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Back in the day, there were plenty of things we were made to feel ashamed of that were always bullshit.

Lifelong nerds know this to be true.

Playing D&D was always awesome. We shouldn’t have been made to feel lesser or outcasts because of it. Video games were always fun. Fantasy and sci-fi movies were the best.

The society that set us up to feel shame for liking any of this never made any sense to me.

That said, there should be some place for shame in American culture.

And while I’m glad that plenty of groups now feel freer to live the lives they want to live, there is one group that I think deserves to be made to feel shame, and to bear the consequences of their shameful actions. And that group now seems totally free of it.

Politicians.

We live in a strange time where we all seem to understand that shame is less powerful than it used to be as a control on bad behavior. You look at Donald Trump and you might come away thinking shamelessness has no consequences anymore.

But the secret is that this is not actually true.

I want to make the case that shamelessness can delay consequences. It can certainly muddy them. Make them harder to recognize. It can let a pathetic, dishonest wannabe tyrant hold an office he should have never been allowed to enter or continue a corrupt business venture that should have been shut down on day one. But I do not actually believe it can totally erase the costs.

And, in more ways than you might think, a politician simply sticking around through sheer shamelessness can end with them suffering in more diverse and corrosive ways than they would have had they simply owned up to their faults or crimes.

So let’s talk about what that actually looks like.

Take Rep. Max Miller.

He was (I certainly hope you know by now) the target of allegations of truly reprehensible domestic violence and abuse. Despite that, he’s still the GOP candidate.

Miller seems to think: the House Republican caucus isn’t going to force me to step down. They’re barely even going to criticize me. I guess I got away with it!

But based on the polling, not so fast, buddy! He might well still lose his career.

And when he finally goes, it will be in a more embarrassing fashion than if he had done the manly thing and stepped down after the allegations came forward.

The consequences could end up being far worse for the Republican caucus, too.

Had they had the moral fortitude necessary to force this guy out, they’d have a better chance of winning this race. And when the battle for the House could come down to a single seat, that’s a pretty significant consequence.

Others are shameless not in the face of crimes they’ve committed, but their own cowardice in defending themselves from vicious, dishonest attacks.

You might have already guess that I’m talking about Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz now regularly prostrates himself before the man who mocked him, his family, and his wife, implying that Trump’s dishonest and disgraceful attacks were actually shrewd politics.

This week he called Trump a “political genius” for viciously lying about him. I bet he thinks he’s clever. I bet he thinks this is a clever strategy. I think it’s a man trying to convince himself that crawling on his belly in the mud as the nation laughs at him for a decade was ackshully him playing political chess.

He should be ashamed of himself. I’m sure that he is, in fact. But he can’t express it any more than he can criticize Trump as he certainly wishes he could.

Ted Cruz will act in this fundamentally humiliating fashion because he thinks that’s what’s necessary to maintain a position in the party. He thinks: I showcase loyalty, even in a humiliating fashion, and look, I still have a place in the party.

Sure.

But do you have the respect of your constituents?

We’ll see in the next election. But bear in mind that Ted Cruz has always looked beyond the Senate to the next step. This dude has been biding his time to run for president again once Donald Trump is no longer around.

And I feel confident in stating that this is not going to work out for him the way he thinks it will.

He has humiliated himself in front of the nation. He’s been able to keep his Senate seat, and I guess that’s something. But people remember when he fled to Cancun. They know all the times he embarrassed himself when it comes to Trump. I think we all remember the fundraising phone call photo…

So don’t tell me he isn’t suffering consequences.

They might not be immediate. They might not be obvious.

But they’re there.

Let’s turn now to good ole’ Petey boy.

Pete Hegseth was able to get confirmed as Secretary of Defense despite his well-documented drinking problems, his unwillingness to commit to resign from that post if he drank on the job, and the allegations of the various ways he has abused women in the past.

In an age where shame mattered, he never would have been put forward for this position. A position he was obviously not qualified for.

And in an age of shame, were he to be put forward for the position, he would have been laughed out of the Senate hearing.

So, on some level, Pete Hegseth, like these other men, probably thinks: oh, look, I pulled one over on America. I was shameless, and it all worked out.

But did it?

He has the position. But can he keep it?

There are mounting indications that Trump might be ready to throw him under the bus, making him the fall guy for the failure of our campaign against Iran. And even if he doesn’t… even if Hegseth manages to last out the Trump term as Secretary of Defense… he’s now going to have this massive albatross around his neck when he tries to run for president.

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Stranger things have happened, I suppose. But I find it hard to believe that America is going to rush to pull the lever for a guy who just spent the last four years losing a war, and losing that war in a way that resulted in massive, sustained increases in the price of gasoline, groceries, etc.

But we don’t have to look ahead to 2028 to see the consequences of Pete Hegseth’s shamelessness.

Look at the day-to-day existence he has.

A morally upstanding man, a man with a healthy value system, some self-control, and high standards for himself, would hold that position (particularly if he didn’t really deserve it in the firs tplace) by working to gain the respect of those in the Pentagon and the various branches of the armed forces.

But Pete Hegseth, perhaps lulled into a false sense of personal security by the lack of obvious consequences for his shameless behavior, instead invades the Pentagon like a bull in a china shop.

And how has that worked out for him?

Vacancies in the top tier of Pentagon leadership are mounting, increasing week by week.

Well-regarded, highly experienced generals appear to have no interest in serving with this buffoon. They don’t respect him. They never will.

And as they leave, it becomes harder and harder to imagine that he doesn’t see how fundamentally embarrassing that is.

He has the position, but he doesn’t have the respect that position is supposed to command.

He’s just kind of… there.

And as I said earlier, the long-term consequences of his time in that position will almost certainly doom any greater political aspirations or ambitions he might have.

Side note on a personal level with Pete Hegseth: despite all the things he has apparently done vis-à-vis women, despite the damning letter that his mother once wrote about what she thinks of her son, he was able to snare another woman.

So maybe shamelessness worked in this case.

And yet?

She follows him everywhere he goes. Literally drives him to work and sits in on his meetings. They’ve tried to present this as something positive.

Who’s buying that?

So, on both a professional and a personal level, Pete Hegseth’s shamelessness has gotten him technically to where he wants to be.

But does anyone think this is how he imagined it would go for him?

No.

I’ve saved the most shameless for last.

Donald Trump, of course, is (and I certainly hope always will be) the king of both shameful acts and shameless responses to them.

I’ll set the politics to the side for just a moment and focus, as we have recently on the Substack, on his shameful personal behavior. Not just the many, many, many allegations of sexual assault and harassment, but the multiple alleged affairs against his wife.

Some MAGA men look at Trump’s scandals and see proof that shame no longer matters. He did the things. He denied the things. He survived the things. He kept the office, the party, the rallies, the applause.

But did he really escape consequence?

One need only look at the obviously loveless public image of his marriage to see the answer. Maybe the consequence was not a resignation speech or a tearful press conference. Maybe the consequence is walking through your personal life like an undead creature: technically married, technically surrounded by family, but visibly untouched by love, intimacy, or respect.

A case could be made that these consequences are actually worse than if he had owned up to his faults, his mistakes, and possibly even his crimes, and in so doing earned a bit of their respect.

The death of shame appears to have landed him in a worse position, not a better one.

And sure, he’s the president. He has billions of dollars. But when was the last time you saw him draw any real, sustained pleasure from any of that?

The consequences are there, for all of these pathetic men.

You just have to think about it a little bit.

And look, while I believe everything I’ve said here, I think there’s room for some nuance.

I’m not trying to produce copium. I’m not going to tell you we don’t have a problem. I would obviously prefer if we moved back into a healthier political and cultural environment when it comes to shame.

I wish Pete Hegseth would be too embarrassed to post his Twitter attack against those Canadian cadets. I wish he would know that would be a national scandal and be too afraid to sign his name to it. I wish we lived in that world.

I wish Max Miller’s career would have been over the moment the allegations came out. I wish the same when George Santos’s crimes were revealed. And Donald Trump should have never made it within a hundred miles of the Oval Office.

So pointing out the various ways that their shamelessness has still undercut them, soured the experience, and may have future ramifications for where they go from here is not the same as saying the death of shame doesn’t matter.

It still does.

And that distinction matters.

We’re in a dark place, but we’re not doomed.

People still care. Not enough. Certainly not consistently enough. Not quickly enough. But they care. They notice. They remember.

That isn’t a solution.

But it is a starting point.

A starting point for rebuilding a political culture with at least some minimal accountability for these pathetic, broken men.

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P.S. What’s the most shameless political moment you still can’t forgot? Post it in the comments. I know we all have a few.

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Warning: This isn’t even close to my final draft, optimally reasoned, intellectual argument against AI.

That will come. Certainly there’s no lack of material. AI is wasteful of our resources. It’s environmentally obscene. It threatens countless jobs. It’s being forced into every corner of our lives completely without our consent by some of the least trustworthy people on Earth. It may even be, if you listen to some of the people building it, apocalyptic.

We can talk about all of that. We should talk about all of that. But this week what I can’t get past is this.

Increasingly, I find AI repulsive. Like in the classic sense of the word.

It grosses me out. The technology is fundamentally sad. Lazy.

It is, altogether, a massive fucking bummer.

Maybe it’s hyperbolic. I don’t know. But these days, I feel like AI might be the worst technology ever produced.

Because sure, plenty of technologies have made grandiose claims they couldn’t make good on, or never actually accomplished much of anything. I mean, how many of you have a 3D TV? Virtual reality is still likely to give you a headache or the cold sweats. The metaverse was so thoroughly lame even Mark Zuckerberg eventually got bored in there. And don’t get me started on NFTs.

AI feels different though.

It’s unique in that, yes, it’s bad in all of the ways that it doesn’t work, and maybe even worse in the limited cases in which it does.

Cases which, by the way, are far more limited than the constantly overhyped statements of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk would have you believe.

Our society was already awash in a flood of enshittification. A drive toward sameness across media, regional accents, restaurant decor, music, and cinema. And AI has turned that stream into a fire hose of lowest-common-denominator nothingness.

Slop, sure.

But worse than just slop.

