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We thought we’d go with something different this week, for two reasons, First, we can’t keep up with Trump’s epic corruption-o-rama plus fake-gold-plated trashing of Washington D.C. plus $30- or $50- or $100-billion war of choice against looking at the Epstein Files. Second, we don’t want to ignore the gun-murders-cum-perp-suicides in San Diego three days ago.

As it happens, we had already written about the latter, sort of. Way back in the 1990s, one of us (SR) wrote a modest-proposal-type piece purporting to offer a solution to the stories of random shootings that invaded the national newsfeed every week or two. This stream of murder stories never ended, so he (SR) periodically updated and reissued the satire with the names of the latest criminals and their crimes.

We considered updating it again with this week’s monsters, but we’ve decided to leave it as is, with its now mercifully forgotten names and quaint references to long-gone cultural artifacts like “television” and “the press.”

The names have changed, the shootings continue, the thoughts and prayers of our elected representatives—a controlling subset of whom are fully owned subsidiaries of corporate interests—continue to stand in for any meaningful efforts to keep guns out of the hands of anyone who has hands.

And how does this relate to Splitsville—our term for a single geo-political entity in which two or more distinct “nations” unpleasantly coexist? Let’s put it this way. There are those citizens of the USA, including us, who look at the various nations on Planet Earth and see that those who have strict gun regulations have far fewer gun murders than we have here in our golden nation on a hill or whatever the fuck that phrase is. And then there are those—hi, MAGA!—who appear to be programmed to “think” that the only way to stop gun murder is with more guns. Lots and lots of guns. In The Split, we exaggerate this—slightly—by portraying the nation we call the CCSA (Confederation of Conservative States of America, the former red states) as having laws that not only allow everyone to carry a gun but insist, under penalty of arrest, that everyone carry a gun at all times. Is that one of the goals of Project 2025? We wouldn’t doubt it.

Here’s ye olde story. Enjoy!

Channel 1609: All Suicide All The Time

We wanted to let Cunanan do what we figured he wanted to do. I know it sounds hardhearted, but in a choice between going out with a gun battle, I’ll take a suicide any day.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, New York Times Magazine, November 2, 1997

He was a loner with an obsession for guns who thought constantly about murder and suicide, acquaintances say.

New York Times article on overweight white supremacist Buford O. Furrow Jr., August 12, 1999

It seemed too bizarre to be true: a television network collaborating with a Federal agency to send a multimillion-dollar 747 jumbo jet hurtling out of the sky to crash on the desert floor, for a live broadcast, hoping to attract the biggest rubber-necking crowd ever.

New York Times, August 28, 1999

Murder being the extroverted form of suicide, it’s clear that for the Buford Furrows, the Andrew Cunanans, the Timothy McVeighs, the trenchcoat-mafiosi Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises, the motel-handyman Cary Stayners, and the day-trader Mark O. Bartons of the world, ostentatiously killing others is integral to the process of ostentatiously killing themselves. As a rule, the rest of us are not upset when we learn that another dangerous wacko has been arrested, or shot by cops, or died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. What does upset us is this: only by sacrificing a number innocent victims can a dangerous wacko become famous enough for us to learn of his capture or demise.

Until now. Remember the ethical suicide parlors of the Kurt Vonnegut short story? Where the government of an overcrowded world offers the inhabitants a bit of blissful solitude in a comfortable room in exchange for the promise to kill themselves immediately thereafter? The plan I am hereby putting forward is similar, except that the proposed incentive is fame: a televised death, the more sensational the better.

Here’s how it works. A cable channel called, let’s say, Suicide Television would actively recruit pre-murderous subjects. While it will require some skillful scouting, database mining, and old-fashioned selling to find and persuade the first few volunteers that this is a good idea, I predict there will be an endless supply of takers following the inaugural broadcasts and a round or two of righteous indignation from the press.

After presenting themselves at an STV regional recruiting center, or being discovered by a talent scout, subjects would be exhaustively interviewed by staff psychologists. Those who pass—that is, who are deemed to be rapidly approaching the tipping point beyond which they will embark on an extroverted-suicide spree—would be put up in a comfortable, hotel-like confinement center, allocated a budget, and assigned a segment producer.

Working together, subject and producer would develop the suicide telecast. Each production would be a unique elaboration on the various family traumas, psychoses, demons and what-have-yous that are driving the subject to slaughter innocent victims. For instance, a subject who was regularly beaten by his parents, or picked on by bullies, might (I’m just guessing here; I’m no psychologist) choose to wrestle a wild bear, or a shark. For another subject, a dramatic motorcycle-crash—over a cliff and onto the rocks below—might be in order. Some may even wish to die an old-fashioned death: being drawn and quartered, hung, garroted, guillotined, or broken on the rack. Or a pop-culture death: being tied to railroad tracks and run over by a speeding locomotive; being sliced in half by a huge circular saw or sizzling laser; being flattened by a steamroller.

[Editor’s (EW’s) note: Some may find these scenarios unrealistic. It can be argued that most perpetrators of senseless mass slaughter would assume that their inevitable suicide-by-cop (or conventional suicide, for that matter) will be fast and painless. Whereas even a dumbfuck serial killer can guess that being drawn and quartered, cut in half by a saw, or pancaked by a steamroller will hurt. (But not being guillotined. Fun Fact: The guillotine was intended to provide a merciful, painless form of execution.) Here is where modern anaesthesiological science rides to the rescue. The show’s producers can assure candidates who are skittish about pain that they can choose to be pumped full of narcotics before the episode’s climax—either in secret (to promote a mystique of fearlessness) or in public (because what the fuck).]

For the network to attract an audience in the 300-channel universe, it will need more than a steady stream of thrilling suicides. It will need first-rate production values as well. The money-shots will be planned and executed with the same care that goes into the making of a major motion picture or big-time commercial. Multiple-camera setups will be common. Special rigs will be developed to deliver, say, an ultra-slo-mo shot of a jet-powered boat as it smashes into a piling at 75 miles an hour; or a closeup of the face of a subject during three minutes of free-fall followed by a few nanoseconds of impact with the roof of an abandoned building; or a clear view, along with surround-sound, of someone who never got to become a serial killer being swallowed by molten lava deep inside the cone of a live volcano.

For promotional purposes there will be documentary footage shot of each subject in the weeks leading up to the climax. The planning sessions. Subject and producer working with the storyboard artist. Discussions with psychologists and attorneys. Tearful and recriminatory reunions with family and friends. Moments of doubt. Moments of commitment. Terrifying glimpses of the subject’s true nature.

Will STV keep all would-be mass murderers from following their grisly destiny? What about those who simply won’t settle for a half-hour of prime-time fame before the lights go out—the ones for whom the murder of others is the necessary prequel to their own public demise? Here’s a thought. I know it won’t work for everyone, but it’s bound to work for some: put two or more of them in the same telecast and let them satisfy their urges in a mutually beneficial manner.

Two subjects with the same obsession might choose to have a high-speed head-on collision with each other—driving specially doctored cars without seat belts, air bags and crumple zones. Or to play out the “chicken” scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Or attack each other with shovels. A Rollerball-type death-sport series could evolve, with the victor going on to meet a new challenger the following week. Or even a game show (Death Wish? High Noon? Look Who’s Standing?) in which the object is to determine who, in any given week, is the fastest draw on STV. [Note: We used this idea for a show in our dystopian satire The Split. You’ll find it on pages 312-313 of the paperback and hardcover versions of the book.]

You know you want to read it.

Of course there will be those who complain that televising suicides is an appalling idea; who write letters to the editor objecting that it’s a barbaric throwback to the age of bread-and-circuses; who ardently protest the commercialization of death. And they won’t get any argument from me. My only response will be to say that the spectacle of our subjects being extinguished on STV is more edifying than watching the loved ones of murder victims tearfully emerging from black limousines on the nightly news.

And if that doesn’t convince the well-meaning, if misguided, critics, perhaps they’ll be swayed by this: STV will donate a substantial portion of its income to an established victim’s rights group. That way we’ll not only reduce the number of serial killers, we’ll also mine the silver lining in the cloud they leave behind.

IT’S WORLD FISH MIGRATION DAY AND NATIONAL WAITERS AND WAITRESSES DAY. CELEBRATE/MOURN ACCORDINGLY. HOW?

By buying THE SPLIT, of course.

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Q: What is it about having a lot of money that fucks people up so much?

A: Not everyone, no. We can think of various people who have a lot of money and who don’t seem to be fucked up, e.g., Warren Buffet, Mackenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’s ex), Taylor Swift. And yet, clearly, there are people who have a lot of money and who seem to be mucho fucked up, if not actually crazy. Name three? Sure: Peter Thiel, Marc Andreeson, Elon Musk.

Thiel not only believes in the antichrist—itself dispositive proof of krazeeness—but thinks it could be Greta Thunberg. We were going to say, “Yes, that Greta Thunberg—the climate activist.” But it needn’t be her. It could be some random Greta Thunberg who teaches third grade in Oslo, Minnesota. The point is, to believe that anyone named Greta Thunberg or anyone else, is the antichrist, is definitive proof of being, not only crazy, but nuts.

Andreeson, who in the good old days helped invent Netscape, has published, in “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” this:

We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

This isn’t, in and of itself, crazy. It is, however, either stupid (which he isn’t) or deeply disingenuous. Saying that markets prevent monopolies is like saying that criminal gangs prevent crime because they kill each other. The only thing that prevents (or unwinds) monopolies are government anti-trust actions. Just, if you’re old enough to recognize the reference, ask AT&T.

The disingenousness (which spellcheck thinks isn’t a word, but fuck you, spellcheck) never stops. Behold:

We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.

TODAY IS NATIONAL BUTTERMILK BISCUIT DAY, INTERNATIONAL CHIHUAHUA APPRECIATION DAY, AND—WAIT FOR IT—NATIONAL DANCE LIKE A CHICKEN DAY.

Celebrate With The Split

Does anyone within the sound of our voice believe this holds true about health care, education, or housing? It’s true that Donald Trump only cares about Cokes and his smartphone, but, then, he’s crazy. When Marc Andreeson (net worth: between 1.5 and 2.5 billion dollars) buys five-bucks-a-gallon gas, is he having the same experience as that of the poorest consumers (net worth: don’t ask) when they do the same?

The manifesto goes on like this, at length, in blithe (if not sadistic) indifference to reality. But maybe it’s wrong to regard it as a good-faith effort to convey the truth. Maybe. like its precursor manifesti, it’s meant more as an incantation, or like the opening song in a James Bond movie: overwrought, melodramatic, luridly unrealistic, hypnotic if you’re susceptible.

Thus, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 The Futurist Manifesto: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

Marc Andreeson’s 2025 The Techno-Optimist Manifesto: “We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.”

(Fun Fact: Marinetti is cited as one of Techno-Optimism’s “patron saints.”)

“Eros”? Really? Still, okay. A fellow, or a movement, can dream.

Then again, the Futurists became fascists—to which Andreeson would probably respond, “Yeah? So?” Andreeson, Thiel, and their fellow billionaire tech bros start out cheering for the authoritarian lawlessness of Trumpism and get more right-wing from there. Why? Because they construe any concern for the collective—labor unions, the environment, democracy, the society of which they pretend they’re not a part but by which they’d like to be regarded as heroes—as impinging on their sacred, huffy-adolescent self-image as individualists. They disdain much about government—its “burdensome” regulations, its tedious “oversight”—but not its intellectual property laws or its lucrative contracts.

Which brings us to Elon Musk.

The world’s richest man recently had a bad week. As documented by the excellent Dean Blundell, we learn:

• French prosecutors are investigating his possible “complicity in possessing and distributing child sexual abuse images on the platform, dissemination of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity, and unlawful collection of personal data.”

• Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive who has had four (4) children with Musk via IVF, testified (for the plaintiff) in the trial in which Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for violating the agreement they had to make OpenAI a non-profit. Zilis’s testimony in cross-examination seemed to demolish many of Musk’s arguments.

• Sunday night (as, per Blundell, “his stock is wobbling. His AI is generating Holocaust denial and synthetic child abuse material. His audience is fleeing X. His own mother’s account is reportedly being run by a ghostwriter who once referred to her in the third person.”) he goes on X and posts, “Bitches, Money, No taxes, Party.”

We have no idea what this means. Maybe it’s a campaign slogan he plans to use if he tries to run for President.

A few hours later he takes it down, and posts a tweet about his mom.

Blundell:

The world is watching the richest man in human history have an open-air psychological breakdown across the world’s most-trafficked social media platform — which he owns — while a sovereign European nation prepares criminal charges against him for, among other things, complicity in child sexual abuse. While his own children’s mother dismantles his vanity lawsuit on the witness stand. While Tesla loses market share, X bleeds advertisers, Grok denies the Holocaust, and his SpaceX rocket keeps blowing up.

Maybe. The thing is, all of Musk’s tweets on X have the wet-noodle impact of a semi-bright teenager, stoned, trying to be clever online. Someone on X will post “THE JEWS AND THE LIZARD PEOPLE ARE IN CAHOOTS” and Musk will re-tweet it with, “Very true.”

What do these three very rich idiots have in common that Buffet, Scott, and Swift do not? Could it be that they’re seeking to use their wealth to influence our government, promote alternatives to democracy itself, and otherwise self-servingly, adolescently, warp the universe? Paul Krugman writes:

At this point, however, it’s clear that we are not experiencing a mere replay of the reign of the robber barons. We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the “malefactors of great wealth” called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.

At least the robber barons had, if nothing else, the elitist sense of noblesse oblige to prompt them to create institutions that could benefit society at large: universities, libraries, museums, etc. Krugman:

Tellingly, unlike the robber barons of yore, many modern plutocrats show little sense of gratitude for their good fortune, little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works. Forbes reports that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have devoted almost none of their wealth to philanthropy, while Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are only slightly better.

(Although, in Zuck’s defense, he is proceeding with the creation of a cattle ranch on the island of Kauai where, per NBC news, “He said he is raising wagyu and angus cattle that will be ‘eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch.’”)

Thiel, having successfully promoted the soulless JD Vance, gives stern lectures about a preposterous pseudo-villain that barely exists even in the Bible. Musk, having destroyed USAID, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, wants to colonize Mars. Andreeson fancies himself a philosopher. Zuckerberg is growing macadamia nuts and brewing beer to feed cattle. Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google; no. 3 on Forbes’ billionaire list) flees Kommunist Kalifornia and its wealth tax to live in Nevada and shifts his politics from liberal to Trumpian. Does this reflect the influence of his pro-Trump, um, influencer girlfriend? Who knows? Take it away, NY Post:

In a statement to the Times, Brin said: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

Translation: “I don’t want California to end up in the same place so, rather than use my unimaginable wealth to campaign for freedom, the rule of law, and justice for all citizens, I left the state and now support a lawless, authoritarian, proto-fascist madman.”

As to the answer to our original question, it’s not that vast wealth fucks people up. All of us have the capacity both to be decent and to be fucked-up. Wealth, like adversity, doesn’t create character. It reveals it. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk both grew up in white supremacist/apartheid South Africa. Now one wants to exit the (pluralist, democratic) society that made him rich and, via “seasteading” or in a “network state,” live in a richy-rich post-democracy enclave, while the other wants to reduce (or eliminate) “entitlements,” immiserating millions, so the US “doesn’t go bankrupt”; he also wants to relocate to Mars.

These people could do literally incalculable good by devoting a mere fraction of the fortunes that they and their descendants will never spend to any aspect of human endeavor: science, art, medicine, hunger, world peace, climate change mitigation, you name it. All that, while still living in the kind of luxury that would make Andrew Carnegie jealous.

Instead, they piddle around with hobbies, acquire giant yachts, destroy newspapers and tv news divisions, and seek mainly just to make more money.

In 2014, when Ebola broke out in West Africa, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, wrote a check for $15 million to an NGO that sent technicians out to wire up the wilds of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and then sent Ph.D.’s into the field with MS tablets to interview the local populace. The campaign wasn’t entirely selfless; America didn’t lift a finger until an infected Liberian arrived in Dallas, and he and two nurses tending to him died. Still, Allen’s brisk act of philanthropy worked. They found Patient Zero—a child in a remote village—and the source of the disease.

Today’s hyper-wealthy can’t be bothered. Instead, they display a sort of sociopathic unawareness of or indifference to the idea of enlightened self-interest. Despite the lessons of history, they think it’s good and patriotic for them to rake in as much money as they can, to rig the economy, to rig the government, to do everything possible to stuff their pockets while the stuffing is good. History teaches that they and/or their children will end up on the (metaphorical) guillotine if things continue at this rate. They don’t care—either that, or they don’t know history.

Think about who these people are. They’re not industrialists and they’re not even businessmen. They’re technologists, which is to say, former (current?) nerds. Maybe they couldn’t get the chicks (or, in Thiel’s case, the studs) in high school. (Facebook, after all, began as a way to rate the “hotness” of women at Harvard.) Now, with their pockets stuffed, they’re exacting their revenge on the rest of us: “Who’s on top now?!” It’s sick (in the classic sense of the word); the country—the world, even—is in this moment essentially owned by a cadre of twisted, fabulously rich nerds.

And so we’re left with another version of Splitsville, our term denoting a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In the one are the tech bros, and their hundreds of billions—trillions!—of dollars and their beer-fed cattle. In the other is everybody else. Oh but don’t worry: in the aggregate, we have more money than they do. For the moment.

Watch Us Ridicule Thiel and Musk

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If you can, cast your mind back to the distant past—all the way back to April 9, almost exactly a month ago, and recall how we mused that it felt like we had reached “an inflection point” in the ongoing serio-comic horror story/farce that is the Trump administration. We cited Trump nattering on to a group of Easter Egg Roll schoolchildren about Biden and “the autopen.” Surely, we suggested, this was batshit craziness of an entirely new level of toxicity. It—

But wait. First, what do we mean by an inflection point? We mean a point in the unfolding of a process, at which it reaches a certain maximum value and after which the process exhibits an entirely new direction and a new set of values. No, that’s not a technical definition you could get from Gork or ChatGTO. We’re not technicians, okay? We’re artists. In fact, we’re Aahht-ists, if you really want to know. We wrote The Split, blah blah blah, funny, prescient, exciting, available here.

