eat that, I’m going to take it home. That’s dinner for the next three days!”

I know that stall. Mine started with my mother telling me my brother was missing… Not dead. Not yet. Just gone. Which is somehow worse, because gone means your brain gets to build the ending itself on a loop for however many days it takes a private investigator you hired to find him.

We found him.

My brother spent over twenty years as a heroin addict. He died on a sidewalk in front of the Bowery Mission in New York City—a heroin-induced asthma attack on a street he’d probably slept on more nights than I’ll ever know about. Right in front of a building whose entire purpose was to save people like him.

There’s a joke in there about proximity to salvation not counting for shit. I’ve never been able to land it clean. Some jokes you write for other people’s tragedies. But that one? That one’s still mine.

By the time EMS got to Hayden Panettiere, they were doing what the reports call “advanced cardiac life support.” A phrase designed to sound like a procedure. Not like six strangers taking turns cracking a woman’s sternum, shoving a tube down her throat, pumping her full of whatever the protocol says to pump.

Someone on the radio says “overdose.” Then “CPR in progress.” Flat. The tone you’d use to read out a drive-thru order. Because if you let your voice do anything else you’d have to stop. And that’s not the job right now.

She’s pronounced dead at 2:32 PM. Thirty-six years old. Five days from thirty-seven.

I developed a fear of the phone that never really left. For years, any call from my mother meant I was about to be told one of three things: missing, dead, or about to die. I never knew which until I picked up. So I picked up braced, every single time—like defusing something with my ear. I fielded every one of those calls for my brother. And for both my sisters.

I didn’t have to field one for Felicia, because I was already there. Asleep on a couch three feet from her, in the same apartment where my father died too (different room, same terrible silence waiting in both of them). She’d asked to spend her final days on the couch instead of a bed. We gave her that because it was the one thing left we could actually give her. Close enough, both times, that there was no phone in between. Just a room going quiet. Twice. Under the same roof.

Now it’s my mother’s nursing home that calls. I still get sick to my stomach every time the screen lights up with their number. She has two forms of dementia and falls more than she should. And I have never once, in my whole life, answered a phone from that side of my family expecting good news.

I spent 18 years as an entertainment reporter learning this dance. The department statement. The “no signs of foul play.” The coroner picking words like he’s defusing something: “no signs of trauma that would have contributed…” while the story’s already three headlines deep.

I’ve written that story. I’ve asked a publicist for comment before a body’s even cold. Because that’s the job. And the job doesn’t wait for you to feel anything about it.

Nobody warns you what happens when the job and your own life start rhyming. When you’re recording and filing 30 seconds on a stranger’s overdose at 11 PM, and your phone lights up with your mother’s number mid-sentence. You have to decide, in real time, which tragedy gets you first.

I covered Heath Ledger’s death. I watched them wheel his body out, and by then everybody already knew what happened: overdose, prescription pills, at an expensive and expansive apartment in SoHo. So there wasn’t even the mercy of not knowing yet.

I’d already lost my brother to heroin only a year earlier. I’d already helped carry my father’s body out of my parents’ building in the middle of the night, down a tiny elevator I’d ridden with my dad hundreds of times. Except this time he was in a body bag, strapped tightly to a gurney, positioned at a 90-degree angle so he could fit. So standing on that sidewalk watching strangers wheel out a stranger... it didn’t feel like a story. It felt personal. In a way I didn’t have language for yet, because grief doesn’t require press credentials before it shows up.

My reporting that day came out raw. Emotional, on the radio, in a business that doesn’t really have a slot for that. The next morning a fellow reporter (somebody who is now well-known, somebody on TV constantly) pulled me aside. He lectured me about sounding too emotional on air. Like grief was a technical error I needed to correct before the next take.

I reminded him, calmly, exactly why I sounded like that. I told him it’s allowed—it should be allowed—for a reporter to sound like a human being standing near a dead body instead of a teleprompter reading one. He didn’t argue. A while later, he sought me out and apologized.

I’ve thought about that exchange more than almost anything else from those years. How an entire industry trains you to perform detachment as professionalism. And how it takes someone actually watching the body of a person they love wheeled out, in your own life, to understand that the detachment was always the unprofessional part.