Have you noticed that text on YouTube thumbnails only seems to come in two or three fonts? Have you noticed that the wraps on vans, the signs in the windows of restaurants, the posters for small events, the fake ads, the digital flyers, and the newsletter graphics all increasingly look like they came from the same dead-eyed clanker content swamp?

It’s because, despite having digested the creative output of literally millions of artists, writers, photographers, designers, poets and painters, AI across multiple platforms and trillions of dollars of investment has like one visual style it uses. And that style blows.

The joke used to be “graphic design is my passion.” I wish that were still the case. I would take an infinite number of those old-school, shitty, ham-fisted, poorly composited Photoshop attempts from well-meaning amateurs over the boring sameness of every piece of visual noise Grok or Claude or ChatGPT can shit out onto a strip of vinyl or a newsletter.

Every bulletin board is covered in the same lazy slop now. I would be infinitely more interested in a crayon drawing your kid threw together for your kickball event, golf tournament, book sale or open mic night.

And don’t get me started on literally anything having to do with kids.

Expectations have never been especially high for art targeted at our little ones. Kids have always gotten plenty of cheap animation, tacky books, bad songs, and aggressively annoying videos. Still, I don’t think there is any realm AI has invaded more quickly or thoroughly than videos, music, images, and books targeted at the next generation.

That should bother us so god damn much more than it does.

There is something especially gross about training children to consume things no one cared enough to make. Videos assembled by prompt. Or not even by prompt, because even that implies a person wrote some text. Increasingly its bots producing the prompts to produce the slop. Its like a human centipede but the centipede is, itself, just more shit.

Our kids are quite literally defenseless against all of this, and I fear we’re not taking seriously our duty to protect them. Their tiny little brains. Their sense of wonder. Their capacity of creativity. Their attention spans.

But it isn’t just the kids being preyed on. I feel it too.

I don’t like the anxiety I get looking at vertical videos and wondering if the people in them, or the words being said, ever truly existed in the real world.

Or seeing a book advertised online and wondering if a pair of human hands had anything to do with the cover. Or, hell, the writing of the book in the first place.

It’s small consolation that, as of right now, AI text is nearly as easy to distinguish as AI art. But it seems to be improving at least somewhat in that respect, and that gives me even more dread.

I don’t want to have to think about it. I don’t want to have to emotionally or psychologically grapple with the idea that we’re surrounded by people or corporations who are happy to strip the humanity, the lived experience, the unique flavor, and the inherent quality that a person brings to prose, to music, to a digital painting.

I don’t want to be forced to assume that every board game Kickstarter I check out is more likely than not going to have AI-generated card art.

That every movie trailer or show intro could have employed talented artists but decided, ah to hell with it, I’m good with prompts. What’s the worst that could happen?

That every speech delivered by a politician has a good chance of including prompt-smoothed text in the teleprompter.

I don’t want any technology to invade every facet of our lives. And by far least of all do I want a technology that has done so little to earn the increasingly widespread, if fundamentally flawed, uses it’s put to.

But maybe I’m launching myself into this pessimistic AI doom spiral unnecessarily. Maybe the backlash is already coming. Maybe it is already here.

The polling seems fairly clear that the generalized anxiety people had over the last few years about AI’s effect on jobs has evolved into something bigger. Growing opposition to corrupt data-center construction, distrust of the tech bros managing these platforms, and support for further regulations to protect our privacy, our water, our electricity, and our humanity from being ground down and processed by the clankers to produce an endless line of “products” people did not ask for and do not want.

That’s good. I like that.

But attempts to nudge our politicians in the right direction on these critical issues have a good chance of running full speed into a wall of campaign donations from tech corporations that, despite their perpetual failure to generate meaningful profits with these AI tools, somehow seem to have an infinite bankroll to buy our politics.

That’s a start. People are paying attention to the technology, the investments, and credit to them for doing that. It certainly doesn’t hurt that every one of these companies is run by a socially maladjusted little monopoly goblin that helps our cause every time they open their mouths to browbeat us into submission.

But what I want, fundamentally, is for the disgust to spread. To become fully normalized.

I want people to feel the… flinch? The subconscious sense that something is wrong.

It’s the smell, if there is such a thing.

The immediate recognition beyond conscious thought that something artificial is at play. A deep, all-senses uncanny valley sensation. I want people to see AI text and feel in their bones that nothing is truly being communicated. I want them to see an AI image and feel how freaking cheap and same-y it is.

I want them to have the training and the will to see it all and say, simply, “No. I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for this. Get this out of my face.”

There’s already plenty of evidence that people literally do not value things created by AI. I think we need to go a significant step further.

I think we need to actively turn away from it.

Actively bar it from our lives.

And don’t feel at any point that you need to be polite about it. God knows the tech bros have never been polite as they ram it down our throats, inject it into every app and website, and plop their brutalist AI megacenters in the middle of our communities.

There are significant psychological and emotional benefits to be had from doing so, and it’s beyond the scope of this piece for me to delve into it, although I almost certainly will in the future.

And I have no doubt that those of us calling for this sort of reaction will be called backward or ignorant. Opposed to progress.

I’m not opposed to technology that benefits humanity. But count me down until my last days as opposed to technology that kills it. That seeks to replace it. To pervert it.

And I get that there’s a slippery slope. I don’t believe nor am I saying that every use of AI is equally repulsive or, in the extreme, evil. God knows I have more than a little experience with it myself. How else would I have generated the deep revulsion towards it that drives me to write this?

Either way, resistance can’t be futile. And it is the first step.

Because we deserve better. Our kids deserve better. You, dear reader, deserve better.

You might not be able to single-handedly stop a data center from being built, although don’t discount the possibility. You might not be able to shepherd through an AI or data-center Bill of Rights, although please keep calling your representatives.

You don’t have to accept a cheap, soulless, increasingly empty version of the world we once knew.

You can refuse to let this parasitic technology remove all of the things from your life that make life worth living. You can refuse to pretend the slop is good, in whatever form it comes in. You can refuse to reward people or corporations or bots for making it. You can refuse to let them convince you that a world with fewer artists, writers, musicians, photographers, teachers, conversations, mistakes and flaws and well-intentioned if ultimately fatally flawed learning experiences… a world with less humans and humanity is somehow more advanced.

It isn’t. Its just a fucking bummer.

And so to Elon and Mark and Sam and Jensen and Dario I say…

Your slop is bad.

And you should feel bad.

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Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: I don’t think Donald Trump is having an actual sexual affair with Natalie Harp. I don’t believe Jon Ossoff or other prominent critics of Trump on the topic of Harp think that he’s actually having sex with her either.

But there are few who will deny that he’s damn sure had a lot of them lo these many years.

And that’s small consolation for Melania Trump, I’d wager.

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Because the humiliating part for Melania is not that Trump is necessarily cheating in a physical sense. The humiliating part is that the best-case scenario is still undeniably humiliating.

After all of the public scandals, the debacle over Stormy Daniels, the hush-money trial, let alone E. Jean Carroll, the sum total of the relationship progress Melania can apparently expect is that I guess he’s probably not having sex with his aide.

Congratulations, I suppose.

So, with that out of the way, let’s also keep it real: he almost certainly wants to.

We know who he is. We know what he’s said and what he’s done. We’re not children, and we’re not going to feign a child’s ignorance of who we’re dealing with here. I can’t prove it, sure. But in your heart of hearts, you know the professional appeal of Natalie Harp is probably not the entire story.

Which is doubly embarrassing, because not only is he keeping another young, pretty blonde around because he finds her attractive and she’s devoted to him (side note, weirdly devoted… those love letters are deeply strange, and that has to be particularly embarrassing for Melania Trump if she has any actual romantic feelings for Donald Trump, or love, or anything approaching it) but Natalie Harp is yet another of these women Donald Trump is interested in who bears, I’ll say it, a disturbing similarity to Ivanka Trump.

I get at this point that Donald Trump is never going to be faithful to a woman. That ship sailed in the ’70s or ’80s. And he doesn’t seem to have suffered any actual consequences for any of the constant infidelity.

That said, is it asking too much for him not to constantly remind the world that he has been publicly, repeatedly, grotesquely weird about his daughter?

Credit to the big guy: he stopped openly talking about it on TV shows. That’s something, I guess. But if you’re going to drag a young woman around so you can look at her, could she maybe be a redhead? Something decidedly, obviously, indisputably not Ivanka-ish?

Anyway, back to Melania.

There’s this big debate going on online about the extent to which Melania is bothered by this. Supposedly, sources indicate that it does bother her. I guess I accept that, at least a little.

Now, Melania is not a good person. I don’t have a surplus of empathy for her in general. She’s quite literally made her bed. She’s as corrupt as any of the other Trumps. She seems to care little, if at all, about what effect her husband’s actions or statements have on America.

I mean, reminder: she even branded that lack of compassion.

But there is still a basic human desire not to be made a fool of. And this makes her look like a fool.

It’s embarrassing for all of this to be happening in public view. It’s embarrassing for all of this to be happening yet again. And it’s especially embarrassing because we can’t even assume, as we might in most cases, that this is bothering her because the man she loves, the husband she’s devoted to, is either stepping out with another woman or at least wishes that he could.

We might expect that with most women, with most couples. But as I delved into in last week’s post about the sad state of Trump’s marriage, there is no reason to believe Donald and Melania have even a close-acquaintance level of warmth or affection for each other.

The onus is decidedly on anyone who wants to claim that they have a relationship like any random husband and wife plucked from anywhere in America.

If they actually enjoyed each other’s company, they’d probably live in the same region. If they actually had any level of physical intimacy, they might occasionally share a bed. At minimum, they might appear in public with the energy of two people who’ve met before.

In fact, the only thing they definitely do share with one another is a love for grift and corruption. A love of launching one bullshit product after another and scamming their followers out of every damn cent they can.

But even that, for the most part, is engaged in in a way we in the board game community might call “multiplayer solitaire.” They both love doing it. They just don’t really do it together.

What was the last time they launched a product or service that both of them were involved in? I mean, hell, Donald even does that with his sons, and he barely seems to like them.