Where were we…Oh, yeah. Inflection point. For a familiar, visceral example, take a roller coaster. You start with that agonizingly slow creep up the initial big incline. Then you get to the top—the inflection point—and everything suddenly changes. Rather than a slow, ratcheted creep up, you begin a rapid, free-fall plunge down. Now you’re being lifted out of your seat instead of forced onto the back of it.

Trump bitching to kids about Biden seemed like such a point. Why? Because it’s not only obviously nuts, it’s nuts to the children. Surely, after that, things would change. Not that Trump would become the opposite of the demented, doddering, resentful, pathologically-lying old fart he had always been. Rather (we hypothesized), the public’s reaction to him would shift. His ever-advancing deterioration would quickly become unacceptable even to the sanewashing mainstream media, the chumps and dupes of the Republican rank and file, the coolly self-interested business community, and (with certain MAGA-fanatic exceptions) to all the other cohorts and cadres and interest groups that had until then found it possible to excuse, deny, or ignore it.

And guess what! (Style note: Please stop using a question mark after “guess what.” It’s not a question. It’s an imperative, like “En garde!” and “Fly the Friendly Skies” and “Go fuck yourself.”) We weren’t entirely wrong! Trump’s approval numbers in many polls continue to go down. The problem is (Ha ha. As if there’s only one.) that every day now feels like an inflection point.

Every day brings some new outrage, lie, blunder, theft, or piece of evidence of the complete corruption of the government, that must, that just must, be dispositive. Every day Trump says things, not only that no one believes, but that everyone assumes Trump himself doesn’t believe. When one of us (EW) pointed out that “every day Trump says something that he contradicts the next day,” the other (SR) said, “The next day? He contradicts himself in the same paragraph.”

Or look at this, from Mary Geddry:

A Daily Beast analysis found that Donald Trump posted 565 times in April, with 189 posts between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., and activity on 83% of nights during normal sleeping hours. [Ed.: That’s an average of 19 posts every day.] That includes multi-hour posting sprees deep into the night, followed by early morning threats, policy pronouncements, and the occasional AI-generated self-aggrandizement meme.

A 79-year-old commander-in-chief is posting through the night, nodding off in public, threatening to end civilizations before breakfast, and improvising military policy in real time, while American troops are under fire.

Everything feels like the last straw. Everything feels like a line—often that we had no idea existed—has been crossed. Everything feels like an inflection point.

Trump hosted small business owners this week for National Small Business Week, where he covered, in no particular order: the Iran war, Venezuela (resolved in 48 minutes, he’d like you to know), Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars, the cognitive test he has now aced three times under extraordinary pressure, and a reflecting pool renovation that came in at $1.9 million versus the government’s $350 million estimate, painted American Flag Blue. Small business was mentioned periodically throughout, like a polite guest at its own party. The actual Small Business Person of the Year got approximately four minutes at the end.

CAN WE AT LEAST ALL AGREE THAT IT’S NATIONAL ROAST LEG OF LAMB DAY AND NATIONAL CHILDREN’S MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS DAY?

What better occasion to buy THE SPLIT?

Or ask us about the war on, or against, or in, Iran. Ans: Don’t ask. Operation We Are Tough Guys starts (on no provocation), accomplishes nothing other than to kill innocents in Iran and American service people and make everything all over the world worse, and ends with declarations of victory while Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and creates a global energy crisis.

Then comes Operation We’re Doing the World a Favor. That—the goal of which is to restore things to how they were before this whole benighted blunder started—lasts two days. The Strait of Hormuz is open. No, the Strait is closed. We have ceased hostilities, except we continue to sustain the blockade of Iran’s ports. On Friday we’re sending Kushner and Witkoff to negotiate. On Saturday the trip is canceled. The Iranians want a deal. No, the Iranians say, we don’t want a deal. Kids visit the White House for National Fitness (!) Week, and Trump—the least fit man in D.C., if not in the US—brags to them about how he’s destroyed Ukraine’s navy and air force. What? He means Iran’s—and then, when someone else is talking, he falls asleep.

Geddry:

The British, as always, cut through the fog with admirable economy. Andrew Neil looked at Trump’s claim that he was on the brink of a “complete and final agreement” with Iran and said he would be leaving to colonize Mars tomorrow, and he was not sure which scenario was more likely. His verdict on the whole spectacle: “It’s a shambles. It’s all over the place. No one has a clue what’s really happening.”

When someone suggested that perhaps Trump was practicing strategic ambiguity, Neil was even more direct. “They’re not playing 4D chess,” he said. “They couldn’t play 1D chess.”

That may be the most generous, accurate thing anyone has said about this administration all week.

“Naturally,” Geddry says, “the next logical step was to pick a fight with the pope.”

As is customarily intoned at the Passover seder, “The simple son asks, ‘What the fuck?’” I.e, why? Why this endless, relentless downpour of straws capable of breaking the back of every camel from Ethiopia to the one illustrated on Trump’s cognitive tests? (You know—the tests he boasts about “acing.” The ones he pretends—or believes—are intelligence tests, when in fact they are exactly the opposite: They’re tests designed to be as easy as possible, so that if you don’t “ace” them it’s obvious there’s something wrong with your so-called “mind.”)

That’s easy. Why all this confusion, thrashing, mind-changing, and chaos? Because the Epstein Files are still out there and people want to see them. Because Trump is stupid and thus persuadable by Bibi Netanyahu that invading Iran will be easy. Because Trump only listens to people who support, flatter, and applaud his stupidity. Because the more Trump does, says, and posts, the more voters turn against him and the GOP. That makes the (hideous) Republicans mad at him, him mad at them for being mad at him, and him constantly in need of new distractions and shows of strength and dominance.

It’s a cycle, see? The more Trump does something, the more it blows up in his face, so the more desperate he becomes, which prompts him to do more things.

(Oh, and this just in: the debris left over from the demolition of the East Wing (!!), dumped on the East Potomac Golf Course (!!!), has tested positive for toxic metals (!!!!). Geddry also reports that, at a White House Mother’s Day event in honor of military mothers, Melania “described Trump as a ‘strong commander-in-chief’ whose ‘empathy transcends the role,’ and the room burst into laughter. Frankly, that laughter may have been the most accurate real-time fact-check of the day.”)

Meanwhile we—Americans; the world; the human race—have to live with this constant pummeling of too-much, this daily onslaught of now-at-last-they’ll-get-rid-of-him-because-look. Like Saint Sebastian and his arrows, we’re being riddled with inflection points. Every new outrage sparks a sense of expectation—raised two or three times a day, and then dashed—that now, finally, we’ll be put out of the misery that is the Trump administration.

We won’t, of course. We won’t because the only institution that can bring that about is, at least for now, the Republican Party, whose moral bankruptcy, cowardly paralysis, and blithe cruelty are plain as the bronze-spackled nose on Donald Trump’s stupid, porcine face.

And so our portion of Splitsville—a term we use for a state of affairs in which a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”—consists of everyone whose common decency makes them (however in vain) anticipate—daily; hourly—a much-needed, long-overdue end to this regime of corruption, destruction, bigotry, greed, mendacity, and waste. Because that’s how we “roll,” okay?

There’s us, and there’s everybody else. We don’t know how they “roll.” Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just sit there, cheering for Trump while he robs them blind, lies to them, nods off after twenty minutes of describing his ballroom to them, sets a terrible example for their children, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc….

Buy THE SPLIT. Trump won't like it.

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“Now then, Dmitri. You know how we have always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb. The Bomb, Dmitri. The Hydrogen Bomb.”

-President Merkin Muffley to Soviet Premier Dmitri Kissoff, in Dr. Strangelove

Hey, what if the thing that goes wrong with the Bomb is the President of the United States? What if he’s a malignant narcissist manifesting the Dark Triad in the throes of progressive frontotemporal dementia?

No, the Dark Triad is not a combine of evil villains from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Right, Wikipedia?

The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities

“Offensive but non-pathological”? That doesn’t sound like the Donald Trump we know.

But never mind. Let’s talk about “nuclear codes.” You see it cited almost every day: “nuclear codes this,” “nuclear codes that.” Why, just this Wednesday morning, the excellent Mary Geddry, writing about how the White House had posted a photo of Donald Trump and King Charles with the caption, “Two Kings,” noted:

This, just days after the president insisted on national television that he is, in fact, “not a king.” Which would be more reassuring if his own communications team didn’t keep wandering into medieval cosplay like a Renaissance fair but with nuclear codes.

This—because, as you know, we’re always thinking—got us to thinking: What are the nuclear codes, and just how bad, dangerous, and horrifying is it that Donald Trump (of all people) has access to them? Of course we know that you know what they are—i.e., the secret combination of (we assume) letters and numbers which, when communicated to the appropriate military authorities, will launch nuclear weapons. But is it that easy? Can the Prez just call up the Pentagon and say, “Alpha Bravo Pi R-squared Twenty-Three Skidoo” and the silos in Nebraska swing open?

The frightening/reassuring answer seems to be: Yes and no.

The President is accompanied at all times by an aide carrying two essential items: the “football” (a brief case containing information about the various nuclear options), and the “biscuit,” a card containing the codes themselves. As Claude, Anthropic’s AI, explains:

The US nuclear launch process involves several key steps and safeguards:

The Decision The President is the sole authority to order a nuclear strike — no congressional approval or second signature is required…

Consultation (Optional but Typical) The President would typically consult with the Secretary of Defense and senior military advisors (the Joint Chiefs), but legally, their approval is not required. The SecDef’s role is advisory — they cannot veto a launch order.

Already we’re in trouble. We don’t know which is worse: the fact that the Secretary of Defense cannot countermand, or at least stall, a single individual’s command to launch nukes, or the fact that the current Secretary of Defense is a radical Christian alcoholic greaser who not only wouldn’t dream of contradicting his boss no matter how insane the boss becomes, but, in fact, probably fantasizes about the cleansing fire of a nuclear exchange as a means of exterminating his enemies and hastening the return of his messiah.

In any case, the President is not able to push any literal buttons himself. He (let’s, for the sake of efficiency, confine our hypothetical POTUS to the male gender) uses the biscuit to authenticate his identity to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon, which we pronounce “PENTA-gahn” but which King Charles pronounces “PENT-a-g’n.” As Claude notes, “The order must match specific codes to be considered valid.”

The President then gives the order to attack place P or country C or liberal L, at which point we enter the domain of:

Transmission The verified launch order is transmitted through the NMCC and/or the airborne command post (a specially equipped aircraft known as the “Doomsday Plane” or E-6B Mercury) to missile crews, submarine crews, or bomber pilots — depending on which leg(s) of the nuclear triad are being used.

Again with the “triad.” But now, at least, we arrive at a realm in which other people must be involved. The SecDef or the Joint Chiefs need not even be consulted and have no power to cancel a presidential command; but the actual dispatch of humanity’s most flabbergastingly destructive weapon will now require the conscious, witting collaboration of others. It’s time for:

Execution

· ICBMs (land-based): Two missile crew officers in separate launch control centers must both turn their keys simultaneously. A single crew cannot launch alone.

· Submarines (SSBNs): The submarine captain and crew carry out the order after authentication. Some procedures require multiple officers to act together.

· Bombers: Aircrew can be recalled even after takeoff, making this the most flexible option.

(Dreary-Not-Fun Fact: SSBN sounds like a new kind of anti-depressant, but SSBN actually stands for Ship Submersible Ballistic Nuclear. Exactly when Pentagon acronyms started being created by Borat, we don’t know.)

IT’S MR. POTATO HEAD DAY AND NATIONAL MAHJONG DAY!

Buy THE SPLIT anyway.

Readers of a certain age, to the extent that they are able to remember anything, might recall various Cold War dramas set amid these scenarios: the two-guys-in-missile-silos-fearing-they’re-about-to-destroy-the-world; The Bedford Incident, set aboard a submarine equipped with nuclear missiles; and, of course, Dr. Strangelove itself. One possibly misleading thing these and similar fictions have in common is, they all play out over the course of hours. Whoa! Not so slow! Claude reminds us, as it discusses:

Timeline From a presidential order to ICBM launch can be as fast as 5–15 minutes. Submarine launches can occur in a similar timeframe. This speed is intentional — it was designed during the Cold War to ensure a retaliatory capability before incoming missiles could destroy command infrastructure.

Thus far we have successfully avoided the topic at the center of this discussion, something Claude might refer to as Consequences. It would require an entire semester at an accredited war college to understand and lay out the range of scenarios that might follow a US first strike with a nuclear weapon. A lot would depend on the target—nuking Iran would have one effect, nuking North Korea or China would have another. Not only would alliances and proxies come into play (America nuking Iran might prompt Israel to nuke Lebanon and somebody, everybody, to nuke Israel), but every country, all over the world, would immediately regard the US the way the faculty and student body of an elementary school regard an active shooter.

We can’t believe we’re talking about this. But yes we can, because Donald Trump is president.

It is, of course, unthinkable that anyone—even Donald Trump—would order the use of nuclear weapons. Then again, ever since January 20, 2024, we have been treated (if that’s the word) to the unthinkable almost every day. It was unthinkable that someone would empower Elon Musk and a gang of twentysomething juvenile delinquents to lay waste to Federal agencies. It was unthinkable that an obviously demented crackpot like RFK, Jr. would be put in charge of the nation’s health. It was unthinkable that Trump would demolish the fucking East Wing of the fucking White House without notification or institutional validation. It was unthinkable that a US President would abandon Ukraine, cozy up to Putin, and attack NATO. It was unthinkable that Trump would simply assault Iran in defiance of a clutch of experts telling him the bad, damaging, world-threatening things that would (and did) happen if he did.

So the unthinkable has become kinda thinkable. Lately a rumor has been circulating that, about a week ago, Trump demanded a nuclear strike on Iran and had to be dissuaded of it by Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Snopes and Yahoo don’t believe it, and it seems to have originated with a distinctly untrustworthy source. Still: Would you have been shocked, or even surprised, if it were true? Us neither.

And why not? Because Trump is—and we say this with all due intellectual caution and delicacy of expression—crazy. You know it. We know it. We bet a lot of people around Trump know it. In fact, one way in which the US is Splitsville (i.e., a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”) is that by now there are only two kinds of people in the US of A: those who know Trump is crazy, and those (including Trump) who don’t.

The more Trump is crazy—and we see evidence of that every morning when we review his insane fusillade of Truth Social posts from the night before—the deeper we sink into an emotional quicksand pit of contradictory beliefs. The use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable because the scale of their destructiveness makes them seem not like “weapons” or “bombs” but primal machines designed to bring about the literal end of the world. We can no more believe anyone would use them than we believe—truly, viscerally—in the possibility of our own death.

But we also know that crazy is crazy, and malevolent crazy seems to be the kind that, faced with its own defeat, would gleefully destroy the world. So being worried or upset about Trump’s having access to the football and the biscuit is both an alarmist over-reaction and a sober, realistic appreciation of reality. On the one hand, no one would let him get that far. On the other, look how far the Republican Party has already let him get.

Meanwhile, of the three legs of the nuclear triad, only one allows for error:

Can it be stopped? There is no reliable mechanism to “recall” an ICBM once launched. Bombers can be recalled. The system is deliberately designed to be fast and hard to interrupt, which is also the source of significant ongoing policy debate about whether sole presidential authority is appropriate.

YA THINK?

(If you haven’t seen Dr. Strangelove, what are you waiting for?)

THE SPLIT. Buy one, get one.

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How bad is Donald Trump? This bad:

Several months ago Sorry. It just feels like several months ago. Last week, when he announced the Strait of Hormuz had been re- opened, our first reaction was: Oh foo. Really? Nuts.

Why? Because the Strait of Hormuz being open is a good thing. And we didn’t want Trump to get credit for being involved in any way with a good thing. Yes, yes, we know: for every possible good thing for which Trump might get even partial credit (and no, we can’t really think of any), there are a hundred terrible things for which he is completely responsible and for which he receives lusty, ringing, worldwide condemnation. And, as we know now (and should have known then), any announcement Trump makes about a good thing can, and should, be assumed to be either an outright lie, an expression of his bone-deep stupidity, or, given his chaotic impulsiveness, something that could (and, in this event, did) change overnight. We should have taken Trump’s announcement that “the Strait of Hormuz is open” to mean “The Strait of Hormuz is not open, or it is, and I will immediately do something to fuck it up and get it closed again.”

Which is to say, we shouldn’t have taken Trump literally or seriously. However, because--unlike some people--we have emotional intelligence, we at least noted our dismay at what should have been good news. And we wondered about that.

We could imagine some well-meaning individual gently chiding us with, “You fucking idiots! You should want the Strait of Hormuz to be open. That would mean that ships carrying oil, natural gas, and fertilizer would be able, once again, to transit through it to markets hither and yon. That would mean gas prices would come down, which would be good for the world and for you. That would mean farmers would be able to get their fertilizer ‘into the ground’ in time for spring planting, which would be good for the world and for you.”

But no. Instead we heard this good news and immediately had a sad. And that’s the point. We—it’s difficult even to type this—rooted against opening the Strait of Hormuz—and, even worse, for the success of a despotic and loathsome Iranian regime. Which is to say, out of our hatred for Donald Trump, we rooted against something that would have been in our own self-interest.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s pure MAGA.

Why, back in 2016, we used to wonder, does the hard-core MAGA coalition cheer, give money to, and vote for this imbecilic, bankrupting, sexual predating, pathologically lying grifter? Wasn’t it obvious that he was both a buffoon and an outright racist? That he promised to solve problems that didn’t exist, and had nothing on offer regarding problems that did? Didn’t those people realize they were voting against their own self-interests?

It was a mystery! Then someone smart—we don’t remember who—said, “They don’t vote their interests. They vote their identity.” And suddenly, as they say, “the penny dropped,” which is the same thing as saying it all fell into place. Those people went to Trump’s rallies and bought his idiotic merch and wore signs that said REAL MEN WEAR DIAPERS and voted him into office, not because he was good for them but because he was bad for the people they hated—liberals, Blacks, “elites,” immigrants, LGBTQ people, etc. They rooted against their interests to strike a blow against people they were browbeaten into perceiving as their enemies.