Here’s what’s officially, boringly true about her, per the Greenville Police Department and the Greenville County Coroner: no signs of foul play, no signs of trauma on autopsy. A preliminary investigation that found nothing suspicious. And a cause of death still pending “further studies.” Which is the coroner’s way of saying I know, you know, everybody in this building knows—but I’m not signing my name to it until the paperwork agrees with me.

I know that waiting room. The one where you already know the pain of the answer and the world still makes you wait for the official version.

Like grief needs a permission slip.

Turned out my brother’s addiction, the psychosis, the decades of everyone (doctors, family, me) calling him just an addict, just sick in the head, just a lost cause... it had a name underneath it the whole time. A rare, undiagnosed neuromuscular disorder. The exact same disease quietly wrecking both my sisters while I was covering somebody else’s tragedy for a living.

Twenty-plus years of my brother’s brain and body failing him in tandem. And the medical establishment handed us the real explanation in a manila folder after he was already in the ground. You want dark comedy? There it is. Government-issued, notarized, too late to matter to him.

She’d talked about her struggles before. Years ago. Out loud, when saying it out loud still cost something. Postpartum depression. Substance abuse. Anxiety. Her brother Jansen died in February 2023, just twenty-eight years old. A family gets hit twice like this, and the internet starts doing arithmetic nobody asked it to do in the replies. Like grief’s a word problem with a satisfying answer in the back of the book.

I don’t do that math anymore. I can’t. Not when I’ve spent my whole life bracing for a phone call that turns out to be about a third sibling, a fourth relative, one more name on a list that never seemed to stop growing. You don’t get to treat a second family tragedy as a plot twist when you’ve lived a version with four, and a fifth unfolding. You just get quieter. And meaner, about how casually everyone else treats it as content.

The dispatch audio was public before her own family had finished making calls. That’s the detail I can’t put down.

TMZ had it. People had it. Somewhere a stringer with a police scanner and a Red Bull got a scoop off a dying woman’s last documented sound and turned it into content before the coroner said her name out loud to a reporter. I know that stringer. I was, some nights, that stringer. And I’m not going to pretend otherwise to make myself the hero of this story.

We built celebrity death coverage the way we built slaughterhouses. Efficient, humane-sounding, technically legal, but nobody wants to actually watch the line move. Somebody’s getting an engagement bonus this quarter. It isn’t her. And it sure wasn’t my brother, whose death got one paragraph in one paper because he wasn’t famous. Just mine.

People are already lining up her substance abuse history like a little bow on the box. Woman struggled before, woman found dead of a suspected overdose. Connect the two dots, close the tab, go back to your day. Tidy. Tidy is comforting. Tidy lets you stop thinking about it by lunch.

But bodies don’t work like headlines. A thirty-six-year-old heart has a thousand quiet ways to just stop. And heart attacks don’t leave a note explaining themselves… No matter how badly a subreddit wants closure by dinner. It’s tantamount to the same energy as guessing the ending before the movie’s over and announcing it to the whole theater…. Except this ending’s a person, with friends and family, whose death will cause ripple effects throughout the rest of time.

It was months before I saw my brother’s death certificate. My father’s and Felicia’s came faster, because at least we were in the room. In the same apartment, close enough both times that there was no gap between the last breath and the knowing.

Hers will take however long South Carolina takes. None of those timelines move at the speed of a scroll. I’ve learned that from both sides now: once professionally, watching other families wait while I typed. And over and over personally, on a couch, on my parents’ bed, on the other end of a phone I never wanted to answer.

There wasn’t a single word from 18 years in entertainment journalism that made any of the personal ones easier than the last.

She’ll get her real cause of death eventually. Filed. Checked off. Closed like a case number, right underneath what she already was to the people who knew her before this week made her a headline.

The scanner’s already halfway to the next name. It doesn’t slow down for anybody. It never did. Not for her. Not for my brother. Not for my father. Not for Felicia. Not for Hillary. Not for the mother I still can’t hear ring without bracing.

Anyway…

Tapper brought him on to discuss the “secrecy” surrounding Donald Trump’s health. Reiner wrote an op-ed pointing out the obvious: the bruising on Trump’s hands, the swelling in his legs, the fact that he seems to struggle to stay awake during basic public functions.

The White House responded by calling Reiner an “ass-hat” (surprisingly articulate for this administration!) engaging in “armchair diagnosis for political purposes.” They then insisted, as they always do, that the 80-year-old President is the “sharpest, most accessible, and energetic” leader in American history.