So to the extent that this does bother Melania, I don’t think it has to be about an actual sense of betrayal. I don’t think she cares enough about Donald Trump to feel betrayed. I certainly don’t think she has any standards for him that would lead her to be surprised by these constant alleged indiscretions, if not infidelities.

No, I think it’s the most base-level human desire not to be made a fool of.

Melania, on any random day, seems perfectly content to live her solitary, private life in Mar-a-Lago. A life of isolation, but riches.

She doesn’t seem to expect much from Donald Trump, or from their quote-unquote “family.” But what I think, on some level, she does expect is that Mar-a-Lago will not be turned into the world’s most ornate cuck chair.

That is the bargain, as far as I can tell.

She gets the wealth. He gets the image of a wife. She gets distance. He gets the brand. She gets her solitary, gilded life in Florida. He gets to keep pretending that the whole arrangement looks normal. But one of the implied terms of that bargain has to be this: do not make me look ridiculous in public again.

After having to undergo the years-long news cycle around Stormy Daniels, at the very least, she probably thought she wouldn’t have to undergo that again. And the Natalie Harp story is still young. It’s possible it won’t rise to that level. I’ll state once again: I don’t think they’re actually having sex.

But the embarrassment has got to feel like a wound being picked at. Something that had barely started to scab over being scraped raw with every reference in a speech by Jon Ossoff, every podcast episode hosted by Michael Wolff, every Oval Office question that leads to a Donald Trump meltdown.

That meltdown could be read, if we’re being charitable, as outrage over a piece of news that is truly fake. But with what we know of Donald Trump, it reads more to me as an indication of how close to home these questions actually hit.

And I think she’d like to avoid that.

Again, none of this is new. Melania knows his history. She knew plenty of it before she married him. She’s had reminder after reminder along the way that this is the sort of man he is.

But that’s the problem with bargains like this. You can know exactly what kind of man you married and still be humiliated when he insists on reminding everyone else.

So I guess, in the end, to update the old expression…

She made her cuck chair.

And now she’s forced to sit in it.

Postscript

Just taking the temperature of the audience here… what do you think is actually going on? Do you disagree with me, and think this goes beyond just adoration?

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You’ve seen this meme, I assume.

Hopefully not because you spend your precious time on Truth Social, of all places, but perhaps because you caught Abdul El-Sayed’s kickass response to it on CNN.

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So much of this attack and response probably does not need to be articulated. The meme is explicitly, intentionally, and undeniably racist and Islamophobic. It is not just those things. It is only those things.

There is no alternative explanation. No fig leaf of substance or policy. No reference to something you might have missed in a chaotic news cycle. No deeper argument lurking beneath the surface if only the libs would stop being so sensitive.

It is just an elderly fascist leading his sad little cult in a two-minute hate on a D-tier social media platform.

I gave my initial thoughts on The Damage Report, available here:

But I’m not here to simply relitigate the racism. I’m not even here to spend the whole post on how obvious it is that, as with James Talarico, the MAGA movement has no idea how to deal with these insurgent young candidates who can talk about actual problems in actual human language.

The right has no interest in having anything approaching an open debate on ideas, policy, or ideology. They have the only thing they ever really have.

Identity.

A hyper-focus, from a try-hard victim perspective, on every conceivable or mappable difference between them and the people they’ve been trained to hate and fear.

Race. Religion. Gender. Sexuality. Freaking FOOD CHOICE.

Anything but policy.

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Because the second the conversation becomes about policy, they have to explain why their billionaire strongman is better for working people than candidates talking about health care, housing, wages, unions, schools, corporate power, and the possibility that maybe normal human beings should not spend their lives getting financially strip-mined by people who already have everything.

Wait.

Sorry.

I said I wasn’t going to delve into that.

Maybe another time.

For now, I want to talk about how sad this is on a domestic level for Donald Trump.

Because the meme is supposed to be an attack on El-Sayed. That is the obvious intention. Donald Trump wants his followers to look at the right side of that image and recoil. He wants them to see a Muslim man with his wife and experience some ugly little jolt of fear or contempt or superiority. He wants them to see a family that does not look like the fantasy version of America they were sold and decide that something has gone terribly wrong.

But I am not sure that is all the image shows.

In fact, I think it may show something Trump did not intend to reveal at all.

It shows him.

Not the version he sells. Not the gold-plated strongman with the too-long tie. Not the guy whose whole life is supposedly one long commercial for winning.

The real thing.

A very rich, very famous, very angry old man standing next to a woman who appears, in almost every public context, to be contractually obligated to be there.

I feel pretty confident saying this: Melania did not give Trump her thoughts on the meme.

Because wherever Trump was when he decided to post it — sitting on the crapper at one of his golf courses, slumped in front of a television, or alone in a massive dark bedroom in the White House — I do not imagine Melania was sitting beside him, laughing along, asking questions, sharing the moment.

Even the tiny modern experience of showing your significant other something on your phone because you found it interesting appears to be denied to him.

Because he does. not. have. a. partner.

Not in the romantic or sexual sense, anyway.

I suppose you could classify their contractual arrangement as a business partnership, but increasingly their never-ending profit-seeking efforts seem as distant from one another as their lips or hips. Melania and Trump appear to have almost nothing to do with each other, except when the cameras, the branding, or the money require it.

And as with so many other things about Donald Trump, and the other broken men like him, this might be something I could have empathy for.

Were they to deserve it in literally any way.

Because loneliness is sad. Emotional emptiness is sad. Reaching the end of your life surrounded by wealth and attention but starved of ordinary human closeness is sad.

But to deserve that empathy, they would need to admit at a base level that there is a problem. Admit that they have made mistakes. Admit that they are living a lie. Admit even once, in the rapidly diminishing years left to them, that not everything is gold and marble and skyscrapers and piles of cash.

That life is about people. And people are fallible. And people are different. And that is not bad.

But Donald Trump is never going to do that.

He will spend these last few years not only stewing in a lonely black void of his own making, devoid of true family connections, romantic love, and honest friendship, but throwing it in our faces with increasing aggression, as if denying the gilded prison he has built for himself can or will do anything to free him.

It cannot.

I don’t know Abdul El-Sayed. I don’t know his wife. I do not know what their private life is like, because unlike Trump, I am not pretending that you can fully understand a marriage from one photo.

But I can say this: the image Trump chose to mock does not look frightening to me.

It looks warm.

It looks normal.

It looks human.

I would guess El-Sayed and his wife will not launch a meme coin together. I would guess they will not get paid a $30 million bribe by Jeff Bezos. I would guess they will not sit side by side in a courthouse while he is tried over hush-money payments to cover up an affair with an adult film star, or after a jury finds him liable for sexual abuse.

But I bet they love each other.

I bet they have actual overlapping interests. I bet they enjoy spending their time together. I bet their family and friends love them, too.

Trump thinks the tuxedo, the money, the whiteness, the celebrity, and the trophy wife are supposed to win the comparison automatically. He thinks that is the good America. The beautiful America. The America everyone is supposed to envy.

But I am not sure people do envy it. Not the way he thinks they do.

There is something deeply pathetic about the whole thing. A man who has spent his life insisting that he has everything using his own platform to mock a younger man who appears, at least in that image, to have something Trump’s money never bought him.

A partner.

A home.

A truly human life.

Donald Trump’s meme sucks, but it is not 100% wrong.

He really is pitting two very different Americas against each other.

Two different models of what a marriage or a family is supposed to be.

Two different models of what a man is supposed to be.

And for me, and I would wager millions of Americans, it is not hard to pick which one I prefer.

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The Anti-Weaponization Fund is dead.

Long live the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Look, I’d love to believe the $1.776 billion slush fund is dead. That a comic-book-style team-up of diligent journalists, concerned citizens, and a few rogue Republican senators successfully cowed Donald Trump and Todd Blanche, forcing them to back off one of the most nonsensical, radical, and grotesque stunts of Trump’s second term.

I just don’t buy it.

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The way I see it, there is one condition under which I’d consider it definitively dead: when Donald Trump is gone. Kicked out of the White House or departed this mortal coil. Either will do. And honestly, even then, I’m going to keep an eye on his successor. Until then, there have been far too many signs that Trump intends to keep pushing this no matter what he or Blanche say.

And, as I’ll describe, there’s also something even more insidious and secretive going on.

We’ll circle back to that.

I’ve just been paying too much attention over the past decade to trust Trump or Blanche.

Recall the timeline. Todd Blanche called the fund dead way back in early June after a heated meeting with Republican senators. He was perfectly willing to describe it as dead. What he would not do was actually kill it. Not on paper. Not in any way that was definitive.

Even facing federal court injunctions, the DOJ said it would abide by the court orders, but refused to sign on to actually ending the settlement. Instead, they hid behind the claim that the issue was moot, which, for those of us familiar with how Donald Trump manipulates the short attention span of the media, was hardly reassuring.

The most suspicious moment came during Blanche’s confirmation fight, when senators like John Cornyn and Thom Tillis made it extremely clear that they would not support him unless he put in writing that the fund was dead, not only in its current form but in perpetuity.

Blanche refused.

Trump even indicated that he would pull Blanche’s nomination and wait for Cornyn and Tillis to leave the Senate before trying again.

And that is the part that never made sense.

Why would Donald Trump be willing to suffer the embarrassment of proposing and then pulling a nomination for attorney general when all he had to do to avoid the embarrassment was put in writing what Blanche claimed was already true?

If the fund was really dead, why not say so?

If the plan was really over, why not kill it?

Eventually, they did put out a rescission order, and that reassured many in Washington and in the media that the slush fund was, at last, truly gone.

I remain unconvinced. And my anger over this entire insane debacle has not abated a bit.

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For one thing, the rescission order leaves in place protection from audits for Donald Trump and his family, a component of the settlement plan so obviously corrupt, radical, and disconnected from the claims of the original case that I almost have to applaud the audacity.

Almost.

But the bigger reason I remain unconvinced is that the rescission order came amid a number of Trump statements making clear that, no matter how much he claims he had nothing to do with proposing the fund, he still deeply wants to see something like it happen.

On July 31st he said he would “always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure.” At a cabinet meeting at Camp David he said ““It is dead, but I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you… I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused… I’d like to see them compensated for the pain.”