“HA HA,” we thought at the time. “WHATTA BUNCHA MORONS.”

It’s not so funny now, is it? Because we’re doing the same thing. But this is what Trump has done. He’s not only turned an army of idiots into the self-harming, delusional cult of MAGA, he’s driven us to self-harming behavior, too. They hurt themselves to promote him; we hurt ourselves to defeat him.

“STOP HITTING YOURSELF!” someone should say to us.

IT’S—AS IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW—NATIONAL CHERRY CHEESECAKE DAY!

Have a slice. And buy THE SPLIT.

But okay, perhaps we’re exaggerating the severity of our own moral corruption. (It happens.) What if there’s a legitimate reason for us to want the Strait of Hormuz to remain closed? What if it’s in our political (as opposed to economic) self-interest? If you were to ask, “Would you be willing to pay two dollars more per gallon of gas if it accelerated the end of Donald Trump’s political career and maybe, just maybe, his life?” our answer would be, like, “DUH.”

Of course, that’s easy for us to say. Neither of us drives to work, so we can afford the higher gas price since we don’t use too much of it. But what about everybody else? Isn’t that selfish of us? And isn’t that (“we can afford it”) the (galling, despicable) rationalization/excuse of billionaires everywhere? Of people who ignore climate change or campaign against AI regulation because (they think) whatever goes wrong, they’ll be okay? “What do we care if Donald Trump’s policies and behavior immiserates millions and threatens life on earth? We’ve got bunkers full of frozen Porterhouse steaks! And look at that tax cut!”

What we have here is politics separating into two elements, like a quantum event yielding a pair of entangled particles. On the one hand we have culture; on the other, economics. The Republicans have been campaigning on and lying about and exploiting the idea of culture (Who is a “real American”? Who festers in “a culture of crime”? Who “is a real Christian”?) since the Southern Strategy elected Richard Nixon. The Democrats have been running on economics (Social Security, minimum wage, unions) since FDR.

At the bottom of the Republican version of this magnetic dipole is MAGA, who will (knowingly or not) sacrifice their economic status for (they think) the cultural gain of owning the libs. It’s the triumph of spite. At the top are the oligarchs, who will sacrifice the rest of humanity for their economic gain. It’s the triumph of greed.

And here we are, indulging in our own bit of spite, hoping not so much that Iran wins the war as that Trump loses. This places us in the even-more-unpleasant position of finding the claims of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be more trustworthy than those of the President of the United States of America. This, normally, would be extraordinary, because we find all groups of right-wing religious fanatics, from the IRG to Opus Dei to the Taliban to their Protestant American counterparts, the evangelicals, to be the most pernicious forces in the world. But compare them to the demented and pathologically dishonest Donald Trump (and his administration of flunkies, weirdos, crazos, and drunks), and they start to seem…credible. And it’s clear that everything Trump announces about the state of things in Iran is false—sometimes comically so—while the Iranian leadership’s statements have been true.

So yes, we hope the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, so that the American (and world) economy suffers “shocks,” the business community turns on the Republicans, and Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and that entire wretched crew suffer the ignominy, embarrassment, and political death (legal consequences!) they so morbidly-richly deserve. If that means we’re willing to sacrifice other people’s gasoline budgets or farmers’ crop yields, then we accept full responsibility for that and we hate ourselves.

But do we? Really?

Maybe not. Because now that we think about it, Trump is an enemy of and a danger to humanity; anything that helps bring him down, short of genocide itself, is, if not a good thing, then a necessary thing. The killing of millions was required to stop Hitler, who himself killed millions. Trump isn’t killing millions, but that may only be because it hasn’t occurred to him he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.

What he has done is bad enough, including but not limited to: wrecked the government, corrupted the Justice Department, sent an army of thugs to murder citizens on the street and drag immigrants to concentration camps, committed war crimes, committed the murders of the crews of fishing and drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, indulged in corruption and self-dealing the magnitude of which we know we don’t yet know, sold pardons and solicited bribes, run the Presidency like a mob boss, suppressed what is surely evidence of his own (and his pals’) pederasty and worse, (___your contribution here___), and subjected Washington, D.C. to an onslaught of destruction, vulgar bad taste, and untrammeled ickiness.

And that’s only a partial list of his crimes. If disrupting the global fuel market is helpful in stopping Trump—because the magnitude of his failure helps turn public and political sentiment against him—then so be it. Besides, maybe even MAGA will notice when it costs sixty or a hundred bucks to fill ‘er up.

And then they’ll admit we were correct all along and thank us. Right?

Ha ha. Jk. A cult is a cult. Whether Trump is merely kicked out of office (via impeachment or the 25^th Amendment) or literally, physically dies (on the golf course, with a hooker, or in prison), he will, to the MAGA faithful, remain a hero and a martyr. (You will note that we decline to add, “…or he simply serves out his term and retires from public life.” Not gonna happen. No one can imagine three more years of this.)

Whatever the cause of his vacating the presidency, the US will remain Splitsville (our snappy term denoting a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinctive “nations”).

In one nation: Trump’s idolators, who will mount lovingly-framed pictures of him as Captain America the way Catholics put up photos of the Pope and Lubavitchers post pix of the Rebbe—and, we assume, Shia zealots display portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini. In the other: Everyone else, including the majority of Americans sick to death of him and the smaller group who don’t follow politics, but all of whom will be happy, or maybe just relieved, that he’s gone.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T BUY THE SPLIT, AND I THOUGHT, “UH OH.” SO I BOUGHT IT AND THEY DIDN’T COME FOR ME.

Buy it here. Just to be safe.

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ONE

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

TWO

If we decide to run for President in 2028 (and don’t think we’re not considering it), our top two campaign promises—in fact, maybe our only campaign promises—will be 1) to exuberantly blow up any and all self-glorifying buildings, architecturally added-on wings, statues, memorials, and other constructions that Trump erected during his term(s) in the White House, and 2) to conduct a national contest in which we will choose, say, 100 citizens (plus maybe 20 nice people who have applied for citizenship) to run rampant through the streets and edifices of Washington, DC, tearing off and chiseling off and hammering off gold-hued ornaments, tat, gewgaws, bric-a-brac, bling, and the randomly-applied word “Trump” wherever they find such evidence of his graffiti.

If we can document and broadcast this process of civic cleansing on pay-per-view, and thus raise funds for some of the useful agencies and noble causes Elon Musk and his vile DOGE cohorts destroyed in their idiot adolescent glee, so much the better.

Simultaneously, we will enlist citizens and their representatives to pass a law—preferably a Constitutional amendment—making it illegal for elected officials to slap their names on monuments, buildings, airports, currency, etc., or otherwise foist their vainglory on the nation. Such commemoration will be forbidden until at least 50 years after their death, by which time, presumably, a consensus will have been established regarding the significance of the figures in question.

IT’S NATIONAL TRUCK DRIVER RECOGNITION WEEK. WHAT WILL YOUR FAVORITE DRIVER BE READING ON THAT NEXT LONG HAUL?

Hint: THE SPLIT!

THREE

Arch de Trump [sic] — Artist’s conception

Just to get you in the mood.

FOUR

What, you may be wondering, does this have to do with Splitsville, our term of art for a single geo-political entity in which two or more distinct, possibly antagonistic “nations” uncomfortably co-exist? Let’s keep it simple: There’s the nation of Donald J. Trump and there’s the nation of everyone else. To those who’ve been observing him (going back to the early 1970s) it has always been apparent that if you are neither himself, Donald J. Trump, nor his pathologically-icky mentor, the late Roy Cohn, he holds you in contempt, considers you a loser and a mark, and will not hesitate to lie to you, take your money, and enlist others he considers losers to do bad things to you. (The universe of Trump’s potential victims thus consists of the entire human race, including his children, wives current- and ex-, and all other members of his extended family.)

Since he’s never troubled himself to conceal his true nature, we see no reason to dissemble or put on airs about what we think of him, or pretend that we’re not thrilled to see his once-solid base slowly but inexorably melting away (except for the unredeemable cultic morons) with each of his deranged utterances and actions.

On the one hand, we hope he never gets to build that ridiculous, oversized arch. On the other, we’re looking forward to blowing it to kingdom come, especially if we can wheel him out of his prison cell, trundle him through the rank and file of the biggest No Kings parade of all time as thousands jeer and tell him to go fuck himself, push him up a ramp to a podium that’s scarily close to the blast zone and, with his eyelids propped open with (very sharp) toothpicks if necessary, force him to witness the explosion that even he will realize formally marks the end of the MAGA era, the obliteration of whatever “legacy” he supposes he has left, and marks his ineradicable definition, throughout history and for all time, as a loser—like no one’s ever seen before.

REMEMBER TO BUY A COPY BEFORE YOU THROW IT AT HIM!

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So. Everything okay?

No, everything is not okay. This past Easter Sunday, here, as reported by the relentless Jeff Tiedrich, is what Donald Trump said to a group of children taking part in the Easter Egg Roll at the White House:

TRUMP: Biden would use the autopen.

CHILD: What?

TRUMP: He’d have an autopen follow him. Joe Biden. He didn’t sign— he was incapable of signing his name. So they’d follow him around with this big machine. you know what it was called? An autopen. And he’d have the autopen sign for him. He’d take the paper, hand it to his guys, sign it with an autopen. Not too good, right? Who likes the fake news? Does anybody like the fake news?”

Note the topic, farcically inappropriate for a group of children, let alone during a celebration of Easter. Then appreciate the final two questions. See how they combine the inclusiveness and simplicity of an adult who thinks he knows how to speak to kids—asking about “the fake news” in the tone in which normal people would ask, ‘Who here doesn’t like licorice?”--with the obsessive self-pity of a batshit insane narcissist.

Thus spake the President of the United States. This, mind, came after a series of tweets (let’s just fucking call them that from now on, rather than “posts on Truth Social”) in which he threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” (sic), addressed the Iranians as “you crazy bastards,” and called upon both God and Allah to bless his plan of genocide.

Then, as documented by Heather Cox Richardson, early Tuesday morning Trump posted this masterpiece of lucid geo-political diplomacy:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

We all know what happened next, i.e., nothing. Trump announced that Pakistan had intervened! With a ten-point plan that both Iran and the US found to be a decent basis for negotiating. Negotiating what? Oh, you remember--an end to that “war” “between” Iran and the US. The war that the US (and Israel) started, against an enemy that posed no particular threat to the US, for which Trump sought no support either from Congress or the American people, for an ever-changing series of goals, which left America’s allies aghast, and which left world energy, fertilizer, and, apparently, computer-chip markets wildly lurching like a toy tugboat in a typhoon.

It was classic Trump: impulsive, stupid, vainglorious, self-defeating, and destructive to everyone except himself. Experts told him Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and throttle 20% of the world’s oil supply. Either he didn’t believe them or he didn’t listen. Iran did it. And that became the casus belli, the thing that Trump demanded they un-do.

If your head is spinning it must be because you’re new here. Trump does this all the time: Create a problem he then has to solve, and for which he then claims credit for solving. Except in this case, he hasn’t solved a thing. On the contrary: Iran has agreed to re-open the Strait, but it will now charge each ship that passes through it (which previously had to pay nothing) a toll of two million dollars. As one wag (EW) put it on Bluesky:

IRAN: You may pass through the Strait for free.

TRUMP: Oh, yeah? Well, I’m going to decimate you.

IRAN: Therefore you may pass through the Strait for $2 million per ship.

TRUMP: I win!

But wait, there’s (sigh) more. According to the excellent Jay Kuo, the White House account of the “peace plan” is—go be surprised—a tiss-you of lies. Iran had issued a 10-point peace plan two weeks ago, which Trump dismissed as “not good enough.” Then, this past Monday, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shebaz Sharif, posted a tweeted plea for Trump to delay his genocidal, civilization-ending plan for two weeks, during which, Sharif proposed, Iran could re-open the Strait as a gesture of goodwill.

Supposedly. But Kuo reproduces a draft of Sharif’s tweet that strongly suggests the PM didn’t so much write it as receive it, written for him, from the White House. (See Jay’s Substack to view the incriminating evidence.) Oh, and the 10-point plan Trump now considered a good start was exactly the same as the one he waved off for two weeks. But, no, wait, even that isn’t clear. There seems to be two versions of the plan in circulation: the one in Iran guarantees their ability to continue to enrich uranium, while the one in Washington does not.

In any case, yes, Trump chickened out, and the TACO Tuesday jokes wrote themselves. As we write this (on Wednesday) it looks as if there have already been three violations of the agreement: According to Iran, Israel continues to strike at Hezbollah in Lebanon; a drone entered Iran airspace and was shot down in the city of Lar in Fars Province; and the exclusion of Iran’s right to enrich uranium. Iran’s recitation of these violations ends with, “Now the ‘very workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began. In such a situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

IT’S NATIONAL GIN AND TONIC DAY AND NATIONAL ALCOHOL SCREENING DAY. EACH KILLS THE OTHER. CELEBRATE ACCORDINGLY.

By buying THE SPLIT!

We just saw a headline about Netanyahu “destroying Trump’s ceasefire”—maybe Israel launched the drone—so we’ll stop here. The lies, the cover stories, the evasions, the reversals just don’t stop. The fact that we’re at the point where we find the theocratic government of Iran a more credible source of information than the White House is mind-roasting enough, let alone the fact that by the time you read this you, and we, may all be dead from a nuclear exchange. But here’s the point:

The entire Iran fiasco (as quarterbacked on the field by the inexpressibly stupid Christo-fascist drunk, Macho Macho Moron Pete Hegseth) has been a complete waste of lives, money, weapons, and American reputation. It’s left Iran (and its unquestionably vicious, tyrannical regime) stronger and the US weaker.

And why? Because Trump is crazy. Heather Richardson quotes Public Notice’s Aaron Rupar—who, as our readers know, deserves a Nobel Prize for Patience for covering all of Trump’s public utterances:

Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.

Okay, we knew that Trump is nuts. But now even many of his own people think he’s crazy. Alex Fucking Jones, who himself is crazy, thinks Trump is crazy. Most Republicans are too cowardly, fascistic, or dumb to do anything about it, but some seem to be coming around.

Of course there are still die-hards who, out of shameless self-interest or bottomless stupidity, think it’s all hunky-dory. Right-wing pundit-douchebag Erik Erikson, as quoted by Roy Edroso, advances the following:

What’s actually happening here is the President has embraced the ‘mad man’ theory and is trying to convince the Iranians that he’s willing to do whatever to wipe them out in hopes of getting a deal... this is not an unhinged President. It’s a man playing a role as a negotiation tactic.

The organism which wrote that should have to prove that it is not an extraterrestrial which only arrived here two days ago. The notion that Donald Trump “really isn’t crazy” flies in the face of everything everyone has seen him do and say for the past 15 months, if not 50 years. It’s tempting to say, “Yes, Trump reveals his craziness every day. But he’s not fatally, irredeemably crazy. His chickening out is proof of that. Chickening out, when he does it, is always the sane thing to do.”

To which we say: First, try telling that to the families of the US soldiers and the Iranian soldiers and civilians this idiotic war has killed. Next, even if that’s true, we all have to act as though it’s only true for now. Threatening to annihilate an entire civilization over the price of oil is an act of significant madness whether you actually end up doing it or not.

And that—to paraphrase the Passover seder—is what makes this week different from all other weeks. Yammering on about the late, great Hannibal Lecter or lecturing kids about Joe Biden’s autopen—that’s just senile Gramps going off on one of his tangents. This Iran debacle feels different. It feels like an inflection point. It feels like the coming-to-fruition of the predictions of every shrink who has stated publicly that Trump’s dementia, in concert with his malignant narcissism, is only going to get worse.

And so it is that we find ourselves in a new version of Splitsville (that state of affairs in which a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”). In one nation—the population of which has been expanding over the past few weeks—are the people who see and are appalled by Donald Trump’s ever-diminishing sanity and ever-increasing brutality, and who desperately desire to do something about it. In another are those who, for a variety of shameful reasons, see it and decline to address it. (We call them “Republicans.”) And in the third are those who just don’t, or won’t, see it.

For now. The ink is still wet on that cease-fire and people are saying it’s collapsing. (It may have already collapsed by the time you read this.) If/when it does there will be ample opportunity for Trump to act out in increasingly deranged ways. If he does so, that first nation will continue to be flooded by immigrants from the other two.

Then two questions arise: How much of a popular consensus will it take for the elected officials of the GOP to do their job and represent that consensus? And if the answer to that is, “Oh, grow up. They never will,” then the next question is: How will voters deal with them?

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We write Splitsville on Wednesday, edit it on Wednesday night and/or Thursday morning, and post it in late morning (Pacific time) of Thursday. This means that, on this day of days (which is April Fool’s Day), we are in the intriguing/soul-destroying position of writing in anticipation of Donald Trump’s upcoming address this evening to a disgusted, contemptuous nation.

Might it not be a good idea, we wondered, to review what the White House says Trump is going to say, critique its credibility, and then tune in to the actual speech and, tomorrow morning, report on what he actually did say and how it was received? No. It would not be a good idea. It would require listening to blatant lying, jackass bragging, whiny complaints, pseudo-patriotic warmongering, and Islamophobic racism. But let’s do it anyway.

First, the claim: From (of all sources) the Times of Israel, we get a brief announcement of what Trump intends to say:

In tonight’s address to the nation, US President Donald Trump “will give an operational update on the progress of Operation Epic Fury, which is meeting or exceeding all of its benchmarks,” a White House official tells The Times of Israel.

“He will highlight the United States military’s success in achieving all of its stated goals prior to the operation,” the official continues.

The official says that the goals are as follows: Destroying Iran’s deadly ballistic missiles and production facilities, annihilating Iran’s navy, ensuring Iran’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region and guaranteeing that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.

It is entirely credible that Trump will assert these things, and it is entirely predictable that none of them will be true. Not only is Donald Trump physically and psychologically incapable of telling the truth, but the entire world has looked on for weeks (in horror) as Trump has flailed, re-defined the mission time after time, joked about killing, praised his Defense Secretary for advocating war crimes, bitched and moaned about (former) allies refusing to help clean up the mess he’s made, and manipulated the stock market with his in-again, out-again TACO vacillations.