I guess if American History comprised of the 10 seconds before they released that statement, they would be right!

Watching this whole deeply stupid cycle play out, I realized something: The Trump has fundamentally broken how the press operates. It has turned journalism into news reporting for six-year-olds.

Think about it. We are constantly forced to treat objective reality like it’s a grand, unsolvable mystery.

The media brings on expert panels to gently suggest that maybe, just maybe, the 80-year-old man who eats garbage, refuses to exercise, and hides his medical records isn’t in peak physical condition.

We have functioning eyeballs. No world-renowned cardiologist necessary.

We can see that the guy is slowly transforming into Chris Christie Light (which is hardly light at all). We see the weird, unexplained bruises on his hands. We see him dragging his leg and limping around.

We literally watch him fall asleep on camera. Everywhere. It’s not a secret.

The guy takes more public naps than a narcoleptic toddler.

Yet, we are supposed to pretend we don’t notice. The machine forces the press to debate basic object permanence. They demand we ignore our lying eyes, look at a guy who is visibly falling apart, and nod along when his base calls him a prime “alpha male.”

“We are constantly forced to treat objective reality like it’s a grand, unsolvable mystery.”

Not sure when eating 6 sleeves of Girl Scout cookies after downing a Big Mac and 3 Diet Cokes makes you an alpha male, but here we are.

It forces you to seriously question their intelligence. Are they just incredibly gullible, entirely brainwashed in a cult, or just plain stupid?

It’s exhausting.

You don’t need a cardiologist on a cable news panel to tell you what’s going on. You don’t need an investigative report to confirm that an 80-year-old man who lives on fast food might not be the picture of health.

But this is the reality distortion field at work. When you lie constantly, about everything, you force everyone else to live inside your fiction just so they have a framework to argue with you. You force serious journalists to debate whether the sky is blue.

When did pointing out the glaringly obvious become a radical act of journalism?

We are constantly being asked to validate his hallucinations, whether it’s about the economy, crowd sizes, or his own physical health. And when a doctor finally steps up and says, Hey, maybe the Emperor isn’t looking so hot, the White House calls him an “ass-hat.”

It’s not just that they’re lying. It’s that they are forcing us to play dumb. They are treating the American public like kindergarteners who haven’t quite grasped that things exist even when you can’t see them.

Or in this case, that things exist especially when you can see them clearly on live television.

That actually came out of the White House. Kush Desai said it on Newsmax.

“Kush” is also the name of an Indica cannabis strain, which is appropriate because most of the shit that comes out of that guy’s mouth sounds like it’s coming from someone high.

“Leave it to the mainstream media to try to make the story about themselves.”

Really.

That was their official defense for President Trumpelstilskin sneaking onto a backup plane in Turkey because he was terrified of an assassination attempt… Leaving his own cabinet members and the press pool on the decoy plane to, possibly, be blown to smithereens. You know, people with children, spouses, friends, and parents who care about them.

Think about that. Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest and finished a speech. Lincoln walked around Ft. Stevenson with Confederate snipers nearby. At least 24 Presidents fought in various wars.

Trump? Five draft deferrals, and he hid on a separate jet, using his inner circle as human shields.

In criminal law, there is a concept called “depraved indifference to human life.” It means you act so recklessly that you clearly don’t care if the people around you die as a direct result of your actions.

If a Fortune 500 CEO sneaked onto a backup jet to save his own skin, and forced his employees to fly a decoy plane through a warzone to take a potential missile strike? He’d be indicted for attempted murder by the end of the week.

But it’s the Kush Desai quote that is the tell; complaining that people are “making it about themselves” when they were just used as literal targets. It is a masterclass in gaslighting.

Donald Trump spent 11 years systematically dehumanizing the press. He turned them into a faceless avatar. “The Enemy.”

When you use hyperbole and repeat lies to an astoundingly gullible base, stripping away people’s humanity for a decade, it gets really easy to justify sacrificing them.

He has inflated his own ego to such messianic levels that he genuinely thinks his life is sacred, and yours is disposable. To him, leaving innocent people on a plane to take a potential missile strike isn’t a scandal. It’s just obvious.

Yes, all Presidents have egos. Yes, past Presidents have ordered men into battle knowing they would die. But soldiers signed up for war. We have 45 other Presidents who understood you don’t sacrifice your civilian staff and press pool just to save your own skin.