All of this is after the rescission order.

I hope I don’t need to explain that Donald Trump does not respond well to being told he can’t do something. Maybe this is the exception, and he takes his loss like a big boy, perhaps consoling himself with the fact that he at least held on to his audit protection. But I wouldn’t bet on it, and I certainly wouldn’t take my eyes off the prize here. Trump loves the idea of paying his supporters for their crimes. He loves the signal it would send to those who might be needed to take similar actions in the future. And amid all of the broken promises, economic turmoil, and chaos abroad, he needs a win most of all.

In the eyes of his most ardent supporters, there might be no win more personal than having this fund reestablished.

It’s worth remembering, with that in mind, that there is nothing in the rescission order barring Blanche or Trump from simply reestablishing the fund as part of the settlement at a later date.

And even if we’ve seen the last of Trump attempting to use the “settlement” as the vehicle for setting it up, why would anyone believe he couldn’t use some other excuse? He has other lawsuits he could try to parlay into a fund in the same corrupt, self-dealing fashion. He could also (and I feel crazy that no one else seems to be saying this) simply set it up without any further justification than his normal slop speech about helping out people hunted down by the government.

I’ll remind you, the fund never had any rational connection to Donald Trump’s taxes being leaked.

One would hope that, were he to set it up totally fresh, Republican senators like Cornyn and Tillis would be there to fight against it. But recall that Cornyn won’t be around for much longer, and if it isn’t attached to the settlement, they might find themselves with fewer avenues to stop it. At that point, we could also be even deeper into Donald Trump’s lame-duck status, and he might have decided that he simply doesn’t care what they say. He’ll go forward with it regardless.

But I want to end with what I teased at the top: even if the slush fund for loyalists is truly dead, the goal of paying off Trump’s supporters for their crimes and their loyalty is already underway.

I discussed this in a video over at The Damage Report, which you should watch for full details as well as my discussion with the awesome Viviana Vigil. But in brief, the Trump regime has already paid off multiple allies and supporters to the tune of millions of dollars.

Paul Vaughn was paid a seven-figure settlement by the government after allegedly conspiring to prevent access to an abortion clinic. The family of Ashli Babbitt was paid $5 million after she was killed storming the Capitol. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was handed $1.25 million.

None of these people should have been given a cent, but the precedent has been set. And while these efforts, in this form, are less organized than what the Anti-Weaponization Fund would have accomplished, they show that the fund isn’t necessary in the first place. Stymied as he was by Cornyn and Tillis, what is stopping Trump from simply doing for every January 6 rioter what he did for Vaughn and Page?

That isn’t a rhetorical question.

And I don’t have an answer.

But I do have to point out that neither Cornyn nor Tillis seemed to have much of an issue with those payments. They certainly didn’t stop them. And perhaps because they weren’t packaged as part of one giant, grotesque, easy-to-understand, $1.776 billion package, the media barely covered them.

That is my true fear: not that the payout scheme survives as one giant fund, but that it survives as a series of smaller, quieter, harder-to-track rewards.

Case by case. Settlement by settlement. Loyalist by loyalist.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund may be dead.

The payoff project is not.

Postscript

If you see more of these payments, settlements, claims, or quiet little rewards for Trump allies or foot soldiers, don’t hesitate to send them my way.

And if you know someone who thinks the Anti-Weaponization Fund is 100% definitively dead and gone, send them this. I hope they’re right. I just don’t think we can afford to assume they are.

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I hadn’t intended to talk about the concept here on the Stack, but I happened to come across this article in Wired over the weekend.

Maybe I was on to something after all.

At its core, in my view, fascturbation is the act of watching and commenting on authoritarian cruelty, repression, and even murder performed on one’s behalf against an ever-growing list of acceptable out-group targets. There’s a clear sexual-emotional thrill people are getting from this. Here I don’t mean the typical right-wing culture-war bullshit. This is a big step past that into some truly dark territory. It’s what happens when the culture war becomes spectacle, punishment, repression, and bloodshed.

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The right has long used culture wars to distract from economic failure. Cultural grievance lets politicians convince their voters that the leaders working against their very own material economic interests are actually on their side after all because, despite the massive class differences and the policy evidence of our eyes, they share enemies.

From the standpoint of the politicians, it’s a pretty sweet setup. You don’t have to raise wages, lower rent, improve health care, or make life any more secure or satisfying. You just have to identify the right targets and demonize them loudly enough.

Fascturbation is the darkest and bloodiest form of that.

It takes the traditional enemies of right-wing culture war and moves beyond attacking them rhetorically. Now the point is direct repression, deportation, punishment, and even murder.

The target audience is not merely supposed to approve of the policy. They are supposed to enjoy the spectacle. The news stories, sure, but the references in speeches as well. And of course we can’t forget about the memes, hype videos, AI slop, and more. It’s an entire dark ecosystem of quasi-snuff-film content for them to enjoy. And when they do, what they’re enjoying isn’t just violence. It’s the complex social hierarchy they have been trained to believe in being enforced with violence against anyone who falls on the wrong side of that racial, religious, or sexual hierarchy.

For some in government, Stephen Miller springs to mind, I have no doubt they draw just as much sick, perverted pleasure from this as the intended audience. For the rest, it’s a convenient smokescreen to keep the base happy as the regime fails to make good on promise after promise. The economy can remain a shambles. Inflation can climb. The most “pro-peace president in history” can start multiple wars. That sort of thing. Who has time to focus on the chaos, crime, and corruption? We’ve got deportation hype videos to watch!

As I said earlier, the -bation aspect of this was always meant sort of tongue-in-cheek. But according to Wired, no longer.

To quote the article: “Several of the accounts promoting MAGA porn also post about incest, fetishize misogyny, and attempt to normalize rape. The pages are often tagged with telltale signs such #ILBAB (I love being a boy) and #BWC (big white cock) in their bios, with some referring to masturbation as “h8 b8ting.”

We can debate in the comments if h8 b8ting is catchier than my concept, I suppose.

The article references videos involving fake ICE raids, explicit racism, the taking away of women’s bodily autonomy, and some deeply strange homophobic/homoerotic content. Again, all of the aspects of the foundational MAGA hierarchical way of thinking being taken to their… I don’t want to say climax. Let’s go with logical extreme.

From the article: “Fascist sexual politics tend toward the sadomasochistic—the dominance of the master race combined with the submissiveness to the authoritarian and the cuckold fantasies that are rarely far from the surface of conspiracy theories” says Whitney Strub, an associate professor at Rutgers University-Newark and author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right.

So you get the bigotry, the violence, but also this bizarre push-pull between wanting to feel dominant but also naturally submitting. I’ll leave it to their psychologists to help them work it out for them. For our purposes, its enough to know that its out there and its spreading.

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But even the non-literal fascturbation should concern us. Particularly the very public nature of it. It seems to me that part of what these people enjoy is that this glorification of the strongman, state violence, systematized bigotry, homophobia, and misogyny is now something they can do openly. They are not merely getting off on cruelty in private. They can do it in plain view. They can post it on main. (Do people still say that?)

Sure, they enjoy migrants being gunned down. But they also enjoy being able to post literal Nazi memes on social media. And they enjoy seeing those aesthetics come from official channels.

It’s not merely that the spectacle they crave echoes fascism. They want the icons of fascism too. They want the symbols. They want the lightning bolts. The eagles. The fourteen words. For some, this might be scratching a dark itch they don’t fully understand. They may not grasp the path they are being led down.

Others seem fully aware of it.

I wish I were wrong. I wish they’d prove me wrong.

I wish MAGA would react with the same horror to the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that the rest of us felt. I wish they would condemn the execution of drug dealers (and likely a good number of innocent fishermen) in the Caribbean. I wish they were just as shaken by the murder of a deported Missouri couple in Guatemala as I was.

I could go on and on because the cruelty and the violence goes on and on. MAGA hasn’t seemed to be phased by any of it.

Because most simply don’t care, and some are literally getting off on it.

Never mind (and they certainly don’t) that the mass deportations aren’t improving our economy or that the “worst of the worst” framing has always been a lie. Never mind that we recently found out the bombings in the Caribbean haven’t affected the price or availability of cocaine.

One would hope that realizing the policy isn’t working would sap at least some of the joy out of the fascturbation. If the cruelty isn’t making anyone safer or better off, maybe the spell breaks?

I doubt it. In this area, as in so many others, reality may not be enough. Accurate information may not be enough. No matter how clearly described, no matter how often delivered, it may be powerless in the face of the emotional and psychological benefit they are getting from the spectacle.

But I don’t want to be wholly negative here, so let’s consider for a moment if a movement slipping into fascturbation can be drawn out of it. Can an improvement in the economic status quo sap some of the appeal, perhaps? Can the genie be put back in the bottle? Can Pandora’s box be closed? Or, once millions of Americans have been converted into this bloodthirsty form of fascist politics, are they lost for the rest of their lives?

I’m spitballing here, but maybe the answer is that people need an alternative identity to emotionally attach to. Everybody wants to belong to something. If people have access to a positive and beneficial identity, many will gladly take it. But in the absence of that, a darker identity will do, especially if it feels like there is energy behind it, even if that energy is destructive.

The desperate try-hard social media posting, the bot amplification, and Twitter’s algorithmic rigging have helped make fascism seem exciting to some people. So, some will glom onto that.

But there has to be an alternative identity. One that does not lead to Americans dead in the streets. One that has the benefit of actually being able to improve the economic status quo while maintaining at least the basic assemblies of democracy.

But where do we find it?

The Democratic Party brand is historically unpopular. Is “progressive” a strong enough label? Is it appealing enough? The DSA certainly seems to be swelling its ranks, but it is not clear how soon that becomes a fully mainstream play.

And consider this: the asymmetry that has always bothered me about MAGA, and about right-wing politics more broadly compared to progressivism. One side asks you, explicitly or implicitly, to be better. To consider more people. To learn. To evolve. To change. To question yourself as well as others.

The other side tells you that you don’t have to do anything. Certainly not anything emotionally or psychologically difficult.

You don’t have to learn anything.