But do continue, White House:

Trump said yesterday that his only goal for the war has been to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the goals also include destroying Iran’s air force.

The White House official says Trump will likely reiterate that the war will take another two-three weeks, in what would probably extend the conflict beyond the four-to-six week timeline that Washington has been offering.

This, of course, is to laff, since it was as recently as June 22 of last year that Trump claimed the US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Having martyred the old Ayatollah, Trump has enabled the ascension of a younger, more hardline one. After encouraging the Iranian people to rise up with promises that “help is on the way,” Trump sent no help on the way, resulting in upwards of 30,000 protestors being slaughtered. Trump, having rejected or ignored expert counsel about the damage Iran could do by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, seemed surprised when Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

In other words, this is Trump retconning (redefining—often dishonestly!--in retrospect) his motives, pulling a Pee Wee Herman, who, having committed some boner or gaffe, would pipe, “I meant to do that.” As the excellent Mary Geddry notes:

…the reporting shows an administration that looks like it is frantically workshopping a surrender speech with extra explosions. Rubio has apparently been sketching a narrower list of war aims that would allow Trump to declare success and crawl toward the exit, while Trump himself continues blurting out larger fantasies about regime change, total victory, and other strongman bedtime stories.

But you, the astute reader, might be thinking, “Yes, it’s the usual Everything Trump Touches Dies shitshow, but why give a speech now? Why not last week or next?”

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Well, let’s see…Maybe it has something to do with the fact that:

a. Eight million (and probably more) people marched in joyous detestation of Trump this past Saturday, exceeding the seven million that did so last October.

b. A federal judge ruled that the administration’s axing of NPR and PBS was unconstitutional. Compare and contrast this with the fact that—

c. Another federal judge called for an “immediate” halt to the construction of Trump’s grotesque ballroom-cum-underground-spy-nerve-center-cum-bunker-suite and called that unconstitutional. Which may be just as well, since—

d. The New York Times published a devastating critique of the building, noting its outlandish size, vulgar design, dumbbell view-obstructing columns, and more than one “stairway to nowhere.” Meanwhile—

e. Fellow autocrat and Trump role model Viktor Orban may very well lose an upcoming election in Hungary. We can easily see how Trump might find that possibility significantly disturbing, and might provoke him to clap extra-hard to try to bring Tinkerbell back to life, as—

f. Republicans and Trump are (correctly) being blamed for skyrocketing gas prices, soon-to-be-skyrocketing prices on everything else, and a truly idiotic own-goal in which Trump sent ICE agents—unmasked!—to stand around airports and sneer at furious travelers in hours-long lines during a TSA shutdown that House Republicans refused to address before going on vacation. Oh, and—

g. Increasingly credible evidence is emerging corroborating the claim by “Jane Doe” that Trump molested her when she was 13. The stories frequently include the memorable phrase “bit his penis.” Too icky? Then perhaps you’d rather think about—

h. The little fantasia Trump spun at last Thursday’s cabinet meeting, in which he suddenly went off-topic and talked about chatting with the president of the company that makes Sharpie pens (who, of course, addressed him as “sir”). Trump said the CEO told him the company could manufacture a special White House pen with the President’s signature in gold, for free. Trump said he insisted he wanted to pay—call it five dollars per. The company said this conversation never took place.

In short, it’s been a helluva week. And that doesn’t even take into account today’s news, in which we read a majority of Supine…sorry; a majority of Supreme Court justices seem to be skeptical of Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship.

So yes, Trump has more than enough incentives to make a big, butch, tough-guy wartime- president speech about—

Wait. This literally just in, from the New Republic:

On Tuesday evening, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected Trump’s claim of presidential immunity regarding his actions on January 6, ruling that he can be held liable for the violence that day. Mehta decided that Trump’s speech to his supporters at the Ellipse and his communications with other officials can all be considered campaign activity. The ruling allows a lawsuit from police officers and Democratic politicians to continue—and opens the door to other similar lawsuits.

(snip)

Also on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly allowed a lawsuit to continue against Health and Human Services, which is alleged to have illegally closed its Freedom of Information Act offices.

…MORE than more than enough incentives to give a big fat speech about military success, although several questions present themselves. We hope tonight’s speech will address such issues as:

1. Why two to three weeks? What is yet to be done?

2. Is it true that serious naval assets are heading toward Iran as we “speak,” as is the 82^nd Airborne? Why?

3. Do Trump, Hegseth, and their people have the slightest idea of what they’re doing as regards the Strait of Hormuz?

4. Will the Houthis attempt to close a similar strait in the Red Sea, further compromising world oil supplies? If so, what will Trump do?

5. Trump has threatened/bragged that he will bomb Iranian electric grids and desalination plants. These are explicitly war crimes. Is he serious?

6. Is Trump seriously going to pull the US out of NATO? Can he? If so, how will Republicans justify it?

7. Paul Krugman:

Russia, by all accounts, is supplying extensive aid to Iran, providing real-time targeting information about the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft. According to Ukraine, Russia took satellite photos of a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia just days before Iran struck the base, wounding multiple U.S. service members and destroying a crucial surveillance aircraft. Western intelligence sources indicate that Russia is supplying the Iranian regime with sophisticated drones.

Yet Trump continues to staunchly defend Putin and is becoming ever more explicit in his support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

So what the fuck?

It’s overwhelming. It’s the kind of thing that gives ignorant sexual predators with malignant narcissism and advancing frontotemporal dementia a bad name. So let’s just stop here for now and come back after the speech.

The next morning…

Krugman—looking uncharacteristically grim and depressed in a video—gets it right:

It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.

There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.

We’ve banged on about that latter point a hundred times: Does Trump believe his lies, or is he just unable to stop telling them? Whatever. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that neither Trump nor whoever wrote the speech (we assume Stephen Miller) was aware that “bomb them back to the stone age” is a phrase synonymous with American overreach and defeat. As Andrew Forster wrote in 2024:

The phrase ‘we will bomb them back to the stone age,’ as a rhetorical flourish of war, was first used by US Air Force general Curtis Lemay, the craftsman of the nuclear defeat of Japan. He advised that the same tactics should be applied to Cuba and to Vietnam in the 1960s… “bomb them back to the stone age… until we have destroyed every work of man” he said. The phrase was later attributed to William Westmorland, US strategist of the Vietnam war. And still later to Richard Armitage, advising Bush after 9-11 on flushing out the Taliban from Pakistan and Afghanistan (we know how that went).

So-o-o, yeah: Both a war crime and a barbaric motto of futility. Having started out by proclaiming he was invading with the goal of bringing “freedom” to the Iranian people, last night Trump announced his intention to destroy their entire civilization.

There were other noteworthy aspects to the speech: the flat affect, the low energy, the absence of improv and “weave,” the undeviating, hostage-video recitation of the text, and what Mary Geddry calls “a tired, reheated plate of talking points served with extra self-congratulation.” So where does that leave us, Splitsville-wise? I.e., in what new form is the US a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”?

Maybe with the most basic dichotomy there can be: As Trump continues to fuck up, and as his fucking-up promises, not only to damage the US economy, but to bring unnecessary deaths to American citizens, immigrants, soldiers and sailors, and people around the world, our population is divided into those (not just Democrats, but Independents, many Republicans, just plain folks) who can’t wait for him to drop dead, and everybody else. As we used to shout to onlookers as we marched down the street in protest of the Vietnam War: JOIN US!

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This is where we are, as ably reported by Jennifer Bendery at Huffpost:

WASHINGTON — The pastor from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s home church in Tennessee said last week on a podcast that he wants James Talarico to die, referring to the Texas Democratic state representative and Presbyterian seminarian who regularly discusses his Christian faith in his current bid for U.S. Senate.

Brooks Potteiger, an evangelical pastor who has been described as Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, repeatedly attacked Talarico on the podcast “Reformation Red Pill.” The show is hosted by Joshua Haymes, a former pastoral intern at Potteiger’s church.

But wait. Before we start getting all self-righteous and indignant and grossed out by what seems to be just one more provincial Bible-thumping asshole, let us pause to consider: What exactly does this pious man of God mean by “die”? Might he be using the term metaphorically? Perhaps what he means is, he wants James Talarico’s political career to “die,” or he wants his bid for the Senate to “die.” Might that be it?

Sadly, no. These two Christians want God—or anyone!—to kill Talarico until he is dead. He may have a new life in Christ, but he will no longer have his old living, breathing life in Talarico.

“I pray that God kills him,” Haymes said. “Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.”

Potteiger concurred. “Right, right,” he said. “We want him crucified with Christ.”

Haymes repeated that he wants “death and new life” for Talarico. “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary,” he said.

“By any means necessary,” huh? This goes beyond our old friend, stochastic terrorism (in which general calls for violence by unspecified actors against unspecified targets, disseminated by mass media, lead to statistically-more-probable acts of violence), in that it quite specifically identifies its target. What we have here is a clergyman—whose pronouncements, strictly speaking, should have nothing to do with politics--calling for God to kill a political opponent. And we have his interviewer not even bothering with the God part. Haymes just wants somebody to take this guy out, for Christ’s sake.

Why? Probably because James Talarico has become a hot property for the Democrats: a presentable, articulate young man who, as a seminarian, is just the kind of professional Christian who can talk to purple- and even pink-area Texans, and offer a refreshing Senatorial alternative to useless, crappy old John Cornyn or his far-far-worse Republican primary opponent, the execrable Ken Paxton.

The thing is, though—and setting aside our own quaint observation, above, that religious figures acting in their professional (and tax-free) capacity are required to eschew expressions of political opinions—you’re not supposed to call for the murder, whether by God or man, of the candidates you dislike. Note, too, that these two clowns live in Tennessee: what business is it of theirs who’s running for the Senate in Texas? Or is Talarico to be “crucified with Christ” because he’s a Presbyterian?

Hateful stuff! From ardent evangelists! Then again, go be surprised. As usual, it’s the most zealous of a religion’s proponents that give the faith a bad name. And these jerks are zealous as fuck. This, remember, is Pete Hegseth’s church, an arch-conservative Christian nationalist stronghold of smug patriarchy. It’s part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. How “reformed”? Let’s ask PBS:

CREC ascribes to a strict version of Reformed theology — rooted in the tradition of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin — that puts a heavy emphasis on an all-powerful God who has dominion over all of society.

And, just as God has dominion over all of society, the husband has dominion over the family. In the opinion of CREC believers, the 19^th Amendment was a mistake, and women should not have the right to vote. Small wonder, then, that Pete “The Least Competent SecDef in History” Hegseth brings such barbaric ideas to the running of the military, from his Sergeant Rock comic book notion that wars today are fought by big, strapping lads with well-developed muscles shooting 20-million-dollar ICBMs (they’re not; they’re fought with cheapo drones) to his demented Lawrence-of-Arabia call for “no quarter” in Iran (a term meaning, take no prisoners and allow no one to surrender. I.e., kill them all. It’s a war crime.).

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Which brings us back to where we started: This is where we are now. A pastor and his former intern call for political assassination. The Secretary of War Defense orders the bombing of civilian boats and encourages the commission of war crimes. Someone(s) makes a fortune in oil futures based on information about a presidential decision that should be classified and secret. The President contradicts himself—about a matter of war—endlessly: The war is a war, but it’s really an “excursion.” It’s over and it’s won; it’s not over and it’s expanding. He needs help from other nations; he doesn’t need any nation’s help. And, in a single breath, there’s no one to talk to, and we’re talking to them:

U.S. President Donald J. Trump tells reporters regarding negotiations with Iran: “The leaders left. The leaders are all gone. Nobody knows who to talk to. But we’re actually talking to the right people, and they want to make a deal so badly. You have no idea how badly they want to make a deal. And we’ll see what happens.”

It’s all out in the open: The bloodlust, the corruption, the religious fanaticism, the shameless lying by everyone about everything, and the undeniably increasing mental collapse of the man in charge even as his once-dependable, fractionally less supine Republican allies start to get nervous and Epstein-adjacent inquiries start to heat up.

We think we’re entering a new age of desperation, both from Trump and from those around him. Iran is a mess and, worse than other messes, it involves icons of selflessness (i.e., American soldiers and sailors) getting killed. ICE in airports promises to be both a mess and a farce, as untrained thugs hired to wear masks while they rough people up on the street now have to go unmasked and be polite to people, all of whom are freaked and furious, many of whom (rightly) despise ICE. Hegseth is a buffoon, now in over his head in an actual war. Pam Bondi is called a liar to her face in Congress. Others in Trump’s cabinet are getting “pushback” in the House and Senate by Republicans as well as Dems. Sean Duffy’s comic inadequacy as Transportation Secretary is plain to every eye. Scott Bessant, appearing with numbing regularity on the Sunday shows, is reduced to sub-Zen-koan paradoxes about how the emergency is to not have an emergency and sometimes the way to de-escalate is to escalate. Howard Lutnik’s blatant lies about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein are known from sea to shining sea.

Oh, and speaking of: apparently someone is going to investigate Epstein’s house at Zorro Ranch, that “sprawling” compound in New Mexico where, some witnesses have said, young girls (and possibly boys) were sexually abused and, um, killed. As Virginia Heffernen reports in the New Republic:

Last month, the New Mexico statehouse launched a Truth Commission, chaired by state Representatives Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya.

Their plan, which won bipartisan support in the majority-female state legislature, is Hague-like in scope: to investigate human rights violations and atrocities carried out in New Mexico by the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein and his many enablers.

This, too, will add to Trump’s (and his many enablers’) desperation. Even if they never went there, none of them can be sure that someone who did won’t be apprehended, questioned, offered a deal, and sing like a fucking canary. And this will be an investigation at the state level, which the FBI can’t catch and kill, for defendants who can’t be helped by presidential pardons. Meanwhile, some Republican dipshit named Don Huffines has bought Zorro Ranch with the professed intention of turning it into a “Christian retreat.” You betcha.

All this points to a new era of frenzy: Trump corrodes more and more, does more and more indefensible things the consequences of which he can’t manage, or can’t be bothered, to foresee; Republicans jump ship or get shirty with his people, which inspires Dems to fight back harder. The goons, idiots, evangelicals, and white nationalists, who up to now have enjoyed a quasi-legitimizing chumminess with Trump and the GOP, will act out in more and more reprehensible ways, further alienating normies. All of that puts more stress on Trump, leading to worse behavior. And the big wheel keeps on turnin’.

But wait. We forgot the ticking clock, the asteroid hurtling toward Earth, the deadline de tutti deadlines: the mid-terms, the approach of which is inspiring nausea among Republicans and triggering any number of desperate ploys to rig, cheat, suppress votes, and generally manifest their fascist desires. In November all but the most die-hard MAGAs will most likely vote for Dems—or they’ll stay home, which itself will favor Democrats.

Does any of this deliver us unto a new version of Splitsville (our term for the existence of a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”)? Maybe—just maybe—it does.

As Trump continues on his unstoppable downward spiral and things get worse and worse, those of us already sick to death of him and his administration may begin to forge a new “nation” of people who find the sheer awfulness of the spectacle somewhat amusing. Call it cynicism, gallows humor, or absurdity. Whatever you call it, we are fast arriving at a point at which the grotesque blatancy of his misrule, and of the monumental cowardice and moral rot of the GOP’s complicity with it, are sparking something other than the usual sighs of disgust and online comments of outrage.

As Trump puts it when he learns something that everybody but him already knows: “It’s called black humor. A lot of people don’t know that.”

Granted: attacks on democracy, endless lies in the interest of open corruption, and civilian and military deaths in an unnecessary war are nothing to make light of. Neither was World War II. But if your familiarity with the literature of that time is restricted to From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead, we recommend Catch-22 for an alternate angle. That’s where we’re at after fourteen months of Trump 2. It isn’t funny, but it is to laff.

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This week’s newsletter will be skimpier than usual because half of us are on vacation on an undisclosed tropical isle while the other, non-vacationing half of us are having a hard time typing because the weather has taken a nasty turn. Also, the dog ate our homework.

But don’t worry about us. We don’t feel too bad that we will not be saying anything about Trump’s costly, pointless Iranian “excursion,” or about the way the Epstein Files are biting relentlessly on Trump’s trouser-mushroom, or about how, on second thought, the former is not pointless but an insane and murderous doggy-waggin’ attempt to distract from the latter. Fortunately, there are many excellent journalists, writers, MSNOW hosts and guests, Democratic elected officials, Substackers, and other sentient types who are doing a splendid job of keeping the world updated on the improbable collective nightmare we’re living through.

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So with this installment, instead of our customary amusing, richly documented, timely observations on “Splitsville”—a geo-political entity comprising two or more distinct “nations”—we’d like to take a moment to ruminate on the Trump Organization, a crucial and often overlooked contributor to the complex of pathologies driving Donald J. Trump’s quest to destroy the world.

The Trump Organization, or as we prefer to call it, “The Trump ‘Organization,’” with quotation marks around “Organization,” is a mom & pop business. It cannot be overemphasized: The Trump “Organization” is a mom & pop business. We say this not because it was founded by Trump’s Mom and Pop, which it was, and not because we’re prejudiced against mom & pop shops, which we’re not. We say this because it’s a fact. A corner bodega, as a classic example of a mom & pop enterprise, doesn’t have an organizational chart because there’s no organization to speak of. It doesn’t have a formal hierarchy, a body of shareholders, a board of directors, a corporate ethos. A bodega’s delivery kid does not aspire to be promoted to middle-management, thence to upper management, thence to the C-suite because there are no management levels between entry and owner. A two-level organizational chart, consisting of “bottom” and “top” isn’t really a chart; a business with such a non-chart isn’t really what you’d call an “organization.”

The Trump bodega, despite the grandiosity of “organization” in its name, despite its real and imaginary accomplishments, despite its fame, despite the way it plasters “Trump” on buildings it may or may not own, even despite its “Pop” inconceivably having become the president of the USA, and even despite its claim to be a successful, lucrative endeavor, never was more than a two-level entity. The only way for an employee to ascend to the gilded office on the top level is the way Donald Trump did it: 1) For that employee to be a child—an heir—of the reigning Pop and/or Mom, and 2) For the reigning Pop and/or Mom to die or, short of that, to legally cede the boss/owner/pop/mom/throne position to said heir.