But honestly? We shouldn’t be surprised. This is who he has always been.

The “alpha-male strongman” routine is a cheap hustle. We have the evidence that he cheats at golf. We have the court documents showing he cheats in business. His name is mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files. We are being asked to fear a guy who takes more naps on camera than a narcoleptic toddler.

The script is falling apart. The lies are getting more desperate.

He demonstrably lied for five months straight about this war in Iran. He demonstrably lied about the damage to the reflecting pool. He is literally pissed at Jeanine Pirro right now because she wouldn’t defend his imagination.

He doesn’t want news coverage. He wants you to validate his hallucinations.

Just listen to him. Violence just emanates from his lips. He throws around death threats and talks about bombing people like a 12-year-old playing a first-person shooter. He calls for it like he’s dictating a shopping list for the supermarket. (Not that he’s actually been inside a supermarket outside of a staged photo op).

When a guy demands you ignore his crimes, ignore his cowardice, and ignore objective reality just to protect his ego... you aren’t a political base anymore.

You are a human shield.

The media isn’t “making the story about themselves.” They are pointing out a terrifying reality.

The President of the United States just proved, out loud and in public, that your life means absolutely nothing to him.

My pocket vibrated. A Motorola flip phone. The screen read “Mommy.”

I hadn’t called her Mommy since 2006.

Since 1990, every ringing phone was just a countdown to my brother’s death. I had the physical muscle memory for it. It started the day we walked into the Coney Island Hospital ER. We marched straight to the nurses’ station. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with dead brown eyes and zero shits to give, didn’t soften the blow.

“Your son is here for a heroin overdose”.

I caught my mother’s elbow as her knees gave out. If I hadn’t been there, her skull would have bounced off the linoleum.

Seventeen years of this. He threatened to kill me at the Sheepshead Bay train station, right near where I once lived. We wrestled very briefly. I threw him up against a car and de-escalated him. More death threats. Rehab facilities in Pennsylvania he walked out of two days later. Pulling him out of a drug den in Alphabet City. Having him arrested in Tompkins Square Park just to keep him alive.

I pressed the green button on the Motorola.

“Where are you?” Her voice was thin. Frantic.

“Walking into work. Why? What’s wrong?”

Silence. Just the howling wind off the Hudson and the dead air on the line.

“I think he’s gone. I know it. I think he died.”

“What? Wait. What do you mean?”

“His bank statement. I just got it in the mail. Three weeks. He hasn’t withdrawn a dime in three weeks. I called the bank. He takes out money every week. It’s how I know he’s okay. He’s not okay. He’s gone.”

The ice-cold air lashed my face. My jaw locked. She was right.

We learned the rest a few weeks later. The private detective pieced the whole goddamn thing together. Jimmy had been dead for six weeks. He died of a heroin-induced asthma attack on the concrete in front of the Bowery Mission.

My mother and I went to the Mission and sat with Pastor Reggie. The room smelled like industrial cleaner and stale coffee. Reggie folded his hands. He wasn’t aware Jimmy had a family.

He didn’t even know Jimmy’s last name was Blaustein. Because of the brutal neuromuscular disorder tearing apart his throat, Jimmy was incredibly challenging to understand. He couldn’t articulate his own identity. Instead, he used his biological father’s last name. Erwin. The severely mentally ill phantom who legally gave Jimmy up decades ago.

Pastor Reggie buried a guy named Jimmy who belonged to nobody. He put him in a charity box in the dirt at Mt. Calvary Cemetery.

A system failure from top to bottom. Erwin died in 1986. The doctors told us he had ALS. They were wrong. Years later, the geneticists figured out it was a rare form of Oculopharyngeal Muscular Dystrophy that came with a mental illness component. They diagnosed Jimmy posthumously. The hospital didn’t catch it. The mission didn’t know him. The city just threw him in the ground.

“We want him back,” I told Reggie.

It wasn’t that simple. Nothing in New York City is that simple. The city doesn’t just hand over a body because you ask nicely.

Weeks turned into months.

We filled out paperwork. We made phone calls. My jaw was permanently locked. I walked into the ABC News building every day, sat at my desk, and thought about my brother decomposing in a stranger’s grave. We had to prove a guy using a fake last name was actually our blood. We had to fight a system that let him suffocate on the concrete to give us the right to take him home.