You don’t have to change.

In fact, the people telling you that you should change are your enemy.

You can be apathetic. Soon, you may not even need to vote. Or be able to. Just sit there and watch as the people you have been trained to hate, fear, and envy are rounded up, repressed, and maybe even killed.

The experience of the last year has told me that this does not hold as much appeal for the American people as I feared. Trump’s deportations have made him less popular, not more.

But there are still far too many people who find this way of life appealing. I don’t know how many it is, but I know this.:

It’s not zero.

I don’t even think it’s “just” a few million.

That is a dark truth to acknowledge.

But it seems increasingly impossible to deny.

Postscript

Apologies. I don’t have anything even really approaching a solution to this issue this week. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about that I think more of us need to grapple with. If you have any ideas, please post them below.

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Donald Trump needs you to hate Canada.

That should be funny. Mostly, it is.

Americans don’t wake up in a cold sweat wondering what Canada is getting up to. Our northern neighbor has never given off strong shadowy-superpower vibes.

It’s… Canada.

That’s what makes this so revealing.

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Pay even occasional attention to the news and the symbols of Trump-era incompetence are legion. The algae-choked Reflecting Pool. The rubble around the White House. The sad, grasping speech where he tried, and failed, to justify his planned and ongoing manipulation of the 2026 midterms.

But Trump’s war on Canada might be the most pathetic exhibit of all.

I’m not going to try to convince you that this is the actual worst thing Trump has done. But turning Canada into an enemy shows just how desperate the political project of MAGA has become.

Trumpism needs enemies the way I need Pop-Tarts. The way Stephen Miller needs permission to enter your home. A movement that runs on grievance, paranoia, and the promise that only one man can protect you will eventually shove even one of America’s closest historic friends into a Spirit Halloween villain costume.

So let me get this out of the way up front.

I do not hate Canada. I would go so far as to say Americans who remain in their right minds also do not hate Canada. This should not require explanation. Hating Canada is one of the dumbest, and perhaps least American, things I can conceive of.

Canada is our natural partner in so many ways.

They have assisted us in our military endeavors. Even our boneheaded military endeavors. Canadians have died helping America pursue its goals around the world.

They are also, no matter what Donald Trump says, our partners in trade. The idea that Canada has been screwing us over is something nobody believed until Donald Trump told them to. Some Americans may now claim to believe it. I defy them to expand on that idea with even two or three sentences that make a shred of sense. Its a fiction, and a sad one.

You’ll be shocked to find out we trade many things with Canada, and have for quite a while. They buy many of our products, and we need many of theirs, not least the lumber necessary to build the homes that might actually help solve our ongoing housing crisis.

And beyond military and trade, they are cultural partners as well. How many Canadians have made their mark in our music and movies? They’ve given us their Celines, their Goslings, their Candys, their Moranises. Canadian cities are represented in our sports leagues. Canadian artists, actors, comedians, athletes, and writers are woven so deeply into American culture that half the time Americans forget they are Canadian in the first place.

All of this, we know.

Which is why a younger Donald Trump, with a few more brain cells still capable of firing, might have realized this was a donkey-brained fool’s errand and moved on to some other distraction, some other imagined foe.

That is not the Donald Trump we have.

The Donald Trump we have doubles down. On tariffs. On threats. On insults. On the desperate invention of enemies where none need exist. Most Americans will not buy it. It makes no sense. It is not based on anything that exists in the realm of the real.

He does it because he desperately needs it.

And we should acknowledge that it will work for his most hardcore cultists. The most gullible. The most slavishly loyal. They will pretend to believe whatever he says.

They probably had few genuine thoughts about Canada or Canadians before Trump started this. Maybe that makes the transition to enemy easier for them. So sure, Toronto is our foe now. Ottawa can be the head of a new axis of snowy evil. The maple leaf is coming for your F-150. MAGA can surely accept that as they’ve accepted so much else about Donald Trump.

But this is not really about Canada.

It is about two sides of a particularly dark coin.

The first is, as I said, Trumpism’s constant need for villains.

I wrote recently about the right’s increasingly desperate attempts to resurrect the old Red Scare. This is that same impulse but with even dumber target selection.

Admittedly, some targets are easier. Trump can trot out Venezuela, Cuba, perhaps Mexico, certainly Iran, and at least some Americans will accept the premise without much work.

Canada is different. Canada is revealing precisely because Canada is such a uniquely stupid enemy to invent.

In Trump’s view, and perhaps in MAGA’s view, Canada is seen primarily through its comparatively liberal politics. The distance between MAGA and Canada on immigration, LGBTQ rights, environmental policy and philosophy, guns, health care, and basic social democracy is enough to wash away the many ways in which we are similar or complimentary.

For a movement built on resentment, Canada is threatening because of what it reveals about us and the various ways our government has chosen to fail us.

And that brings us to the flip side of the coin.

For MAGA to work, it fundamentally needs to be isolated.

Donald Trump often crows that, with him at the helm, America will be respected and loved around the world once again. In practice, he doesn’t want America surrounded by allies. He wants America surrounded by threats. That is the emotional architecture of the whole endeavour.

To hear them tell it, every institution is corrupt. Every expert is a fraud. Every judge that rules against Trump is a Dem plant. Every negative story is fake news and the outlet that published it is an enemy of the people. Every female accuser is a fame-seeking liar. Every trading partner is robbing us blind. And it should go without saying that every election he loses was stolen.

This is the rhetorical poison they’ve been guzzling for years.

And then, when you’ve lost faith in everything you used to rely on, what’s left?

Trump.

He told us as much when he said “I alone can fix it.”

Just him. Not the prime minister of the UK. Not some EU diplomat. Certainly not Mark Carney. No matter how long our defensive and economic partnerships have lasted, no matter how deeply our interests are intertwined, MAGA must feel that there is only one person who has their back.

That is the point of making even friendly old Canada an enemy.

Its not substantive. Its not really about policy at all. It doesn’t solve a trade dispute. It doesn’t protect American workers. It doesn’t restore respect for the United States around the world.

It further isolates Americans psychologically and politically.

That is the danger here. Most Americans are not suddenly going to start waking up every morning consumed with hatred for Saskatchewan. The American people, broadly speaking, are not buying this nonsense.

But MAGA is made different. Or, more accurately, it has been remade different through years of manipulation and misinformation.

Right-wing politics, and in particular MAGA under Donald Trump, is a movement that philosophically demands desperation, jealousy, and a dark parfait of the worst inclinations and feelings humans are capable of, all endlessly swirled together by a complicit, elite-funded media apparatus.

That produces a chunk of the populace, if never a true majority, that will buy almost anything Donald Trump says or proposes. They will look the other way as policies are announced or enacted that work directly contrary to their own interests. It is enough, it turns out, for many of them to turn away from our democratic system of government entirely.

And perhaps Trump and his allies in right-wing media see that Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and the rest are not enemy enough to produce the level of anxiety and fear they require.

For that, we need to face not only a slate of enemies.

We need to face nothing but enemies. And we must face them alone.

That is, for Trump to have any chance of holding on to power past the midterms.

Which is why I do not entirely discount the possibility that an increasingly desperate Trump could move beyond mere rhetoric and tariffs. To be clear, I do not think military action against Canada is likely. But nor can I rule it out.

Donald Trump is the guy who launched January 6th. Anyone who still believes he is dangerous only because he says things is forgetting the myriad horrors we have shared over the last decade.

There is nothing he will not say. True.

There is also seemingly nothing he will not do.

And even if this never escalates beyond threats, insults, and economic damage, the consequences will almost certainly outlast the moment.

The American people, aside from MAGA, will probably be ready to resume our prior relationship with Canada once Trump has finally exited stage left. We will want things to go back to normal. We will want the old warmth, the old assumption that America and Canada are friends in the way neighbors are supposed to be friends.

The Canadian government and the Canadian people may not be so eager.

They haven’t merely been insulted repeatedly by Trump with his threats to make Canada the 51st state. They haven’t just been turned into props in another round of authoritarian theater. They have been given reason to question whether the United States can be trusted under Trump, after Trump, or after whoever comes next.

Were they to maintain a guarded stance once Trump is gone, could we really view that as irrational? After what they’ve experienced, and with the knowledge that it could return, how could we?

Perhaps four years of a closer relationship with a President Ocasio-Cortez or Ossoff could be followed by a return to self-destructive brinksmanship with a President Carlson or Rubio trying to reignite the culture wars of the Trump era. Maybe America snaps back to sanity. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe our allies get tired of betting their future on our ability to keep our worst people away from power.

I hope Canadians can bear in mind that Donald Trump is not America, in the same I once hoped against hope that the world would see that George W. Bush was not America.

And yet, even I have to acknowledge that this can only happen so many times before perhaps it is America, at least to some extent.

That is the deeper damage Trump is doing.

The tariffs matter. The insults matter. The pathetic attempt to make Americans look north and see an enemy where a friend has always stood matters.

The deeper damage, though, is that he is making it harder for the world to believe America is better than this.

I want us to share the bonds we have shared for so many decades: economic, defensive, and especially cultural. I want Canada to remain what it has been for generations: a partner, a neighbor, a friend, not a punching bag for a rapidly decaying old despot’s collapsing ego.

When Trump is gone, that relationship will not simply repair itself. It will take significant overtures. Time. Proof.

And until then, we should be clear about what is happening.

Canada is not your enemy…

But the guy trying to convince you otherwise just might be.

Postscript

I’m especially curious what Canadian readers make of this. Does this feel like a temporary Trump-era rupture, or has America made itself harder to trust even after he is gone?

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Yes, I’m talking about Lindsey Graham, but the frantic, frenetic rhetorical war going on in the wake of his death makes clear that this is about so much more. It is about how we greet the deaths of public figures who used their power to make the world a worse, more dangerous, and far crueler place.

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The way it typically seems to work is that you have two extremes. There’s the mainstream media, which will launder, soften, whitewash, or deliberately ignore the reputations of even the most unrepentant political monsters the moment they die. A man can have spent decades working for nothing more than war, corruption, disenfranchisement, bigotry and more… and the obituary machine will still flip into hagiography mode and at worst label them “complicated.”