Now think—strongly!—about these four items: First, other than pretending to be a more successful version of himself on a television show, Donald Trump has zero work experience outside of his mom & pop shop. Second, he stopped allowing new information into his brain—that is, he stopped learning—a long time ago, around the time his mentor, the hideous, utterly corrupt Roy Cohn, died. Third, he is and always has been a moron. A conniving, manipulative, lawbreaking moron, but a moron nonetheless. Finally, whatever there may have been to start with, there’s not much left of Trump’s mind. He’s decompensating before our eyes.

What we have, then, is a demented old man who sees the world as an enormous if somewhat vague mom & pop extravaganza in which he is Pop, sitting in the big chair in the big office, and everyone else is downstairs mopping up the slop and waiting to be fired.

We suppose that at this point we ought to speculate about the very few other people who Trump views as being on his own level or even, if possible, higher in the non-hierarchy hierarchy: Putin, Xi, maybe Orban, maybe even Little Kim Jong Un. How does that work? Somewhere in the deep, corroded recesses of his reptile brain, he knows that he’s not really the Pop of America. At least not yet. And he is jealous of the unchallenged power real dictators wield. Why, it’s almost as if they are the real Pops of the Earth. It’s almost as if they are to Big Donald what Donny’s actual Pop, Fred Trump, was to Little Donald. But here we go waxing psychological, and that makes the dog want to eat our homework again.

Anyhoo, that’s our little thought for the week. The question that millions of right-minded individuals have been asking themselves for the past ten years, cast in the language of todays filter, is: Why are so many people eager to debase themselves by putting on a crappy red hat and metaphorically mopping slop in the basement of the one-story Trump Dump? Is “authoritarian personality disorder” the answer? According to Wikipedia:

The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat the voice of authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect.

O…kay. Why do people debase themselves in the presence of authoritarians? Because they are disposed to debase themselves in the presence of authoritarians. Got it.

In a perfect world, Donald Trump would never have been born. In a slightly less perfect world, he would have died years ago, killed, perhaps, in the 1989 helicopter crash that took the lives of three of his casino hirelings. In an even less perfect world, he’d still be alive but wandering around some park in Queens muttering the same incoherent word-mush he mad-libs now in front of reporters.

As it is—in what is apparently the real world—there is a substantial, if gradually shrinking, group of people who seem to enjoy debasing themselves in the presence of a patently stupid, mentally ill, sadistic, misogynistic, traitorous, senile authoritarian grifter who inherited, and then nearly bankrupted, a thriving second-rate, family-owned real-estate-development company. And—Splitsville alert!—there are others who are actively looking for ways to rid the world of this pestilence. We absolutely will not mention the third group, the ones who have no idea what we’re talking about.

We’ll be back full-strength next week.

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Hmm. Where to start…First, with the announcement Donald Trump made on Monday that the war in Iran was, essentially, over. Yay?

It’s true that, months after whining that he didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize and weeks after creating the brain-damaged-named Board of Peace, Trump unilaterally attacked Iran, killing over a thousand and endangering millions. But never mind all that. He now claims that oil and liquified natural gas would soon start flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has unconditionally surrendered. Oil markets would calm down, the stock market would buck up, and “peace” will soon reign supreme.

Or so he seemed to imply. On Monday. On Tuesday he said it was “very complete and ending soon.” (“Very complete” is his frontotemporally demented way of not quite reaching the right words.) He also, after repeatedly referring to it as a war, said the attack on Iran “is an excursion that’s going to keep us out of a war.”

Clear as mud, yes. In any case, in order to know how to respond to the ever-changing Trumpian serenade of triumphalism, boasting, exaggeration, fabrication, grievance, self-contradiction, and bullshit, we must start with something peripheral. Maybe with something concerning shoes. How about this:

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump has developed a strong affinity for the American shoe brand Florsheim, and has bought a pair for Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, communications director Steven Cheung, deputy chief of staff James Blair, and speechwriter Ross Worthington. Even those not in his Cabinet, such as Fox News host Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Tucker Carlson, have been gifted a pair. They are around $145.

“Did you get the shoes?” he’d ask them.

“All the boys have them,” one female White House official told the WSJ. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” said another.

Isn’t that nice? No, it’s insane. This is mad king shit. (Calling this mob of killers, grifters, liars, and frauds “boys” is cute, and so is calling it “hysterical” that everybody is “afraid” not to wear the lunatic’s favorite footwear.)

And so behold: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in polka-dot socks and too-big clown shoes. Hat tip to Substacker Miles Taylor, who correctly notes:

Almost overnight, the “Trump shoe” has become a symbol. Whether for Secretary of State Marco Rubio or the gaggle of White House officials reportedly marching around in the same stupid shoes, it signals that — at the highest level of American government — our public servants believe loyalty to one man matters more than their loyalty to the law, to the Constitution, or to the country they’re supposed to serve.

“But,” someone will say, “This is nothing! At least he hasn’t killed anybody with the shoes.”

True enough. He uses the military and ICE for that. Note how the same concern for the welfare of those around him is conspicuously absent as regards tens of thousands of Americans trapped overseas by his frothingly idiotic war of choice. Tell us about it, Jen Rubin of The Contrarian:

The Trump regime’s level of recklessness and indifference to human life and international order should appall all Americans. Trump’s excuse for making no evacuation plans — “Well, because it happened all very quickly” — is ludicrous, considering the United States and Israel apparently spent months planning the military assault. His jaw-dropping admission that Iran’s bombardment of neighboring countries in retaliation was “probably the biggest surprise” reflects how little thought he put into a war with global ramifications.

The thesis of Rubin’s piece is Trump’s “incompetence.” Fair enough! But notice how that’s at odds with our brilliant characterization of Trump as being “insane.”

“Incompetence” only makes sense as an explanation if Trump means well. Does Jennifer Ruben, or anyone with the intelligence of a five-pound bag of Russet potatoes, think Donald Trump means well? Okay, then, he’s crazy. But that would mean that nothing he does makes any sense. Does that scan?

Journalist and Substacker Zev Shalev doesn’t think so. He detects a different motive:

A president wages an illegal war without congressional approval. He alienates allies. He assassinates a head of state and then demands the right to choose the replacement. He sends oil prices into a spiral that punishes American families. He presides over job losses and market crashes. He holds legislation hostage to ram through voting restrictions. And every single one of these actions serves the strategic interests of Russia and China — the same Russia and China that are actively backing the other side of this war.

This war is positioned as being about Iran. It is not about Iran. It is about Russia, China, and Israel and their unholy alliance to destroy the United States from within — and its currency with it.

So far, so bad. But so credible—except for the “unholy alliance” including Israel. No matter how corrupt, evil, and horrible Trump Netanyahu is, we don’t see what Israel has to gain by subverting the US and allying with Russia and China. The rest of it plays, though, and leads to Shalev’s conclusion:

The economic carnage is not collateral damage. It is the objective. A weakened dollar, a destabilized America, a military bogged down in an unwinnable Middle Eastern war — this is the scenario Moscow and Beijing have war-gamed for decades. And they have a willing participant in the Oval Office making it happen.

There is a word for such acts — for collaboration, aid, or comfort given to the enemies of the United States. We have wanted to use it before. We were told we couldn’t. The term is reserved for wartime, we were reminded. It requires an enemy. It requires a war.

Well, now we have one. Trump gave it to us. He started an illegal war against Iran without congressional authorization, against a nation backed by Russia and China — the same Russia and China whose strategic interests every single one of his actions serves. The war he started is the war that completes the legal framework for the charge.

The word is treason.

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The word is treason. But it’s not the only word. The other words are madness and incompetence, within which we suggest “nesting” several other other words. Thus, treason includes not just acting in a way to benefit an adversary (e.g., Russia), but in a way to destroy the US as a representative democracy and turn it into something else (e.g., an authoritarian oligarchy). Similarly, madness need not only denote incoherent fulmination and pointless rampage and forcing your toadies to wear Florsheim, but a determined, calculating embrace of death and destruction. And, of course, incompetence, when applied to Donald Trump, must always include the probability of good old-fashioned stupidity.

Our problem is, we find each of these three Trumpian motivations to be equally plausible. Trump does seem to be mentally deteriorating, from the things he natters on about in speeches, to his obsession with Joe Biden’s autopen, to the ALL-CAPS TRUTH SOCIAL RANTS HE SPEWS INTO THE NIGHT BEFORE THANKING YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

Then again, in business—the field in which he supposedly made his reputation—he has displayed a lifetime of incompetence, bankrupting multiple casinos, stiffing investors and contractors, and endorsing products and services in a list of failures longer than his tie.

And he only wins at golf by cheating.

As for treason: Multiple news sources have reported that Russia is helping Iran locate US military forces. When asked about this on Air Force One several days ago, Trump a) refused to condemn it; b) said that Iran wasn’t “doing too well,” so who cares?; and c) said that the US would do the same in similar circumstances (whatever that means), so shut up. The US has also eased back on trade sanctions, allowing India to purchase Russian oil—the receipts of which are then used, by Russia, to purchase weapons with which to attack Ukraine.

So, yeah—Trump is openly sucking up to, comforting, and defending Russia, not only as it attacks Ukraine but as it gives wartime intel to our enemy. That looks bad. What? Not treasonous enough yet? Fine. Name one thing Trump has done in his second term that has not damaged the US economy, polluted the environment, subverted public health, violated and/or ignored the law, harmed and threatened—and, more than once, killed—the American people, terrorized entire neighborhoods, and sought to undermine democracy itself.

The thing is—or, rather, the three things is—none of these motivations need be mutually exclusive. Trump could intend to do crazy things but be incompetent at it, like a guy trying to take his clothes off in Times Square but getting his pants caught on his Florsheims. He could strive to do treasonous things but fuck it up by being incompetent or nuts.

It’s the human-motivational version of the famous Three-Body Problem. Over to you, Britannica AI (yes, the Encyclopedia Britannica apparently has its own AI, because who doesn’t?).

three-body problem, in astronomy, the problem of determining the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. No general solution of this problem (or the more general problem involving more than three bodies) is possible, as the motion of the bodies quickly becomes chaotic.

So it’s hard to get a fix on the precise proportion of insanity, incompetence, and treason that drives him. Still: Does it matter? It must, since we’ve been banging our heads against this wall for more than a year now. We want to sort out and reconcile these chaotic motives for any number of good reasons: We want to know what will happen next, if not to prevent it than to prepare for it. We want to know whom to blame, and for what, with an eye to punishing anyone who deserves to be punished. We want to know what the fuck is going on.

But perhaps most of all, even though we and all decent human beings despise Donald Trump with the intensity of a thousand—no, a thousand and one—suns, we want to know specifically why we hate him. Should we hate him for his cartoonishly unappeasable greed? His comic-book villain’s malevolence? His dumbbell-rube’s contempt for science and culture? His shamelessly fake religiosity? His sociopathic indifference to suffering and death? His smugly proud ignorance and preening egotism? His compulsive lying and constitutional inability to tell the truth? His fascist dictator’s obsession with dominance, cruelty, and revenge? His (we’re almost finished) piggish misogyny and sexual predations?

Or is it enough simply to despise him because he’s the biggest, most evil asshole in US history? It might be!

And look, all this would be merely darkly amusing if the stakes weren’t so high, the actors weren’t so loathsome and malign, and the victims weren’t innocent people in the Middle East, the United States, and all around the world. But they are, they are, and they are. And so we find ourselves in a version of Splitsville—that is, in a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”—with blurred, uncertain boundaries.

One group (a small, wretched minority) believes everything Trump says, no matter how absurd, demonstrably false, or self-contradictory. He is the god-emperor of their cult. He could shoot them on Fifth Avenue and they would die with tears in their eyes, saying, “Thank you, sir, may I have another.”

The other group consists of us, you, and, really, everybody who is anybody. But within that unhappy “nation” there are many factions. When Trump says a thing and none of us believe it, the factions become manifest. Some don’t believe it because they think Trump is knowingly lying. Some, because they think he believes what he’s saying and doesn’t know it’s false because he’s a bonehead ignoramus. Some, because nothing he says has anything to do with reality, because he’s out of his tiny mind.

Then there’s the whole “he thrives on chaos” group, who seem to imply that there is a method to the madness and calculation behind the disorder and failure.

The whole thing is emotionally insulting, morally enraging, and physically exhausting. No wonder we’re waiting (and hoping, and praying) for him to die. But he hasn’t died, and instead keeps bringing about the immiseration, impoverishment, and deaths of others while going out of his way to give rich people new shoes. In the end, all we can do is agree to disagree about his motivations, join hands, and say as one, “What’s not to hate?”

SPECIAL BONUS MULTI-MEDIA PS:

Around six years ago, we (SR, tympanically assisted by EW) made a related musical observation:

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NB: Substack is not letting me post Steve Radlauer’s name under the headline above. It keeps telling me “Something went wrong.” YA THINK? E.W.

So. Any questions? Yes? You in the back—?

Q: What the fuck?

A: That is an excellent question. Unfortunately at this time we lack sufficient information to answer it. Yes—?

Q: Huh?

A: That we can answer. Let’s start by reviewing recent events.

Several days ago, Donald Trump unilaterally—well, bilaterally; Israel is involved, too—launched a war against Iran. People were quick to compare it to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, both because a) neither country had attacked the US, and b) their names are almost identical. If there were a country called Irav, we probably would have attacked it over the past 20 years.

Note that in 2003 there had been at least the pretext of what screenwriters call an “inciting incident,” which is the event that gets the story going. In that case, it was the catastrophes of 9-11 in 2001. Of course, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11; President George W. Bush, Veep Dick Cheney, and SecDef Donald Rumsfeld launched a campaign of lies, propaganda, and bullshit to promote popular support for the invasion. It was disgraceful, an unmitigated fiasco that led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and a cavalcade of corruption, but at least they tried to make it look like a reprisal for our national trauma. They strove to gin up popular support for it, and they succeeded.

The Trump admin can’t be bothered to do even that. When, on March 2, Secretary of State Marco “Liddle Marco” Rubio was asked why we invaded, here is what he said, as reported by Natasha Bertrand of CNN and re-printed by the excellent Jay Kuo in his newsletter, The Status Kuo:

The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit, sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.

Who would attack Iran first? Israel. Thus, we went to war because we were goaded by Israel’s intention. Doesn’t that sound bad? It sure does. But don’t worry. First, because one day later Rubio denied having said that. On March 3 he said, “It’s false to say I said the U.S. had to attack because Israel was going to attack. That’s not what I said.” He’s not just contradicting himself, he’s lying about something he said, out loud, in public, to CNN. That’s bad, too, isn’t it? Oh well.

Then, on March 4, Press Secretary Karolyin’ (sic) Leavitt offered this explanation. Over to you, New Republic:

The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons.

Israel forced our hand, but they didn’t. Trump had a feeling, but it was based on fact. This must be what they mean by “the fog leading up to the fog of war.” But don’t fret, because now we (think we) actually know why they attacked Iran. Here’s the relentless Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reporting on what Axios’s morning email reported:

Last Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Trump with a stunning tip: Iran’s supreme leader and his top advisers were set to meet at a single location in Tehran on Saturday morning.

They could all be killed in one devastating airstrike, Netanyahu told Trump and his team, Axios’ Marc Caputo and Barak Ravid write.

It answers the question that lawmakers, MAGA skeptics and world leaders have all been asking since Saturday: Why now?

The answer: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle were irresistible targets of opportunity that neither Trump nor Netanyahu wanted to pass up.

Trump was already leaning toward striking Iran before learning the new intelligence about Khamenei. What he hadn’t decided was when — until Netanyahu called.

So now we know What, and Why now? But do we know Has there been any idiotic bluster involved? We do know, because there has. As the tireless Aron Rupar reports, here is a statement from the man Wonkette’s Evan Hurst calls the Secretary of Hair and Makeup, Pete Hegseth:

Death & destruction from the sky all day. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by POTUS & yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise designed to unleash American power, not shackle it ... we are punching them while they are down.

Note, to your amusement and disgust, that “our warfighters” are not constrained by any pussy-ass International Humanitarian Law or Geneva Conventions. They have authorities personally granted them by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. This is like asking one of Al Capone’s muscle, “Why did you feel entitled to murder that cop?” and being told, “Because Mister Capone personally told me I could.”

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Next question. Yes—?

Q: Jesus Christ.

A: Could you state that in the form of a question?

Q: Jesus Christ?

A: Actually, yes. Funny you should mention Him. But first, cast what remains of your mind back to 1980, when XTC released the album Black Sea with the song “Generals and Majors.” It includes the line, “Generals and majors always seem so unhappy ‘less they got a war.” Is this really true?

We don’t know any generals or majors, so we can’t say. But we can say that there are at least several commanding officers in the US military who are tickled pink by the invasion of Iran. And why? Because—but let’s ask Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Air Force veteran Mikey Weinstein, founder and director of the MRFF, told Larsen:

These calls have one damn thing in freaking common; our MRFF clients [service members who seek MRFF aid] report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new “biblically-sanctioned” war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian “End Times” as vividly described in the New Testament Book of Revelationˆ

So, yes, it’s our old friends, the Rapture and the Tribulation, leading to the ultimate battle between good and evil and climaxing in the return of Jesus leading an army of the holy.

You, of course, are somewhat familiar with the flaring imbecility of that eschatology, because you have read The Split. (RIGHT?) If not, let’s just say you should. Let’s also just say that, for a comprehensive introduction to the whole lurid fantasy, from the Antichrist to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the Opening of the Seven Seals to the 200 Million Horsemen Out of the East, the seas turning to blood, the descent from Heaven of the New Jerusalem (a high-rise condo 1,500 miles high and wide)…for all of it, and too much more, go here and buy this. It’s informative, it’s appalling, and it’s hilarious.