Months.

My mother sat in her apartment, waiting for a signature from a city clerk. I stopped checking the mail. The physical weight of him sitting in the wrong dirt settled in the back of my neck and stayed there.

Eventually, the city relented. The paperwork cleared. We hired the right people, signed the right forms, and had him disinterred. We moved him to our family plot.

I was the youngest of four siblings. Now I was the youngest of three. Little did I know that in 11 years’ time, it would just be me.

He is the first President in American history to govern entirely by narrative. MAGA isn’t a political base. It’s a fandom.

And he treats them exactly like a legacy rock star out on a perpetual stadium tour. He just gets on stage and plays the greatest hits. The border. The radical left. The fake news. The crowd doesn’t want new material or white papers on the tax code. They just want to sing along to the chorus.

And just like a hardcore music fandom, they absolutely do not care about the off-stage behavior.

Look at Michael Jackson. There is a mountain of overwhelming, horrific evidence about what that guy did to kids. But his diehard fans? They either flat-out refuse to believe it, or they simply do not care. As long as the moonwalk is good, they’ll buy the ticket. There’s a long list of famous musicians who behaved like absolute monsters but kept their arenas packed because the audience was addicted to the show.

Trump’s base operates on the exact same psychological wavelength. You can wave 34 felony convictions in their faces. You can show them the fraud, the blatant grift, the horrible way he behaves. It doesn’t matter. You are trying to cancel their favorite artist while they’re waiting for the encore.

They bought a ticket to a franchise where they get to be the heroes, and Trump is the frontman constantly feeding them what they want to hear.

His sycophants don’t respond to governance. They respond to messaging.

Look at the Mueller Report.

Before the actual 400-page document dropped, Bill Barr released a four-page summary. In the entertainment business, we call that cutting a trailer. Barr cut a highly deceptive trailer that completely misrepresented the actual movie. But it didn’t matter. He planted the “Total Exoneration” flag in the ground first.

By the time the real report came out, the audience had already eaten their popcorn and gone home. The narrative concrete had dried. Objective reality didn’t stand a chance against a perfectly timed teaser trailer.

This is why the relentless lying works. It’s not a glitch. It’s the entire operating system.

If you lie once, you get caught. If you lie ten times a day, every single day, for years? You aren’t just lying anymore. You are world-building. You are forcing the rest of the country to live inside your fiction just so they have a framework to argue with you.

Just turn on your TV today. It’s Sunday morning. We are watching it happen in real-time.

You have Senator Jim Banks looking Kristen Welker dead in the eye and saying Trump deserves an A+ on the economy because “every single jobs report except for this one has exceeded expectations.” A complete fabrication.

You have RNC Chair Joe Gruters going on NewsNation. The anchor reads him the actual, devastating reality—3.5% inflation, $4 gas, 1.5% GDP under Republican control. Gruters doesn’t even blink. He just pivots straight to the script: “Biden’s disastrous economic record.”

Then you have Kevin Hassett. He goes on Fox News to blame Biden for current prices, then jumps over to CNN to try and sell Jake Tapper on the idea that Trump’s economy is “the greatest of our lifetime.” Tapper actually brings the receipts and dismantles him, leaving Hassett stammering, “Right, well, okay, so, uh” on live television.

But here is the depressing part: the stammering doesn’t matter.

Hassett getting embarrassed doesn’t matter. The facts don’t matter. They aren’t debating economic policy. They are just reciting the logline of the movie Trump is directing. If they say “greatest economy ever” enough times, the base will just buy the ticket.

Think about his favorite catchphrase. How many times have we been promised something is happening “in two weeks”?

A beautiful new healthcare plan? Two weeks.
Massive infrastructure rollout? Two weeks.
The greatest economic policy you’ve ever seen? Two weeks.

It is a literal cliffhanger. It’s a cheap, daytime TV writing trick designed to keep the audience from changing the channel before the commercial break. The payoff never actually comes, but the payoff isn’t the point. The anticipation is the point. The plot keeps moving.

We are watching it happen right now with Iran. He keeps insisting we are inches away from some massive, historic deal. Any day now. Just around the corner.

It’s the exact same trick. There is no deal. There is no complex diplomatic policy being hammered out by experts. There is only the trailer for a deal. And as long as the base believes the trailer, they don’t care if the movie never actually hits theaters.