On the other side you have the legions of humans (and increasingly bots) on the internet who treat every death as an opportunity to torch a dead public figure because 1) everyone has done bad things and 2) its a great way to get noticed.

But since this substack will stan for nuance even if it kills me, I have to think there’s a different way.

There is a line. Some people cross it.

Some, like Lindsey Graham, sprinted past it many years ago and didn’t slow down until the moment they dropped dead.

It is neither my job nor my duty to pretend otherwise.

And so we get to the origin of this article.

I posted this on Twitter when I heard the news.

Hardly scathing, in my view. Downright reasonable, actually.

The bots and slavering hordes of bigots and warmongers on Twitter felt otherwise, crashing out by the thousands and, rather than going to a qualified therapist, they tweeted me about it. I’ll repond to a few of the more common types of replies, but first…

The freakout over my post was not really about Graham. It was about the ugly moral corner his defenders have backed themselves into after years of following wherever Lindsey Graham, and to a much greater extent Donald Trump, led them. If they can deny that what their leaders have done is evil, they can avoid the necessary reckoning with their own moral culpability for having supported those actions. And so, they want reverence for people who worshipped only themselves, decency for people who weaponized indecency, and restraint from those of us who watched them cheer on every cruelty.

And since we are inevitably going to have a news cycle and a debate a hundred times larger than this one when Donald Trump dies, we might as well hash this out now.

Possibly the most common response to my tweet was also easily the most ironic. Many told me confidently that “nobody cares what I think.” Were that true, one imagines they would have abstained from replying. Relatedly, many responded by labeling me their new favorite r-word. Considering they did so in the pursuit of encouraging me to be more civil in public discourse, this too struck me as delightfully ironic.

But regardless, I found the reaction strange because I didn’t even really go hard at Lindsey Graham in that message. I simply said I would show him the same amount of empathy he showed those kids.

And honestly, that was me being nicer than I needed to be.

Because we are not talking about equal acts here. I posted on social media. Lindsey Graham held power. My lack of respect for him does not kill anyone. His lack of respect for Palestinian children was not merely rhetorical. It existed in a literal life-and-death context, and tens of thousands of people have died.

No matter what I tweet, no one dies.

Lindsey Graham’s actions helped sustain policies under which countless people died across multiple conflicts. And this was not merely an unfortunate side effect of his advocacy. In many cases, it was the point of his advocacy. He wanted the wars. He supported the bombs. He defended the people dropping them.

So let’s work through more of the freakout.

There were the people furious at me for judging Graham by how little he cared about Palestinian children, and the way they expressed that outrage was by making clear that they cared just as little.

That was something to behold.

Many (too many) responded by claiming those children would have become terrorists anyway, or by posting images of Palestinian children holding guns, as though that settled the matter. For these people, an image of a child who has been handed a gun is proof that the child deserves no sympathy. Which is especially rich given that many of these same conservatives would love the image if it were Lauren Boebert’s kids posing with rifles for a Christmas card.

Apparently, a child holding a gun in a photo is worse than soldiers using guns and bombs to kill children. The hypothetical future crimes these commenters have imagined these children committing anger them infinitely more than the actual war crimes that killed those children.

Now, I understand that I am, in a different way, being as naive as these people and bots by expecting Twitter of all places to be a venue where the inherent value of human life is respected, or where evidence has any meaningful role in argument. I should not have been on the platform in the first place. That was my first mistake.

In my comment, I chose to focus on one of Lindsey Graham’s most recent barbaric failings: his complete lack of concern for the slaughter of Palestinian children. And before moving on to the rest of his record, I want to be clear about something. This was not merely a case of him advocating for a war that led, tragically and incidentally, to children being killed.

If that were all it was, someone might say: I disagree with the policy, but surely the late senator’s heart broke for the children who died.

But I have seen no evidence that it did.

But in the exact same way that these commenters didn’t seem to mourn the death of the kids in Gaza, Lindsey Graham never did either. He nearly rolled his eyes on television when he was told about the many dead. I’ve never seen him express empathy or sympathy for the children who have been killed in Iran, including well over 100 in a single boneheaded bombing.

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He wanted his wars, and he wanted the rest of us to treat their victims as the cost of doing business.

My hope in centering his callous disregard for a mountain of slain Palestinian children was to make this point as easy as possible to see:

There are politicians we disagree with.

And then there are politicians whose records should disqualify them from the polite rituals of respect we are ordered to perform the second a powerful person dies.

We do not owe them more empathy than they showed their victims. We do not owe them more decency than they showed the people their policies harmed. We do not owe them some fake, solemn, cleaned-up version of themselves the moment their pulse stops.

Of course, Gaza is not the whole of Lindsey Graham’s record.

There were the other wars.

There was the war on democracy he waged on behalf of Donald Trump, including his attempt to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

There was his humiliating flip-flop after January 6, when he briefly experimented with pretending to have a backbone after the attack on the Capitol, only to allegedly reassure Trump soon after that he didn’t really mean it. Apparently, attempting to end American democracy was not actually a red line for Lindsey Graham.

This would be humiliating enough if he had not already lived through the same moral collapse once before.

The tragedy of Lindsey Graham is not merely that a man who never once led occupied a position of immense legislative power for years. It is not merely that he produced little of value during that time beyond an ever-growing mountain of civilian death. It is that in the one or two situations where he was actually right about something important, he was forced by his endless horniness for proximity to power to turn his back on his own greatest moments.

He had a chance to be remembered as someone who saw Trump clearly.

Instead, he chose to be remembered as someone who crawled back.

Then there was his shameless, theatrical, performative defense of Brett Kavanaugh. The list goes on and on. The specifics matter, and we could walk through them, but the broader point is simple.

People should receive the reaction to their death that they earned in life.

And all that I have said about Lindsey Graham on social media, on The Damage Report, and on this Substack, is doing exactly that.

One does not need to go searching for a reason to disregard Lindsey Graham’s death or to label him a villain. He cast himself in that role for years and years and years, across virtually every issue area in American domestic and foreign policy.

You are not owed respect.

You are not owed decency.

You build your obituary, and the media cycle surrounding it, with what you choose to say and do in this limited time that you have.

Now, I am not naive. I know there are bots. I know there are trolls. I know the internet is more awash in grifters than ever. The most benign politician or public servant can die and immediately be greeted by people insisting they were every bit as bad as Lindsey Graham or Donald Trump.

We have been reminded of that in recent years. When Robert Mueller and Rob Reiner died, Donald Trump still found reasons to mock them. As far as I know, neither of them ever advocated for children to be blown apart or starved by the thousands.

But bots are going to bot. Trolls are going to troll. For my part, I am going to hold myself to a standard that I consider reasonable, moral, and not remotely difficult to understand for anyone who does not merely perform values, but actually hold them.

Not every politician will meet the standard of deserving mockery or condemnation.

But there are a special few.

Lindsey Graham is undoubtedly one.

Mitch McConnell, when he finally passes, will be another.

And hoo boy, buckle up for Donald Trump.

Rest assured, I will have more to say about that when the day comes.

For now, I remain convinced of one thing:

Death ends a life.

It doesn’t rewrite one.

Postscript

Where do you draw the line?

What kind of action, statement, policy, or legacy is enough to forfeit the polite respect usually granted to public figures when they die?

Which living politicians or public figures do you think merit the same kind of critical coverage when they pass?

Post your thoughts in the comments. I may do a follow-up note based on your responses.

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The midterms are coming to kick Donald Trump and MAGA in the metaphorical crotch, and he needs something, anything, to try to turn the tide.

He can’t run on results, since they are uniformly terrible. He can’t point to an inspiring Republican candidate, since they do not appear to have any. But he does, as he has repeatedly reminded us, have the “best words.”

The word he has landed on, the one he clearly believes — or desperately wishes — will save his and the GOP’s collective electoral bacon, is an old one:

Communist.

Considering the chaos and cruelty of the political world we live in, it is almost cute that this, of all things, is what Trump thinks will take out James Talarico or Zohran Mamdani.

Communist?

That’s the best you’ve got?

It has all the sting of “Dumocrats” or “Obuma,” his recent best attempts at mocking nicknames. We’re leagues away from “Crooked Hillary” at this point. Even “Little Marco” managed to stick. As I detailed last week, Trump has clearly lost his mojo. But this time, the problem is bigger than Trump’s decaying talent for schoolyard branding. When he reaches for “communist,” the rest of the Republican Party reaches with him. Right-wing media repeats it, hoping against hope that the old magic still works.

It won’t.

The modern red scare is a rhetorical ship already taking on water, and Republicans are racing to jump aboard. The problem for them is simple: calling your political opponent a communist only works if the audience still hears the word the way old school Republicans do. For them, being branded a red is a fate worse than political death. It’s supposed to, and back in the day would have, ended the conversation. It’s supposed to turn every proposal for public housing, rent freezes, higher taxes on the wealthy, universal health care, or government action on food prices into an instant scandal.

Increasingly, it does no such thing.

Most Americans weren’t politically conscious during the Cold War. Many weren’t alive for the fall of the Soviet Union. And a growing number have spent their entire adult lives under an American version of capitalism defined by unaffordable housing, medical debt, stagnant wages, corporate consolidation, and billionaires openly purchasing the government.

So when Trump shouts “communist,” he is trying to terrify people with a ghost from his youth. We don’t share his fear. We’re too busy being terrified of trying to cover rent.

The Cato Institute released a poll last week that found 21% of the American public had a favorable view of communism. That number rose to 38% among those under 30. An even larger percentage has no strong feelings whatsoever attached to the label.

That doesn’t mean America is about to become a communist country. But it does mean that the word no longer functions the way Republicans need it to function. It no longer produces instant terror. For a growing number of Americans, especially younger ones, it barely registers as an insult.

This is not merely because the term is antiquated. It is because Republicans have spent decades draining it of meaning. There has not been a single Democratic presidential candidate who has not been called a socialist, a communist, and somehow simultaneously a fascist, usually with no regard for where that person actually sits on the political spectrum.

When you grow up being told that every politician to the left of Mitch McConnell is a commie, the word starts fading into background noise.