[CONSUMER NOTE: If freaking Amazon only has How to Profit From the Coming Rapture in the Kindle format, go to Barnes and Noble here.]

Speaking of appalling, if not hilarious, is it really a good idea to have military commanders, who are tasked with ordering men to kill and/or be killed, storming around the globe in avid anticipation of the end of the world? Might it be unwise to have officers in charge of combat troops and serious weaponry who flaunt a religious belief that holds, among other things, that all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, and etc. who do not accept Jesus in the evangelical manner deserve to—and are destined to—die? Does anyone seriously think it’s cool to have the Secretary of Defense be an alcoholic with an adolescent’s manliness insecurities?

Next question. Yes?

Q: Why is the Iran action called Operation Epic Fury?

A: Because, as usual, it’s always projection with these nimrods. Epic Fury is E.F., which is their unconscious way of referring to the Epstein Files. That’s why Trump invaded Iran—not only as a “distraction” from the increasingly damning news about the files, but in an attempt to compel everyone to rally around the flag and support him. Oh, and possibly as a pretext to justify canceling the midterms.

Q: Will it work?

A: No. Nothing he does works. Last question. Yes—?

Q: What does all this have to do with Splitsville?

A: You mean our—

Q: Your term of art referring to a situation in which a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations,” yes.

A: Because, unlike Trump’s other follies—the tariffs, the ballroom, ICE, DOGE—the attack on Iran has splintered the US into a lot of fragments, and not just the usual three of Pro-, Con-, and Don’t Care. They include:

❖ Die-hard Trump fans who cheer everything he does, no matter how stupid, cruel, or demented

❖ Right-wing “patriots” who get boners any time the US does anything militarily, regardless of the merits or the outcome

❖ Republicans in office, from dog catcher to POTUS, who are desperate to stay in power and don’t care how they do it

❖ Opponents of the Iranian theocracy, who don’t care about Trump but want to see it fall

❖ Opponents of the theocracy who nonetheless see this as a reckless, not to say illegal, act, who demand Congress be consulted before the US goes to war

❖ MAGA isolationists who voted for Trump because he promised “no more forever wars or nation-building” and who now feel betrayed

❖ Opponents of Trump now furious that he’s acting like a king, not to mention getting people—civilians and soldiers—killed to distract from the Epstein Files

❖ Members of the military, and military and academic historians, who see and deplore the haste and carelessness with which this has been whipped up, and who know how unpredictable and dangerous the future is

❖ Americans living, working in, or visiting the Middle East or on cruise ships stranded in Middle Eastern ports, all of whom are being told by the Trump Administration that they’re shit out of luck

There are probably more. But is that split-y enough for ya? Good, good. Meanwhile, watch for two aspects of this nightmare/farce to be in constant tension: One is, the chief Ayatollah, Khameini, is dead. Trump can point to that fact as proof of “victory.” Of course, he could be replaced by his even-more-hardline son, so maybe never mind.

The other is, Trump wants this to last as long as possible—ideally until November and the midterms. But even he must know (to the extent that the word “know” has any meaning with regard to his rapidly corroding mind) that an incursion like this lasting eight more months will look like anything but victory. It’s already metastasizing throughout the region and drawing in other countries, militias, proxies, etc. Oh, and for added hilarity, it’s already being said that the US lacks sufficient top-rank weapons for a conflict lasting more than another week or so.

All of that can only mean more American deaths. Having already abandoned previous pretexts and rationales for the invasion—to “keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons;” to “prevent our being attacked once Israel attacked”—the only one left will be “to free the Iranian people.” Does Trump (and do the Republicans) really believe any but a tiny minority of Americans will be willing to send US soldiers to die for the sake of Iran—a country which, by then, will be a physical, social, and political wreck? Won’t that be just like Iraq? Does Trump think he can sell that to the American people?

We’re just asking questions. Frequently.

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Rollo Tommasi.

Who he?

Rollo Tommasi is a fictional character invented by a fictional character. In the movie L.A. Confidential (and in the original novel by James Ellroy), Edmund Exley, one of the two protagonists, is asked by a fellow cop why he joined the LAPD. He replies that his father—who had also been a cop and had died in the line of duty—used to talk about an imaginary criminal named Rollo Tommasi, “the guy who gets away with it.” Exley joined the force and became a detective in order to find, arrest, and punish all the Rollo Tommasis he could.

(Fun Fact: Exley is played by Guy Pearce. The other protagonist, a cop named Bud White, is played by Russell Crowe. Thus, we have two versions of a Los Angeles police detective—one of the most iconic figures in American fiction—played [beautifully] by two Australians.)

Naturally, as night follows day, the topic of criminals and getting-away-with-it leads us to the subject of Donald Trump. Trump has spent a lifetime as a criminal who gets away with it. Yes, he’s had to pay fines in restitution for the scams of his fraudulent “university,” and his so-called children’s cancer “charity,” and probably other offenses we’re just too exhausted to bother remembering or looking up.

But has he paid what he owes E. Jean Carroll? Don’t make us laff. Has he paid the price of instigating an insurrection on January 6^th? Hardy-har-har. The stiffing of contractors, the numerous allegations of sexual assault (by women, let alone by children), the war crimes, the vandalization of the East Wing (not to mention the Bonwit Teller flagship on Fifth Avenue), the bribery, the ignoring of court orders—his is a career of law-breaking to make Al Capone look like the Dalai Lama. For a mind-roasting rundown of the crimes and failures of his first year in office as compiled by the mighty Christopher Armitage, go here. If you dare.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, in his project to impose a fascist dictatorship on the United States, Trump is failing. Everybody says so. And everybody else, who doesn’t say so, is lying. Just ask Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny:

And so the state of Trump is that he is stuck. He is failing at fascism. He can break things, but he cannot make things. He can bluster, but he cannot triumph. He is tired, and every day is harder than the day before, and there are rivals in the wings, and elections coming.

The mainstream media continue to be shamefully complicit, but independent media have picked up the slack. The heroic people of Minneapolis have shown how to beat back a Gestapo with whistles, phones, and frog costumes. Federal judges from sea to shining s. have shut down many of the regime’s violations and excesses. The Epstein Files continue to not go away. And everyone around Trump, who were hired for their loyalty and not their competence, beclowns themselves on a daily basis.

And so, to paraphrase Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man, certain words are creeping into our conversation. Words like “accountability.” And “justice.” And “tribunal.” What’s that, Jason Linkins of The New Republic?

Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.

This, we are tempted to say, will become the principal challenge of this generation: How to deal with Donald Trump, his staff, his cabinet, their staff, and every other participant in the most lawless and repulsive administration in history. Various models spring to mind: The Nuremberg Trials after World War II. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in Argentina.

These are public displays and enactments of accountability to which a nation must resort when an entire government is complicit in crimes. Their point is not only to punish the guilty. Indeed, in South Africa, punishment was not the main goal. A part of the Commission was charged with hearing and deciding on the granting of amnesty to those who expressed remorse for their actions. But whether or not individual perpetrators of crime and abuse were punished or forgiven, the essential purpose of these boards was to be seen meting out justice in public—to re-establish (or establish for the first time) the primacy of democratic values and the rule of law, and to do it on the record.

Which, after the murders and seizures and kidnappings and imprisonments and brutality of ICE, is something we fucking need. Not to mention Trump’s cavalcade of bribery and self-enrichment. Not to mention RFK, Jr.’s campaign of disease proliferation. Not to mention Pete Hegseth’s war-crime murders of people on fishing boats. Not to mention the innumerable times Trump’s cabinet members committed perjury before Congress. Not to mention—

Well, let’s not mention what we’re not going to mention. You get the point. Although one thing we haven’t mentioned is the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of deaths brought about by Trump’s and DOGE’s defunding of USAID. It prompts Linkins to note:

This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.

Is it legal to stop giving money to a charity that keeps people alive? Yes. Is it morally defensible? Let’s discuss it in an open forum and hear administration officials—and erstwhile official Elon Musk—try to justify it.

IS IT LEGAL TO NOT BUY, READ, AND ENJOY THE SPLIT? PROBABLY NOT!

So don't do that.

In classic authoritarian/Mafia form, Trump has gotten underlings to do illegal things for him, which binds them to him all the more. They no doubt believe—with cause—that he would pardon them for whatever crimes for which they’d be convicted. Except, the thing is, he can’t pardon them if he’s out of office or…you know…physically dead/six feet under/rotting in hell. We’ve heard it said that under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the entire administration could be indicted for its cover-up of the Epstein Files and its violation of the signed-into-law Epstein Files Transparency Act. Such a nervy (if improbable) move would ignite a gigantic extravaganza of little fish ratting out big fish, and cue more singing than an entire festival’s worth of Wagner at Bayreuth. So that would be fun.

There are, however, two elements to this scenario that might mitigate against the administration of justice and accountability. One is the Supreme Court’s wretched ruling that the President cannot be criminally charged for acts he committed while pursuing his official duties. It’s obnoxious and insulting, but we think that will only shield Trump to a limited extent. He’s just too greedy, too impulsive, and too stupid. He’s an evil genius without the genius. He has surely done things the Court will deem permissible, but he’s done other things as well.

The other possible monkey wrench in what might be the smoothly-operating machinery of accountability is Democratic weakness and cowardice. We saw it when Obama failed to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration for lying us into war, and we saw it when Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, fumfered for years instead of prosecuting the January 6 insurrectionists, starting with you-know-who.

In both of these cases of political and legal malpractice, the watchword was something along the lines of “let’s look forward and not back.” This, of course, reminds us of Michael Palin’s immortal quote in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.” It also reminds us of something EW wrote in a comment on a recent Substack: “The adjudication of every crime in history, from shoplifting to genocide, involved looking back.”

Because right? We—and by “we” we mean “civilization”—solve crimes and punish the guilty by looking back, but we also do it for the sake of looking forward—i.e., to deter future bad actors from acting badly. Had Trump been prosecuted for January 6, he might not have run for (let alone won) a second term, and we’d have been spared all this corruption, all these lies, all these deaths.

Which is to say that Democrats, starting when they re-gain the House next January, have to throw off their customary tendency to “not seem political” or “maintain respect for the institution” or “strive to safeguard the principles of collegiality” or “act like pussies.” Instead they have to “man up.” Make that “man the fuck up.” The Trump administration may look like a collection of bureaucrats, lawyers, diplomats, and public servants, but that’s just because they wear expensive clothing. Inside they’re criminals, racists, and thugs. They are robbing us blind and killing us in the streets. (They’re also destroying the economy and polluting the world, but that’s not illegal, for some reason.)

And if you don’t believe us, getta loada Rick Wilson’s “take.” Yes, he has much to answer for as a lifelong Republican strategist who arguably laid the groundwork for the rise of Trump. But he has been an eloquent and tireless anti-Trumper, and in “The Cancer at America’s Heart” says it well:

Keep repeating the litany of the damned: Pam Bondi, the Florida fixer turned Attorney General; Todd Blanche, the private counsel who traded his soul for a Deputy AG badge; Kash Patel, the “Deep State” pod-bro conspiracist now sitting on a booster cushion in J. Edgar Hoover’s chair; Jeanine Pirro, the Franzia-soaked harpy, shrieking performative vengeance; Susie Wiles, the silent enabler, and, of course, the criminal mastermind Donald Trump.

(snip)

In a practical world, they need to spend the rest of their lives being investigated, prosecuted, sued, shunned, and treated as the criminals and conspirators they most certainly are. No law firm should hire them, lest they be excluded from any and all government contracts (I was told that’s perfectly normal!). They should have Federal prosecutors seeking indictment after indictment against them. (I was told that’s perfectly normal!). They should be subject to internal investigations for every…single…action in office. Not one moment of the rest of their miserable lives should be peaceful. The more of them who spend time in a cell, the better.

Failure to prosecute these…call them “scumbags”…would be catastrophic, not only for the country, but for the Democratic Party. It would inspire (if that’s the word) millions of Dems to simply give up, to stop voting and to stop donating. It would signal the MAGA/white supremacist/theocratic right that they can do pretty much anything they want with impunity. And it would turn the US into perhaps the worst form of Splitsville imaginable. (We know, by now, that you know, by now, that by “Splitsville” we mean a geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.”)

One nation would consist of the worst people in the world newly revived and heartened, with a spring in their step and a yes-we-can-repeal-the-Enlightenment gleam in their eye. Another nation would be those who, as always, don’t pay attention and can’t be bothered.

And the third nation would be us: morally exhausted, irredeemably cynical, and enraged at yet another betrayal by a political class who ask us to give them power (and, endlessly, money) and then, when it comes time to confront and indict Rollo Tommasi, refuse to use it.

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Yes, you. Yes, “hates.”

Is that so hard to believe?

“But he doesn’t know me,” you weakly retort. At which we laugh in a witheringly dismissive manner and reply, “Of course not. That’s the point.” Trump hates everybody who is not himself—which, when you do the math, reveals that he hates everyone in the world.

“But that’s crazy!” a normal person (such as you) will reply. It is. In fact, it’s not only crazy, it’s insane. And it’s not only insane, it’s sick, psychotic, and significantly “fucked up.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Consider the most cursory rundown of the things he’s done over the past year-and-change he’s been in office, and you’d give yourself an aneurysm trying to conclude that he doesn’t hate everybody, which includes you. Behold:

❖ He ended USAID, dooming hundreds of thousands to death by starvation and disease.

❖ He made a certifiable lunatic head of HHS, whose policies have caused the return of polio and measles (up next: Leprosy!) and discouraged the use of vaccines.

❖ His EPA has revoked the 2009 scientific finding that climate change is a danger.

❖ He is trying to kill renewable energy and bring back coal.

Speaking of which, take it away, Paul Krugman:

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy…Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves [sic. swerves?] are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

Want more? Here’s more:

❖ His ICE is conducting a reign of terror around the country, murdering witnesses, kidnapping immigrants (including children), and consigning them to concentration camps.

❖ His erratic tariffs are crippling the economy, raising the prices of imported goods and making long-term investments impossible.

❖ He has ordered a continuing series of bombings of small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing over 100 people who may be drug smugglers (which would be illegal) but who also may only be fishermen (which would be murder).

❖ He is alienating allies and subverting NATO, raising fears of a new nuclear weapons arms race and a new Cold War run by AI.

❖ He has largely abandoned Ukraine and sided with Russia.

❖ He is increasingly cosseting Nazis and white supremacists.

❖ He and his DOJ are doing everything they can to suppress the Epstein Files and protect the identities of pedophiles guilty of child trafficking, rape, torture, possibly even murder.

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These, to put it gently, are not the policies and actions of a person who means well. In fact, they’re the policies and actions of a person who takes pleasure in being as destructive as possible. You—

(But wait. First, note that we haven’t even mentioned the greed, the grifting, and the graft; the destruction of the East Wing, the egomaniacal Kennedy Center farce, the ballroom, the arch, the FIFA “Peace Prize,” the bordelloification of the Oval Office, the extortion to get a train station and an airport (and possibly everything else in the country) named after him, the invasion of Venezuela, and the constant, constant lying.)

—may object, “Okay, he hates anyone decent, which includes me. But ‘everyone’? Shirley you can’t be suggesting that he hates his fellow billionaires. Or other authoritarians, like Orban or Putin or Netanyahu. And what about his wife! Okay, he probably hates her at this point, since she obviously hates him. But what about his children! Okay, he hates Tiffany, to the extent that he remembers who she is. But what about Don Junior, and Eric, and Ivanka?”

To answer those perfectly reasonable questions, let’s talk about quantum mechanics.

Gemini is Google’s “AI assistant.” Here’s its summary definition for the term superposition:

Superposition is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics where a quantum system can exist in multiple states at the same time. For example, a qubit can be in a superposition of both “0” and “1” states simultaneously until it is measured, at which point it collapses into one of the states.

Yes, this seems counterintuitive (all of quantum mechanics is counterintuitive), but this is neither the time nor the place nor the spacetime to get into it. Let’s just accept that, at the most fundamental level, two realities can be present at the same time, and only the act of measurement causes the system to “make up its mind” and reveal a single state. This has been confirmed in thousands of experiments. No one really understands why or how it works this way.

This, we think, is as good a metaphor as any for describing the state of Donald Trump’s attitude toward those he might be thought to not hate. Toward them, Trump, due to the profoundly damaged nature of his psyche, exists in an affective state of superposition. He likes and hates them at the same time. (Forget “love.” He is and always has been incapable of love.) He likes them if they make him look good or can provide him with something he wants, which is limited to money, sex, cheeseburgers, preposterously over-the-top flattery, and esteem. But he also hates them because they are not him. And, because they are not him, and because he is a big fat mess (i.e., a malignant narcissist with paranoid and sadistic tendencies), each of them—even the lusted-after Ivanka—is a potential threat. The moment they behave improperly (by criticizing or repudiating him or just failing to worship him enough), the superposition collapses into the single state of hate.

(In this, he is different from the quantum mechanics model, in which the measurement of either state is equally likely. Trump will always default to hate and never to like. So sue us. It’s just a metaphor.)

So yes, of course he hates you. He hates you because he doesn’t know you. And even if you met him, and he got to know you, and he decided that he liked you, he would still hate you.

How, you may be wondering, are we going to tie this in to Splitsville, which is our term of art for when a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”? Easy. One nation consists of Donald Trump and the other malignant narcissists out there (he’s not the only one, but he’s the BIGGEST and MOST MALIGNANT), who rampage through life inflicting cruelty and damage without a speck of remorse, because they believe—their psychological equilibrium requires that they believe—that that is what “winners” do. The other nation is everybody else. Including you.

“Whatever,” you wearily reply. “But you’re forgetting something. If he really hates everybody, there’s one more person available for him to hate. Himself.”

You make an excellent point. Trump’s behavior, going back to when he first appeared on the social scene in New York in the 1980’s, has always reeked of desperation. No amount of money, no amount of publicity, no amount of fame, no amount of self-aggrandizement is enough. The unappeasably vainglorious asshole who cheats at golf and really seems to think he “won,” who recently slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, and who crows about the violence he unleashes and then can’t stop whining about not winning a Nobel Peace Prize, is the same sleazy douchebag who called the New York Post pretending to be his own p.r. flack, in order to brag about how Marla Maples thought (or allegedly said she thought) he was the World’s Greatest Lover. Trump is, and always has been, an unquenchable, unfillable, infinitely-dense black hole of insecurity.