We are bringing spreadsheets to a story fight.

You cannot dismantle a reality distortion field with a fact-check. You can’t beat a narrative with a statistic. If we actually want to break the spell, we have to stop reviewing the villain’s bad script and figure out how to write a better one.

So when Vance makes disgusting, inexcusable comments about Abdul El-Sayed, my first instinct, like everyone else’s, is to watch him get dragged. And the internet, never one to miss a pile-on, immediately went for the dunk.

People started flooding the timeline with pictures of Vance’s wife, Usha, and their kids. Pictures of his family in India. The caption is always some variation of: Look at this massive hypocrite! How can you attack immigrants when you’re married to one!

It’s meant to be a devastating rhetorical kill shot.

There’s just one massive, uncomfortable problem.

By using his images of an Indian family to defend an Egyptian man, the people doing the dunking are being accidentally, spectacularly racist.

Abdul El-Sayed’s family is from Egypt. JD Vance’s in-laws are from India.

These two places have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Nothing.

India and Egypt aren’t even on the same continent. A massive chunk of Egypt sits in Africa. India is largely a Hindu nation; Egypt is predominantly Islamic. They are separated by nearly 3,000 miles, completely different histories, and entirely different cultures.

Assuming they are interchangeable simply because the people involved happen to have brown skin is the exact kind of lazy, monolithic racism we are supposed to be fighting against.

It instantly reminds me of the dark, panicked days right after 9/11. People were out in the streets harassing and attacking Sikh men wearing turbans because they stupidly confused them for Arabs. It is the exact same fundamental flaw in human behavior: I don’t understand the nuance of your origin, so I am going to group you into a single, terrifying “other” category.

Or, in this case, a single, convenient “gotcha” category.

As a storyteller, my job is to look at how narratives are constructed. If you want to take apart JD Vance’s narrative, you have to hit the actual weak points. You can’t just invent your own.

Do you want to call him a hypocrite? Go for it. But do it right.

The actual hypocrisy is that Vance’s in-laws are immigrants, and the hardline, draconian policies he currently champions for the Trump ticket would have likely prevented his own family from becoming naturalized citizens.

That is actual hypocrisy.

When you do that, you are attacking the policy and the man. When you just hold up a picture of an Indian family and equate them with an Egyptian family to score a point, you are just being racist.

There are a million terrible things about JD Vance and this administration. Dunking on them is not a highly complex, Olympic-level sport. It’s a layup.

But if you’re going to take the shot, do it factually. Don’t adopt the villain’s tactics just to win the argument of the day.

“Hypocrite” is the Trump brand. Don’t make it yours.

Ben Gibbard plaintively sings, “I’m thinking of what Sarah said: ‘Love is watching someone die…’” Then Ben and company stick in an interlude, giving us time to ponder that impactful thesis, followed by this right hook to the heart: “So, who’s going to watch you die?”

Admittedly, the first time I heard the lyric, I cried. It wasn’t just about watching my father die, or watching my sister Felicia pass. It was the guilt of not being able to comfort my sister Hillary when she slipped away, or the thousands of times I thought my brother had died, and when he actually did, not being there for him in those anxiety-riddled, stressful final moments.

My mother and I have been through it, and now we’re dealing with the crucible of dementia. The good news is her timeline continues to collapse, wiping out the last 20 to 25 years of her life. It means she’s forgotten that my siblings died, and as of a couple of weeks ago, the memory of my father’s demise is also slipping away.

It’s a beautifully devastating paradox…. Watching a disease steal her mind while simultaneously erasing her most profound grief.

Life has a dark and twisted sense of humor that way, which is probably why, despite clinical depression, anxiety, and PTSD, I LOVE life, and have fallen in love with LOVE.

It helps to have Tina, great friends, and an understanding that our brain’s natural inclination to put more weight on tragedy than love is just a massive flaw in our “intelligent design.”

Love is everything. So, who’s going to watch me die? The honest truth is, I have absolutely no idea. If life’s twisted sense of humor has taught me anything, it’s that there are no guarantees about who will be sitting in that room when my timeline finally runs out. But maybe that’s the terrifying, beautiful point. We don’t get to know the ending. We just get to love as fiercely as we can right now, and let the rest write itself.

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