And that is, of course, ignoring the fact that communism is not even on the menu these days, no matter how hard Donald Trump and MAGA hope to will it into existence. Politics is not a vision board. The candidates winning Democratic primaries around the country are not running on Soviet central planning. They are democratic socialists. Plain and simple. Donald Trump might be incapable of and uninterested in learning what that actually means, but over the past 10 years, plenty of Americans have. And they like what they see.

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Last year, the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found that 53% of young voters said they wanted a democratic socialist to win the 2028 presidential election. Those results were replicated in a follow-up survey, which also found that 27% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 feel similarly. And that is with the label applied, including all of the associated attempts to propagandize against it.

While Donald Trump does not understand the substance of democratic socialism, more and more voters seem to. And again, they like what they see.

In that same poll, 62% supported Zohran Mamdani’s proposals for more government housing and nationwide rent freezes. Fifty-eight percent liked the idea of government-owned grocery stores. And there is something about those poll results that hits harder for me than even increasing support for Medicare for All.

Medicare for All has always relied, to some extent, on the expansion of a program that is tried, tested, and popular. Mamdani’s proposals on housing and food access do not have that automatic leg up. They are more unfamiliar. More vulnerable to caricature. Easier, at least in theory, to demagogue.

And yet they are winning support on the merits.

That is the real problem for Republicans. It’s not merely that their labels have lost power. It is that the things they are trying to demonize increasingly sound like solutions to problems people actually have.

But while Donald Trump and the Republicans deserve a great deal of credit for sabotaging their own red scare by wringing every drop of meaning out of the relevant words, they deserve credit for a second, even more significant reason.

It is because they have won.

Economically, I mean.

They are victims of their own political and economic success. Over the last 40 years, they have helped rig the economy and extract every drop of wealth they could out of it. They have shredded regulations. They have shifted the tax burden toward working Americans and the benefits toward the wealthy. And in a process massively accelerated under DOGE, they have worked to weed out as many tax dollars as possible that were going to projects that could even hypothetically aid regular people, killing spending on Medicaid and food stamps while jacking up the military budget in cartoonish fashion.

And despite the best efforts of their 24/7 culture war to keep people from seeing what has happened, we do see it.

We know how our government has been bought. We know how the law and the judiciary have been reconstructed into tools of the Epstein class. We can see that opportunity has been drained out of the system. It has been deregulated away. The tax burden has been shifted onto those with the least capacity to bear it.

So even if you are someone who still has some remaining fear of socialism or communism, perhaps because you grew up hearing decades of propaganda, there is a good chance you have been driven to such a point of desperation by the state of things that you are willing to roll the dice anyway.

And this simply cannot be a surprise to Donald Trump and the Republicans. Voters did not just tell us how desperate they were in 2024. They showed us.

How desperate must they have been to choose Donald Trump again? A guy who tried to end our democracy. Who utterly and willingly failed to protect us from COVID. Who made a mockery of America around the world. Who committed not only the crimes he was found guilty of, but many more that he was protected from the consequences of thanks to a lawless Supreme Court and the lackadaisical efforts of Merrick Garland and Joe Biden.

And still, they chose Trump.

That is how desperate they were. That is what stagnant wages, rising inflation, increasing housing costs, and dozens of other economic vices squeezing them produced in the end.

There was a lesson there for Donald Trump. But it was a lesson he was either too stupid or too corrupt to learn.

Faced with an electorate that felt a dagger in its back, he decided to twist the blade.

He did not just transfer multiple trillions of dollars more to the wealthiest people in America. He buried us in tariffs. The toxic, corrosive efforts of DOGE. The historic wealth transfer of his “Big Beautiful Bill.” All of it designed to make clear that the business of government is not to provide a single goddamn cent of aid to anyone who did not donate millions of dollars to Donald Trump and the Republicans.

And then, as if to rub salt in the wound even more, there is Epstein. Trump made clear that there is going to be literally no justice of any kind when it comes to the wealthy.

More salt came in the form of endless pardons for some of the most out-of-control and unrepentant con men and fraudsters in American history.

Never before have we had a cabinet so wealthy, or a shield of protection placed around the wealthiest Americans more all-encompassing than what we have seen over the past year.

The electorate was crystal clear that it wanted change that would relieve its burden. Instead, it has received nothing but additional burdens. Injury, followed by insult.

Communism holds little horror for a generation raised in the economic straitjacket that passes for “capitalism” in America these days. Socialism is less frightening when rent is unaffordable, groceries feel like a luxury good, health care can bankrupt you, and every institution seems to exist primarily to protect the people already standing on your neck.

If voters were desperate enough to roll the dice on Donald Trump, I am not going to clutch my pearls that they are willing to give a chance to Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, or Melat Kiros — candidates with real ideas to solve real problems. Candidates who have not personally enriched themselves to the tune of billions while getting us embroiled in disastrous wars and covering up for an elite network of sex predators.

I follow politics effectively 24/7. I am used to the attempts to manipulate and propagandize, and even I feel like I am taking crazy pills when I am told to conflate these DSA candidates with monsters like Trump or Paxton or Hegseth. For a regular person struggling to make ends meet, these efforts will never make a shred of sense.

They are doomed to failure.

You simply can’t red-scare us anymore.

The status quo you built is far more terrifying.

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“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”

Lord Varys intended his analysis for a different world, but I believe it is just as true for ours. And in our world, Donald Trump has a problem.

He would have you believe that he is powerful. That he demands and deserves your respect. Your fear. But that was never as true as he claimed, and it is less true now than ever before. More and more, it is becoming impossible to deny that Donald Trump’s power is slipping out of his hands.

This brings with it significant opportunities, as well as new threats.

A weakening Trump is, unfortunately, not a harmless Trump. A man who understands domination but never self-reflection is unlikely to respond to humiliation with restraint. But if we are honest about the danger he still poses, we should also be honest about the opening. The spell is breaking. The cult is growing brittle. The aura of inevitability is fading.

So let’s examine the evidence across the four areas where his power seems to be waning most quickly: Congress, foreign policy, culture, and control of the narrative.

Congress: Fear No Longer Commands Obedience

Domestic policy has, admittedly, never been Trump’s natural arena. Few would call him a policy wonk. Doing the relentless, grinding work of building coalitions, negotiating details, or whipping votes is a clear nonstarter. He prefers spectacle, intimidation, executive whim, and displays of personal loyalty. But even by that low standard, his congressional track record in 2026 has been strikingly poor.

His recent attempt to derail new bipartisan housing legislation by pressuring Congress to pass his voter-suppression bill first failed. Multiple attempts to pass the SAVE Act have similarly failed. And in a genuinely surprising development, a critical mass of Republican senators turned against his January 6 slush fund. That last one must have hurt the most, since it wasn’t yet another case of Democrats opposing him. That’s rote. Republicans, including some who have spent years accommodating him, are increasingly willing to decide that obedience is more costly than defiance.

Fear of Trump is no longer the only consideration, even after he successfully primaried several of his most dogged opponents earlier this spring. Sure, he can still threaten. He can still rage. He can still demand. But his demands aren’t translating into action with anything like the reliability they once did.

That said, I am genuinely not sure how much he cares.

He already got his “Big Beautiful Bill.” Trillions have been redirected from working-class Americans to the uber-wealthy. That seems to have been his only real domestic legislative goal for 2025, just as his only real domestic legislative goal in 2017 was passing his first massive tax cut bill. Other than the SAVE Act, he seems to have no real legislative agenda. No plan for health care. No desire to meaningfully influence housing or infrastructure. No apparent interest in doing the work of solving real problems, or hell, even fictional right-wing culture-war problems, through legislation.

So yes, when it comes to Congress, Trump’s power has clearly diminished. But this may be the one arena where his own laziness and indifference protect him from the full humiliation of that fact. A president who cared about governing would experience this as a devastating collapse in authority.

Trump may barely notice.

It will likely be more difficult for him to ignore his inability to exert seemingly any influence over what happens abroad.

Foreign Policy: The Limits of Bombs & Willpower

I probably do not need to remind you that Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one. Similar promises were made vis-à-vis Gaza. But at least as of this writing, the Ukraine conflict continues, albeit thankfully with a better status quo for Ukraine through no help from Donald Trump. In Gaza, civilian deaths continue almost daily during the so-called ceasefire, as Donald Trump’s Board of Peace plots to permanently expel the people of Gaza and establish some sort of seaside techno-enclave for the oligarchs of the world.

But Iran is where the fantasy of Trumpian willpower has collided most violently with reality. His earlier military victories in the brief first conflict with Iran, as well as the Venezuela mission, have proven impossible for him to duplicate in his most recent attacks on Iran.

The problem for Trump is not just that America’s military has proven incapable of exerting its will over Iran. It is that he has proven incapable of managing the situation in virtually any fashion. He has been unable to come up with a compelling argument for why we went to war or why we should continue it. His mismanagement of the war has perhaps single-handedly broken long-standing Republican support for America’s military relationship with Israel. His repeated brags that Iran is desperate to deal with us are almost invariably followed by violations of the ceasefire or ships being struck in the Strait of Hormuz. And a conflict that was unpopular on day one is now possibly the least popular foreign adventure our military has ever engaged in.

All this from a president who swore he would be the president of “peace.”

It was not supposed to be this way, at least from his point of view. His threats should have gotten him what he wanted out of Iran. Barring that, his exaggerated faith in the capacity of aerial bombardment to accomplish political goals should have produced a quick Iranian surrender. And he certainly should have been able to manage the domestic view of this conflict, considering it was against a long-time adversary.

He failed in every one of these arenas.

He did not get into the war the way he wished. He has not managed the war the way he might have wished. But perhaps most importantly, once he grew frustrated and bored with the conflict he initiated, he became utterly incapable of drawing it to any sort of acceptable conclusion. And as we enter July, many are beginning to wonder whether he will be able to bring it to literally any conclusion at all.

Foreign policy was supposed to be the area where Donald Trump could unilaterally call the shots. It was supposed to be the realm of pure presidential will, where he could achieve virtually any goal he could conceive of, no matter how insane, blood-soaked, or illegal that goal might be.