Where it comes from—genetics; bad parenting; Jewish space lasers—we don’t know. What we do know is that no personality subject to so insatiable a need for what psychologists charmingly call “narcissistic supply” has the wherewithal, the inner resources of stability and calm, to like itself. Every transparently stupid boast (“My uncle taught at MIT. That means I’m smart.”) whether at a rally (“I have the best words.”) or in a press gaggle (“I aced the cognitive test.”) reveals a fear that the opposite is true. And if the opposite is true…well, add that to the well-known history of bankruptcies, business failures, felony convictions, court-levied fines, impeachments, accusations (and boasts!) of sexual assault, and a lifetime of lying and cheating, and it would be hard for Trump to suppress the conclusion that he really is, at bottom, that which he most despises: a loser.

So yes. In some small isolation booth of his ego, shielded from all the pretense and Big Lies and fantasizing, he hates himself.

As well he should.

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Let’s talk Lutnick. (Or, as the indispensable TenGrain at Mock Paper Scissors refers to him, “Obvious Anagram Howard Lutnick.”)

Yes, we know: What can be said that isn’t already being said in newsletters and magazine articles across the length and breadth of the land? We’ll see. But first, some background.

Howard Lutnick—who, they say, was the most despised man on Wall Street--was CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which achieved tragic notoriety by having occupied two floors in the World Trade Center, resulting in its catastrophic annihilation on 9-11. (Lutnick wasn’t in the office at the time.) He’s also (at least as of this writing) Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. But you may remember him from when he described himself as having committed an act of impressive moral integrity in 2005. It seems that—but here’s The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling to set the scene:

In an interview with the New York Post podcast in October, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recalled an instance in 2005 when Epstein—who was at the time his Upper East Side neighbor—invited him to tour his infamous East 71st Street townhouse.

“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick told the Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’”

“In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he added.

Even if nobody was on the table getting a “massage,” still—ick, right? Hell, yes. Except, as Paul Krugman notes:

… even the highly limited, extremely redacted release of the Epstein files — everything we’ve seen reeks of a major coverup — shows that he was flat-out lying. Not only did he stay in close contact with Epstein, the two men appear to have gone into business together.

“Close contact” is right. In 2012 Lutnick wrote to Epstein arranging to meet him for dinner on what everyone is now calling the financier’s “pedophile island.” (Joke from “the internet” via Wonkette’s Marci Jones: “Kid Rock? I thought that was a nickname for Epstein’s island.”) As Houghtaling delicately observes,

Lutnick then mentioned he was traveling alongside another couple, and that both couples had four children each, before listing out the specific ages of all the children who would be traveling to the island with them.

We also learn, from the NY Times, that Epstein asked Lutnick if he could meet the family’s nanny—presumably because Epstein was thinking of having children of his own and would require a nanny’s services sooner or later.

Meanwhile, as to that biz connection, CBS News—of all places! Thanks, Bari!—sez: “Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin…”

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So yes, Lutnick lied on that podcast. Isn’t that interesting? No. Lutnick is a member of the Trump administration, which is populated entirely and exclusively by liars.

What’s telling here, and what no one we’ve read has quite put their finger on yet, is not only did Lutnick lie about his continuing contacts with Epstein, but in the Post podcast he let it be known—he essentially bragged about—how morally upright he was. From the briefest nudge-nudge-wink-wink mention of “the right kind of massage” Howard Lutnick was—years before it became fashionable and profitable--able to discern how “disgusting” Jeffrey Epstein was.

It was not a careful, self-protective lie, but a florid, self-aggrandizing lie, the equivalent of not only (dishonestly) claiming on your resume that you graduated from Harvard, but that you were first in your class. (Which reminds us that Liar-in-Chief Donald J. Trump claims to have graduated first in his 1968 undergrad class at Penn/Wharton. To his credit, he did in fact graduate. But not first in his class; not summa; not magna; not with any kind of academic honors. He was, in fact, as one of his professors recounted, “the stupidest student I have ever had.” Sad.)

Now, one of the dangers inherent in lying, especially when it occurs in the public or professional sphere, is that the lie risks being exposed. When that happens, the damage is twofold. Your present is harmed: you lose the thing you hoped to gain by the lie—the job; the admiration; the money; the Nobel Prize; etc. In addition, though, your future is subverted: your reputation as a person suffers. Many people will refuse to trust you ever again about anything. The bigger the lie, more glaring these consequences. For this reason, a liar would be well advised to keep the lie as minimal as possible. (Another reason for keeping it minimal is that a small lie is easier to remember than a big or complicated one. It’s thus easier to keep your story straight and less likely to trip you up in self-contradictions later on.)

Lutnick’s lie wasn’t minimal. It was—unnecessarily—a big fat stupid lie. He could just have said, “Yes, I met Epstein in 2005. My wife and I had dinner at his house and I never interacted with him again.” True, the mendacity of that would have come out today regardless. But now he looks not only like a horse’s ass but a gigantic horse’s ass. (Apologies to actual horses.) What he said on the podcast was, essentially, “In 2005 I could see Jeffrey Epstein to be what the rest of the country now sees him to have been. Back then I was—like you all are today—a morally admirable individual who would and will not tolerate sleazy persons of low character.”

Talk about virtue signaling! And now we see that none of that was true. For years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, Lutnick socialized and did business with him. Turns out he did and does tolerate persons who, as he knows full well, everyone else considers sleazy and of low character.

Then again, go be surprised. He works for Trump.

Krugman is unsparing in his assessment of Lutnick:

The only waves he has made are a result of his exceptional combination of stupidity and offensive tone-deafness.

Thus he promised to revive U.S. manufacturing by bringing back “the work of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws.” Lutnick, a billionaire, dismissed concerns about chaos at the Social Security Administration by saying that his mother-in-law wouldn’t complain about a missed check. He gave a Europe-bashing speech to a private dinner at Davos so offensive that Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, walked out.

And now this. In fact, there’s more of this than when we started writing this newsletter yesterday. While we were doing so, Attorney General Pam “No One Can Believe How Corrupt I Am” Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and fulfilled her primary function, which is to be—in the words of Roy Edroso--“Trump’s moll.” When asked about the Epstein Files and the FBI’s disgraceful “reverse redactions” (exposing the victims’ names, concealing those of the perpetrators), Bondi yelled about the stock market, read (from a “burn book”) custom-crafted insults about and to specific representatives, and triumphantly cemented her reputation as the worst Attorney General in US history. And then came the Lutnick Moment. Vermont Representative Becca Balint asked Bondi about why she had not questioned Howard Lutnick about his experience on Epstein’s island. In The New Republic Houghtaling writes:

“By 2008, we knew that Epstein was a convicted sexual abuser,” pressed Balint. “And we now know that Lutnick went to Epstein’s island in 2012.

“How was that not a deal breaker for the president, and why aren’t you asking questions of the commerce secretary about what he saw on the island, which he lied about not ever going to?” Balint asked.

(snip)

But as the Vermont Democrat continued speaking, Bondi got louder.

“Please stop talking,” Balint spat at Bondi’s attempts to deflect.

“The American people have a right to know the answers to this. These are senior officials in the Trump administration. This is not a game, Secretary,” Balint shouted.

“I’m attorney general,” Bondi sneered.

“My apologies, I couldn’t tell,” Balint said.

It—if you can believe it—went downhill from there. Bondi accused Balint of antisemitism. Balint replied, incredulously, “Woah woah, do you want to go there, Attorney General? Do you want to go there? Are you serious? Talking about antisemitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust? Really? Really?”

This, then, is the result of Lutnick’s lie and its exposure in the Epstein Files. To which we must add: so far. God knows what’s in the three million documents the administration is still sitting on. Will there be consequences? Will Lutnick be fired, or will he resign, or will he be fired and “resign”? Krugman doesn’t think so. And neither do we. Catching a member of the administration telling a lie is like catching a member of the New York Knicks practicing three-point shots. Trump would never fire a guy for doing his job.

Still, never say never. What if, for whatever true or false public or private reasons Lutnick does, in the demure euphemism the media likes, “step down”? Will it mean anything?

Maybe. It might mean nothing more than that Lutnick, who is a billionaire, decided “Who needs this shit?” and retreated into private life. (Indeed, many Republicans in the House are doing just that.) And who could blame him? One might well wonder why he took the job in the first place. You can bet that if we were billionaires, or even puny, loser-ish millionaires, the last thing we would want to do is work in any capacity for Donald Trump.

But if Lutnick’s departure is revealed to be other than voluntary, it might mean that Trump’s Roy Cohn-ish never-apologize/never-explain façade is cracking; that he seeks to limit his exposure to the radioactive contamination of the Epstein Files and those who knew Epstein; that his customary defiance (of the law, of morality, of decency itself) has sprung leaks; that he thinks the walls are closing in—which would confirm that they really are.

All of this points up one more reason the US is Splitsville—our term of art for when a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations.” To some (and probably most) of us, the mere idea of consorting with a child sex trafficker is repugnant and disgusting. To others, though, it’s unobjectionable. Hanging out with such a person, taking their children (and their nanny) to visit him, even doing business with him (or her!), is no big deal. In fact, it’s fun! Sure, they have to lie about it now and then. But so what? Like you’re so perfect?

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We can’t believe we’re about to say this, but it might be time to cut the Democrats a little slack.

We know: Ew. Who wants to? For more than a year now we’ve been screaming for them to do more, to meet the moment, to—in the words of our high school cheerleaders—”lean to the left/lean to the right/stand up/sit down/fight fight fight.” Except for the lean-to-the-right part.

It’s been more than twelve months of open murder and lawless brutality, naked corruption, wanton destruction of government agencies and properties, flaunted racism, economic stupidity, foreign relations catastrophes, a morally bankrupt and ethically farcical Supreme Court, endless and ubiquitous lying, and disgraceful Republican complicity with all of the above. (And yes—when we put it that way it sounds pretty bad.) What has been the Dem response?

Sternly-worded letters. Record-long speeches. Holding up silly auction-house paddles at the State of the Union address. Indignant tweets. Calls for bipartisanship. Demands for “accountability.” Thundering pronouncements about the price of eggs. In a word, complaints—while, at the same time, confirming Trump’s horrible nominees for Federal offices and refusing to acknowledge the intensity of we the people’s outrage, disgust, and fear with similar expressions of same.

Notably absent from the Democratic response has been anything aggressive, such as the formation of a shadow cabinet (to shame and mock, on a daily basis, Trump’s cabinet of baboons), or the organization and co-ordination of national protests, or the holding of hearings to publicize Trump’s bottomless greed, or an active campaign of shaming Republicans in both chambers for enabling what, by now, everyone and their dog is calling fascism. Rather than responding with a robust counterattack on Trumpian depravity and Republican collusion, Dems (with precious few exceptions) have responded with timidity, cowardice, or obliviousness. It’s been galling and frustrating and infuriating. But it just occurred to us that we have been so galled, frustrated, and infuriated that we have missed the obvious reason for it all.

Why can’t the Democratic members of the House and Senate mount an adequate opposition to Donald Trump and his flagrant criminality? Because they’re Democratic members of the House and Senate.

For a year—if not since Trump I, starting in 2017—we’ve been saying that the Republican Party selects for bigots, morons, and liars the way the NBA selects for tall men. But ask yourself: What kind of person does the Democratic Party select for? Ans.: Compromisers. Give-and-take-ers. Getting-to-yes-ers. You-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours-ers.

You get the idea. And this, in normal circumstances, is not a bad thing. The Democratic Party is not a party the way France, with its single, unified land-mass, is a country. (Oh, wait. We forgot the outre-mer departments—Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, and Mayotte. All right, substitute, umm, the sovereign, unified-land-mass city-state of Monaco.) It’s a party the way Indonesia, with over 17,000 islands, is a country. To represent a Dem district in, say, Texas requires (that is, selects for) a different sort of person than a rep from Massachusetts. As Will Rogers said (almost 100 years ago), “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

Once they reach the House or the Senate, these 17,000 different types of people have to work together to accomplish anything—especially if they expect to be re-elected for a next term. The result is a party built on, dedicated to, and defined by compromise. That’s what a democracy (or, okay, soreheads, a democratic republic) requires. And again, under ordinary circumstances, that’s fine.

But these are not ordinary circs, and the Dems in Congress find themselves at a disadvantage—floundering, whining, coming up short and being yelled at by their base—because they are unable to do one vital thing.

They are unable to actively oppose evil when they see it.

We were at first tempted to say that they are unable to recognize actual evil. But that seems, not only inaccurate, but too kind. If you can’t see something, you can’t be expected to do anything about it. Every Dem on the Hill knows how toxic, criminal, and repulsive the Trump administration is. The problem is their response to it—or lack thereof. For most of them, their go-along-to-get-along nature impedes their ability to fight fire with fire.

What? What do we mean by “evil”? You tell us. The workings of Satan in the world? A metaphysical force of negativity, like The Force, but bad? The human capacity for destruction, cruelty, and greed? Whatevs. Pick your philosophical or religious poison. In any case, that is what Trump embodies and represents. He always has. Over the years he has aligned himself with (or been manipulated by) other evil people: Russian mobsters, soulless oligarchs, fascist strongmen. The Mafia. Roy Cohn. He has surrounded himself with shameless toadies and cynical careerists, made a sociopathic Nazi his prime minister, and played to a worshipful cult of racists.

Most people who a) decide to run for a Democratic seat in the House or Senate; b) do and say what has to be done and said to get the nomination; and c) do and say what has to be done and said to get the money to run and win, are simply unable to robustly oppose such Trumpian depravity.

At first that sounds crazy. “He pardoned drug dealers! He bombed fishing boats! He razed the East Wing! He praises Putin and trash-talks NATO! He invaded Venezuela! He’s paralyzing business with his lunatic tariffs! He defends the killings and kidnappings perpetrated by ICE! He’s openly soliciting and accepting bribes from corporations and foreign countries! He insults and arrests reporters, lies about everything, and wants to build an arch bigger than the Lincoln Memorial! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR TO ROBUSTLY OPPOSE?”

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You’d think. But who’s arranging the marches? Indivisible and 50501. Who’s delivering the mockery Trump deserves? Kimmel and Colbert and Oliver. Who’s actively opposing ICE? The people of Minnesota. As we’ve said before, the Democrats may not have legislative power, but they all have comms teams, and budgets, and access to every broadcast and social medium on Earth. Why aren’t they using them?

Then again, there are exceptions—non-monstrous people who are somehow able to talk about Trump or treat their Republican colleagues with the contempt they so richly deserve. But there are fewer than a dozen: AOC, Bernie, Chris Murphy, Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, Jared Moscowitz, Eric Swalwell, Jamie Raskin, Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, Alex Padilla. And that’s it. Eleven names out of a total of 258 members in the House and Senate. There’s also Gavin Newsome, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker, but they’re governors and not in Congress. Maybe we’ve left out one or two. Sorry not sorry.

[Insert here obligatory fulmination over the tone-deaf/tin-ear uselessness of Chuck Schumer and the weak-tea/hula-hands disappointments wrought by Hakim Jeffries. We can’t even.]

It is possible, of course, that many elected Dems want to respond vigorously to Trump’s (and Vance’s, and Miller’s, and Hegseth’s, and Bondi’s) evil, but fear the consequences of attacking them. Maybe they’re afraid of getting death threats from MAGA loons. Then again, it’s unimaginable that they don’t get them already. It comes with the job and fully a third of the population is insane.

Whatever the reason—inherent wimpiness; reasonable fear--until now, the Democratic strategy for opposing Trump has been: “Keep your head down, don’t attack him, focus on kitchen-table issues like affordability, and prepare for Republican cheating in the mid-terms.” In other words, “Yes, this administration is entirely populated by scumbags, fascists, and swine, who quite deliberately commit a new moral, legal, or ethical outrage every day. Maybe say something. But don’t really do anything.” Is this cowardice and timidity or canny political strategizing?

Well…

Last week, Taylor Rehmet, an unknown Dem, pulled off a 31-point turnaround in the Texas (!) state senate, winning by 14 points a district Trump had won last year by 17. And all he focused on was the cost of groceries and health insurance. The always-astute Brian Beutler asked, “Did Dems cause a landslide or are they simply being swept along by one?” Meaning: Has Schumer been right all along? Just talk about eggs, and stifle your moral outrage, lest you scare off centrists and disaffected Republican voters? Beutler thinks not.

According to the New York Times, Tarrant County is the epicenter of a backlash to right-wing book banning and other kinds of censorship and discrimination.

Which means that Dem passivity should not be excused, let alone promoted, as constituting some kind of MAGA-whisperer insight. Rather, as Beutler puts it:

…the benefits of the pivot to affordability are limited to battleground territory, and precisely because “affordability” is too antiseptic to scare people into their partisan corners. It isn’t a galvanizing issue, it’s a pacifying issue.

In other words, the kitchen table issues do play in contested purple, pink, and even red districts—not because they’re so electrifying, but for the opposite reason. They offer a do-no-harm agenda that nervous Republican voters, disenchanted with Trump’s toxicity, might find acceptable.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters in blue areas don’t need to be courted with promises of lower egg prices; they already hate Trump’s guts and will crawl over broken glass to vote against him and the GOP. Indeed, the reason the Democrats in Congress poll so abysmally (job approval rating: 18 percent) is surely because their response to this nightmare has been so tepid.

But, like we said, maybe it’s not their fault. They’re professional compromisers being asked not to compromise with a deteriorating and desperate malignant narcissist and his morally bankrupt cabal. Maybe they deserve a little slack. So here. Take it. We willingly grant that we’re calling for them to behave in ways that do not come naturally.

But that’s what you have to do when confronted with evil. Just ask Frodo! He didn’t want to schlep that damned ring into Mordor. It wasn’t in his nature. But he rose to the occasion. Isn’t that what we’re all called upon to do? Even lifetime compromisers in the House and professional do-nothings in the chummy, oh-so-collegial Senate?