Instead, it has become one of the clearest demonstrations of his weakness.

Sure, he can summarily execute some fishermen or the occasional drug-dealer in the Caribbean. But he cannot end an entrenched conflict between Ukraine and Russia. He cannot unilaterally swap out Iran’s government for one he finds more favorable. And in his rush to chase the thrill of a big, bold military victory, he has blundered his way into a quagmire that may dog him to the end of his days.

But Trumpism was never solely, or even mainly, concerned with policy. What of the culture?

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Culture: Power is not Appeal

We should remember that some predicted, or perhaps feared, that the broader culture might bend to Donald Trump and MAGA following his win in 2024. They weren’t wrong to worry. A corporate knee-jerk turn away from marginal moves toward inclusivity, or even mere acknowledgment of the existence of minority groups, was certainly possible. And indeed, some major corporations did exactly that, canceling DEI programs internally or pulling certain types of merchandise, including Pride Month products.

Those corporations have almost universally been made to suffer as a result of that unwise decision. Target is perhaps the clearest example. But if Trump or MAGA thought their burgeoning cultural power would extend beyond using fear of Donald Trump, or fear of government power being brought to bear against them, to influence the decisions of a few corporations, they have been proven wrong.

With a few exceptions that truly do prove the rule, conservative movies have not taken over the box office. Conservative musicians are not burning up the charts. MAGA is setting no trends. And Trump’s wildly unpopular moves of the last year have turned young people off to a degree even I wouldn’t have predicted.

Those breathless editorials claiming that it was “cool to be conservative” or sexy to be MAGA are even more ridiculous with the benefit of hindsight than they were at the time of publication. Millions of women are not lining up to become tradwives. White nationalists and neo-fascists have a happy home on Twitter, perhaps, but their viewpoints, policy goals, and conspiracy theories are as niche as ever outside of these digital bubbles.

But nowhere is Trump’s nonexistent grip on the culture more obvious than when he tries to interact with it directly.

He couldn’t bear to see New York caught up in the glee and excitement of the Knicks’ NBA playoff run without shoving himself into the mix. And what did he get in the end? One of the loudest choruses of boos of his lifetime. The fear of a follow up chorus is almost certainly what has inspired him to keep as far from any World Cup matches as he can manage.

His own attempts at cultural pageantry have been even more spectacular failures. The Kennedy Center, once it had been Trumpified, struggled to attract the kind of major stars who would make that takeover feel like an actual victory. A-listers turned down invitations to his UFC birthday spectacle in droves. His supposedly grand celebration of American greatness ended up having so much trouble booking musical acts that they were forced to bring in Kash Patel’s girlfriend. And the Great American State Fair has been such a massive failure, even in drawing Trump’s own fans, that the biggest impact it has had on the culture is the massive number of retweets generated by clips of Fox hosts pretending to see crowds that aren’t visible on film.

There’s a difference between power and appeal. Trump can still terrify corporate lawyers. He can push weak institutions, whether corporate or academic, into anticipatory surrender. He can still make most Republican politicians bow to him.

The culture? Not so much.

But the area where Donald Trump’s ability to exert his will has degraded the most, and most indisputably, is his control over the narrative. Over attention. Over the news cycle. Over what the country is arguing about at any given moment.

Narrative Control: Chaos Without Aim

These were the areas where, not so long ago, even those who despised him had to acknowledge his skill. He knew how to lead the media around by the nose. He knew how to force an issue he favored into the center of public attention. Even more importantly, he knew how to drag attention away from the issues he desperately wanted people to ignore.

We are leagues away from that in 2026.

There are plenty of examples. He clearly wants nothing more than to never talk about affordability again. You can see it on his face. It pains him to even hear reporters ask about the economic struggles of regular working people. And he has repeatedly proven that he does not have even the minimal capacity to pretend to empathize with those who are struggling.

When gas prices rose, he called it “peanuts.” He called efforts to lower housing costs a “big yawn.” He said that he “loved” the inflation. He repeatedly called affordability itself a hoax. He said that Americans’ economic struggles have no influence whatsoever on his continued negotiations with Iran.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by the condescension or the lack of empathy. That is very much in character for him. But the Donald Trump of 2019 would surely have been able to distract people away from the terrible state of the economy. He would have found a migrant caravan, a celebrity feud, a racist provocation, a fake scandal, something to yank the cameras in another direction.

He wants that now. He needs that now. And yet he simply cannot make it happen.

That said, the clearest and most powerful example of his inability to control the political zeitgeist is his comically bungled cover-up of Epstein.

Remember, if you will, how this was supposed to go. Donald Trump got back into power in no small part thanks to the enthusiasm of QAnon cultists, after encouraging them, posting their memes, and referencing elite sex criminals in his speeches. Then he would return to the White House, Pam Bondi would take over, and the entire thing would be shut down. His buddy Jeffrey Epstein and the other, as-yet-unidentified co-conspirators would be protected, to say nothing for Trump’s own activities.

Indeed, that is exactly what they tried to do.

It has been the single largest individual failure of his presidency so far. And despite the coordinated efforts of his regime, from Kash Patel to Dan Bongino to Todd Blanche to Karoline Leavitt and others, he has been completely incapable of neutralizing Epstein as a topic or as a liability.

Sure, the conversation waxes and wanes. One week he launches a war. In the next, the sheer scale of his corruption (billions made in crypto, for example) is unveiled in a major piece of reporting. But inevitably, the country returns to Epstein, thanks to the dauntless efforts of principled politicians and the survivors themselves, who continue to push for justice despite threats to their lives and the mocking condescension of the regime itself. But the most surprising aspect of this failure to control the narrative is that the drumbeat for disclosure, document releases, and justice is not coming merely from Democrats or liberals. He has utterly lost independents on this topic. He has lost a significant and growing number of Republicans as well.

A man who once convinced his followers to ignore their friends and family dying around them by the thousands in 2020 now cannot manage to distract them from the rising cost of beef. That is a profound change. Trump can still lie. He can still threaten. He can still create chaos. But chaos only works as a weapon when you can aim it.

And increasingly, he cannot.

We could, and perhaps eventually will, discuss other areas that bear on his power. The courts, for instance, particularly the Supreme Court, which has often shown radical, ahistoric levels of deference to his will. Public polling is another, and can tell us quite a bit about what remains of his coalition and what that means for future elections. For now, let’s talk instead about why all of this matters, and why it is worth thinking about.

The Danger and Opportunity of a Weakening Trump

My greatest motivation in detailing the many ways Donald Trump’s power is slipping out of his hands is to inspire those who would oppose him, and perhaps even more so those who would replace him. If people believe that he is unstoppable, they will act like it is so. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if we recognize that his power is brittle and receding, resistance becomes easier, more contagious, and more effective.

Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, an elected official, or a regular person struggling to survive in a country that has increasingly failed you in virtually every way it possibly could, there is strength to draw from understanding that while Donald Trump has done massive harm to America and will almost certainly do more, his ability to do that damage is decreasing every day.

That does not mean we can afford to be naive. In fact, it means the opposite. We need to make use of the understanding of Donald Trump’s dark, primal psychology that we have gathered over the last decade. Trump does not have the capacity of a normal person when it comes to critical self-analysis. He is increasingly disconnected from what the rest of the country is thinking and feeling. But even he can see that his power is slipping through his hands.

And he is incredibly unlikely to respond to that in a healthy or constructive way.

Sure, perhaps he will retreat into exerting control over the few things that seem to genuinely draw his interest these days. Maybe he will resign himself to building his ballroom ever bigger, covering every statue in D.C. with gold, turning the capital’s municipal golf courses into country clubs only the wealthiest people in the world can afford, and buying high-quality maple trees, as he assures us only he can.

That is possible. Honestly, if I could make that bargain today, I would.

But it seems far more likely that a Donald Trump who realizes his power is slipping away will lash out with increasingly frantic attempts to prove otherwise.

A man who can no longer pass legislation may find increasingly extreme executive orders even more appealing than he already has. A man who can no longer drive the zeitgeist may try even harder to make fetch happen, perhaps by choosing a hot-button constitutional fight like birthright citizenship. A president humiliated by the failure of his stupid, pointless, illegal war on Iran might find the prospect of a quick, theatrical strike against Cuba quite appealing.

A man who has almost certainly been advised to make some symbolic gesture toward transparency, to reassure a nation horrified by what it has begrudgingly been allowed to learn about Jeffrey Epstein and his network of powerful friends, could instead decide to stubbornly go in the opposite direction by pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell.

And perhaps most ominously, a president enraged by his lack of power in the final years of his final term might decide to try once more to refuse the peaceful transfer of that power.

That is the danger of a weakening strongman. The weakening is real. The danger is, too.

Trump is less able to command the country, less able to direct the culture, less able to dictate the news cycle, and less able to bend institutions and individuals to his will than ever before. That is worth recognizing. It is worth taking strength from.

But humiliation does not make him harmless. Decline will not make him gentle.

A cornered despot does not suddenly discover humility. He looks for a way to make everyone else feel the panic he feels himself.

I hope I’m wrong.

I hope he goes with the maples.

Take heart whenever a former red-hat wearer draws the line, whether over Epstein, inflation, or Trump’s submissive posture toward Israel. Take heart when a historically compliant politician tells him to kick rocks. Take heart when the Senate passes a War Powers resolution, no matter how loudly he cries. Take heart when the Supreme Court demonstrates even a minimal amount of autonomy and shoots down one of his self-evidently unconstitutional executive orders.

And let’s especially take heart as voters around the nation elect a new crop of politicians who will not only fight vigorously and viciously against Trump and his regime, but help craft an America more resilient against the next would-be strongman.

But do not merely take heart. Fight back. Because the goal cannot be merely surviving Donald Trump. It cannot be waiting for his power to slip away on its own. We can and must accelerate the process and pull the power from his hands. We have to replace him. And we have to replace the politics that made him possible with a country that actually delivers for its people, in a way Donald Trump and his administration of graft, cruelty, and entitled incompetence never could and never would.

Trump’s power is slipping away. That’s the good news.

What matters now is who picks it up next, and what they do with it.

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Update for July 2026: I’m here!

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