Somebody tell them that. Somebody else tell them that, per Beutler, loudly campaigning against corruption and brutality is good politics. We’ll be over here, quietly (?) observing that another version of Splitsville—our term of art for a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”—may be the most fundamental one of all.

Here it is: Part of the US consists of evil people. Some of them commit terrible acts, while others simply help, or enable, or defend, or look the other way.

And then there’s everybody else. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we dealt with a version of it in July of last year. Back then we issued a touching plea for everyone to be “decent.” This is different. Now we’re issuing a touching plea for every Democrat in the House and Senate to call out these monsters for what they are, and to denounce the Republicans who have, for over a year, allowed them to get away with it.

Is that too much to ask? DON’T ANSWER THAT.

And by the way, we haven’t even mentioned the Epstein Files.

THE SPLIT. Buy one. Get one.

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While Donald Trump is busy arranging for his farcical Board of Peas to award him its not-all-that-coveted Peas Prize, we’ll be lobbying the actual Nobel Committee to award the real Nobel Peace Prize to the Citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota. (And we’re not the only ones. But just remember that we wrote this the day before this hit our inbox.)

It isn’t often—it’s almost never—that we find someone or something to be inspirational. But you’d have to have a heart of stone—or, alternatively, like Trump and his followers, a brain of vanilla pudding—not to be awestruck with admiration for that crowd.

It brings to mind a possibly apocryphal quote from some British chap describing his experience at the front at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. (Or maybe it was at Dunkirk in WWII. Or some other wartime event. No one can definitively say.) When asked what it was like, his response (purportedly) was, “My dear—the noise. And the people.”

When we invoke this, we mean it in a good way. The noise—the whistles, the drums, the shouting! And the people: Tens of thousands of them, braving wind chills of tens of thousands of degrees (F) below zero. But perhaps above all, the restraint! Watching these thugs brutalize innocent citizens (let alone murder two of them), tear gas cars full of children, pepper-spray someone just for standing there—it can’t have been easy to resist the urge to physically counter-attack.

What? You haven’t read THE SPLIT? How is that even possible?

Remedy that.

But, of course, that’s exactly what ICE, and their mistress, Ilse the She-Wolf of the SS Kristie Noem, and her boss, The Failing Donald Trump, want. ICE wants a riot so its lamebrain fatso Call of Duty cosplay assholes can inflict their murderous fantasies on liberals, people of color, and—especially—women. Noem wants a riot because Trump does. And Trump wants a riot so he can invoke the Insurrection Act and send the US military into blue cities. (Or so he has been encouraged to think by obvious sociopath and frothing servant of e-vil Stephen Miller. It goes without saying that such a move would blow up in Trump’s deeply-spackled face, because a) everything he does blows up in his face, and b) decent Americans—and maybe even some Republicans—wouldn’t stand for it.)

We’re not the only ones cheering for the Minneapolitans, or whatever the noun is. Paul Krugman, in his Wednesday Substack, is also rapt with admiration:

However, MAGA has clearly been shocked by the way the people of Minnesota responded. Rather than rolling over in submission, ordinary citizens quickly organized highly effective resistance. Although they haven’t stopped ICE’s reign of terror, they have thrown a lot of sand in its gears.

They have also shown remarkable courage and selflessness. A week before Alex Pretti was executed at the hands of ICE, he suffered a broken rib in another protest. And he died trying to protect an innocent woman who was being brutalized. Nor was he alone in his courage and selflessness. As you watch the video of his murder, listen to all the whistles blowing, look at all the people who continued to film after multiple shots were fired.

Krugman titles this newsletter “Minnesota is the Beginning of an American Color Revolution,” reminding us that “a ‘color revolution’ is a widely used term for the nonviolent uprisings that overthrew some of the autocratic regimes that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Yes, it’s come to this: The US has an autocratic regime, and it is up to “ordinary people” to overthrow it. It is not too much to say that the peeps of MPLS are showing us how.

We want to talk about that word he just used—“selflessness”—but first: It must be said that whatever anti-ICE and anti-CBP success the people of Minnesota have achieved has at least in part been bought with the lives of two people. (And those names! She was Good and he was Pretti.) Their fates were influential, not because they were white, and not even because they were killed. It’s because—like George Floyd—they were killed in public, on video. Prior to Good’s death, numerous Latinos, regardless of their legal status, had been swept up by ICE and consigned to concentration camps where, presumably, some of them died. Their deaths are every bit as outrageous and tragic as Good’s and Pretti’s, but we didn’t see them.

In the case of Good and Pretti, we can’t un-see them. It’s one more example of why Trump is Wylie Coyote in human (barely) form. He wanted to goad a blue city into violence, so he could justify a brutal crackdown. Instead, it’s his goons who have been goaded into violence, providing viral content the whole world finds repulsive. Result: Gregory “Li’l Himmler” Bovino is out, Noem and Miller are at each other’s throats, and Senate Democrats are actually thinking about doing the right thing.

Krugman notes that the orc army we call MAGA must find all this bewildering:

Trumpists insist that the thousands of ordinary people opposing ICE in Minneapolis are all, as Trump has said, “paid professional agitators”. They must know how absurd their claim is. Yet behind the absurdity lies a genuine sense of bafflement. MAGA can’t understand the willingness of so many people to endure so much hardship and run so many risks out of a sense of civic duty and care for their fellow man. Surely, they think, there must be hidden paymasters and puppet masters coordinating the anti-ICE resistance.

We’re not so sure they know how absurd their claim is, since the ability to recognize the absurd relies on a solid grounding in reality. These are Trump fans we’re talking about: their relation to reality consists of they don’t got any. Still, we take his point. They must be mystified at the very idea that someone would do something inconvenient, let alone dangerous, for a total stranger. Didn’t Jesus warn those good Christians about that? Something like, “Don’t do anything for a stranger and be thou not a chump”? What’s even the point of having a self if it’s supposedly so praiseworthy to be selfless?

God knows that’s Trump’s modus vivendi. Trump would no sooner lift a finger to help a stranger than he would appear in public without his poofy hairdo. No wonder he sees somebody doing something for the common good and accuses them of being paid; those are the only circumstances in which he does anything for anyone. (Trump, you will recall, characterized the soldiers killed in World War I as “suckers” and “losers.”) So it’s not very surprising that the suckers and losers who still admire him would feel the same.

We don’t mean to suggest that Minnesota has “won” and ICE has “lost.” The goon squads are still there, and now others are infecting Maine. There will be more illegal seizures and kidnappings, more brutality, more deaths of decent people, more lies from the government, more cowardice and complicity from Republicans, more wishy-washy half-measures from Democrats. But there will also be more displays of courage, guts, compassion, and selflessness from citizens, not only in the Twin Cities but all over the fucking place, thanks to the Minneapolis example.

Of course, in the midst of all this, there are still millions of people who think Trump is the bee’s knees and is doing a great job. They see masked thugs gang-tackling teenagers and think, “This is good.” They see some tubby assholes in discount fake-military duds shooting a guy on the ground ten times and think, “He asked for it.” They see enormous crowds of people protesting the most vile kind of state-sanctioned violence and think, “Who’s paying them?”

Which brings us, as usual, to a new iteration of Splitsville, our term of art for a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” Trump, the people who work for him, the MAGA faithful, and the Republican Party—anyone, that is, who has witnessed the depredations of the past year and has not been sickened by it and demanded its abolition—are one such “nation.” They’re the nation of the morally blind, the ethically tone-deaf, and, in some many cases, the embodiment of evil. They can’t understand why someone would do something unpleasant or risky on behalf of a stranger, especially if they’re not getting paid for it.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, there’s everybody else. And there are way more of us than them. As Minneapolis has demonstrated, numbers matter. Persistence matters. Bearing witness to Trumpist crimes—and then putting that footage online—matters. When ICE comes to town, you know what to do. Bring out the people and bring on the noise.

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People say to us, “Jeez Louise, what will it take to get at least a handful of Republicans to recognize that Donald Trump is a danger to the US and the world, and to join with Democrats to impeach his ass and remove him from office?”

We’ve developed a standard response to this question. The first part of the response is, “Look, our name isn’t ‘Louise.’” The second part is something along the lines of, “Good question.”

These days it’s become an even better question, because this week will go down in history as the one in which Trump’s insanity became obvious even to children, houseplants, and certain microorganisms. As summarized in relentless deadpan by the indispensable Heather Cox Richardson, Trump unleashed a flurry of deranged posts on Truth Social just after midnight of January 20. Included among its greatest hits are such chart-topping delusions as:

“As I expressed to everyone, very plainly, Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back—On that, everyone agrees!”

and

“No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along there would be no NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad, but TRUE!!! President DJT”

in addition to, as HCR narrates,

Later, the account would post a short video of Trump under which the chyron read: “I AM STANDING UP FOR AMERICAN AUTOWORKERS,” although the video was of him promising to stop all federal payments to “sanctuary cities” on February 1.

as well as

Then the account turned to reposting long-debunked lies about the 2020 presidential election. It reposted claims that there was voter fraud in Nevada (there wasn’t), that Dominion Voting Machines flipped 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden (they didn’t), that China had rigged the voting for Biden (it didn’t).

Later, during the day, Trump held a press conference in which, among other things, he tried to defend ICE. Richardson notes:

To illustrate his claims, he held up one photo after another of individuals above the label “WORST OF WORST” as he mumbled about how bad they were: “many murderers, many many murderers, people that murdered.”

She adds, “Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who has watched and clipped Trump’s speeches for years, commented: ‘folks, this is some really weird sh*t. the president is not well.’” This is noteworthy. Rupar has indeed seen it all. Every clip on Bluesky showing Trump in public is from him. If Aaron Rupar is alarmed, we are indeed in a new era of Trumpian deterioration.

Don’t believe it? Want more? Here ya go:

“I should’ve gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don’t say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, ok? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They’ll say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige.

(One way the Nobel Committee can regain that prestige is by continuing to refuse to give Trump a Peace Prize—which. with luck, will so enrage him that it will trigger a fatal heart attack, at which point the Nobel Committee will be entitled to award itself the Nobel Peace Prize.)

We are long past the point of wondering whether Trump knows he’s lying or if he believes the lies (and remember: “It’s not a lie if you believe it, Jerry.”) and thinks we believe them, too. Or at least we should. But, having been beaten into submission by Trump’s lifetime of lying, we must now confront a new phenomenon: He is oblivious of everyone else’s reaction. He lacks a sane person’s understanding of other people.

If he believes he really did save “millions and millions of people,” why does he have to tell us, and why aren’t we reacting as though it’s true? And if he knows he’s lying, what makes him think we will believe it?

You reply, “Because he’s a malignant narcissist suffering from frontotemporal dementia, you idiots.” Exactly. Our point is that this fact is even more obvious today than it was last week, when it was pretty damn obvious.

The Split is fiction. OR IS IT?

This—an inability to read the room that amounts to complete room-readin’ illiteracy—was on vivid display on Tuesday, when Trump delivered opening remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As Dean Blundell puts it in his Substack roundup of Davos video clips,

What unfolded was not strength. Not leverage. Not “strategic ambiguity.” It was confusion, grievance, racism, lies, and visible cognitive decline, delivered in a raspy, slurred, low-energy mumble to a room that had clearly already tuned him out.

Here is Trump’s intro, delivered with all the confident zest of a minister with a hangover commencing a funeral service:

Just over one year ago, under the radical-left Democrats, we were a dead country. Now we are…the hottest country anywhere in the world.

Never mind the inane, tv-pitchman’s language (when speaking on Meet the Press, Trump’s lapdog Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, also called America “the hottest country,” as though about to offer it for sale if you call the number on your screen). Instead, ask yourself if that’s the way you’d address an international audience of business, financial, and political leaders already openly wary, pissed off, and contemptuous thanks to your erratic tariffs, your ridiculous demands for a Nobel Prize, your preposterous and dangerous designs on Greenland, your invasion of a sovereign country, and your bootlicking obeisance to Vladimir Putin. And if you’re not aware that they feel that way, why not?

Next up, Trump’s racism:

Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable anymore. They’re not recognizable. And we can argue about it, but there’s no argument. Friends come back from different places—I don’t want to insult anybody—and say, ‘I don’t recognize it.’ And that’s not in a positive way. That’s in a very negative way.

As Blundel comments:

Just the same old white grievance politics, exported internationally: too brown, too foreign, too different, too not Anglo-Christian.

In Davos.
On a world stage.
In 2026.

The room stiffened. Because everyone understood exactly what he meant.

Trump continued in that vein, touching on his favorite topics. Windmills are bad and yes, China manufactures them, but they’re just for show. They “don’t do anything.” (China has the largest wind-farm infrastructure in the world.) The US should get Greenland because only the US can defend it, and “Every NATO ally has an obligation to be able to defend their own territory.” (This entirely-made-up bullshit would negate and make moot the very idea of a military alliance.) The US has always paid for all of NATO. (It hasn’t). And so on.

Paul Krugman also has a succinct, damning review of Trump’s performance, concluding that Trump “just wanted to swagger, whine, and mostly hear himself talk. And all he accomplished was to turn suspicions that he’s gone off the deep end into certainty.”

Let us pause here to note that these three epic displays of lunacy and obliviousness took place in less than 48 hours. Let us pause in that pause to note that a) we completely forgot the bonkers note Trump sent to the Prime Minister of Norway last week, saying that, since they didn’t give him a Nobel Peace Prize (which the government of Norway does not have the power to bestow), Trump will “no longer feel an obligation to think only of Peace.” And b) word has just come through that Trump has reached a “framework of a future deal on Arctic security” with the NATO Secretary-General, and will therefore reverse his latest tariffs on Europe. It’s TACO Thursday! (This confirms Lawrence O’Donnell’s thesis—and ours!—that Trump never intended to do anything to or about Greenland, and had advanced the entire topic to distract from the Epstein Files.)

Still, Greenland Shmeenland. (Which, due to his rapid decompensation, he now refers to as “Iceland.”) You get the idea. He’s insane in the brain and getting worse. Which brings us, at last, back to the Republican Party. Trump is clearly, objectively, unfit for office. What will it take for enough Republicans to act on that?

Some say: Nothing. They will never impeach him. Trump provides the only thing they care about: votes. (His backing doesn’t guarantee you’ll be elected, but his disfavor is something incumbents fear.) Of course, while he’s destroying the country and endangering the world, he’s also ignoring Congress, thus rendering the jobs they wish to preserve more and more meaningless. But they don’t care. Where else can a white supremacist, a fascist, a bigot, or a Christian maniac score such a nice sinecure?

(Bonus brain teaser:

Q: A fascist, a bigot, and a Christian maniac walk into the House of Representatives. What does the Sergeant-at-arms say?

A: “Good morning, Speaker Johnson.”)

But what if something really terrible happened? Suppose, for example, he loosed a goon squad of masked thugs to terrorize, say, Minneapolis. Would Republicans respond? Probably not. Or what if something even worse took place? Like, say he dropped a nuclear bomb on Chicago. We can imagine this scene:

REPORTER: Mister Speaker, Trump just nuked Chicago. Is that disqualifying?

MIKE JOHNSON: I’m not aware of that. I’ve been pretty busy, as you can see. But I’ll certainly keep what’s left of Chicago, if there is anything, in my prayers.

Oh, maybe some Republicans would disapprove of the incineration of 2,721,308 Americans by the US President. Susan Collins would be not just concerned but extremely concerned. Still, even if there were enough votes to impeach Trump, they’d never convict him. They’d hew to the sentiment expressed by Mel Brooks’s character in Blazing Saddles: “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!”

It’s another version of Splitsville, if you really want to know. (That’s our term of art for a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.”) On the one hand you have the Republican Party who, unlike any other group in the country, have the power to stop the obviously deranged, stupid, ignorant, spiteful, sadistic Trump and refuse to do so. On the other hand you have everybody else.

It’s a grim, enraging scenario, but it won’t last forever. Once Trump is out of office—whether in exile in Qatar, kidnapped by aliens, imprisoned by the state of New York, or just from having died to death—MAGA will, without its cult god, dissolve. And those dependable votes which Trump used to be able to provide will disappear. The solid bloc of liars, criminals, imbeciles, and fascists—the GOP—will crumble. Some will retire. Some will go to jail. Some will become lobbyists. And all, when asked about their lockstep allegiance to Trump, will say, “Well, I had no choice. But I never really liked him.”

Their children and grandchildren will slink to local courthouses, where they will file applications to legally change their last names.

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Hey, remember “death squads”?

Sure ya do. And if you don’t, here’s Wikipedia to remind you:

A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings, massacres, or enforced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror.

You may remember them as starring in such Cold War iterations as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador—you know, those relatively poor, fucked-up Central and South American countries, where everybody was always running around repressing the left, murdering nuns and priests, and installing ruthless dictators with the help of the US government, the CIA, and US corporations. You might, if you were so inclined, call them “shithole countries.”

In hearing about their activities (kidnapping and torture, the mass slaughter of entire towns, throwing people out of helicopters—that sort of thing) you may have thought or felt something along the lines of, “Well, yes, that’s barbaric and terrible. But that’s how it is with your hot-blooded Latinos south of the equator in shithole countries, where democracy can never quite take root, the church is sometimes in collusion with the repressive state, and they’re just not as civilized and enlightened as we are up here.”

Uh-huh. Except that we regret to inform you that we now have our own All-American death squad. But rest assured, it’s nothing like those brutal, non-governmental, extrajudicial ravening gangs of bloodthirsty scumbags we used to deplore in those far-off shithole countries. No, our ravening gang of bloodthirsty scumbags—we call it ICE—is fully funded and authorized by the US government. So that’s reassuring. And, just to further their effort to distinguish our good, new death squad from the bad old death squads of the Cold War, ours has adopted a new (or, rather, old) slogan that has nothing to do with Latin America. It takes its inspiration from the massacre of (not in; of) the Czech village of Lidice in World War II. Wikipedia:

Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, because its residents were suspected of harboring local resistance partisans, and were falsely associated with aiding team members of Operation Anthropoid. On 9 June 1942, 172 boys and men between age 14 to 84 were shot. Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). The village was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with explosives.

This gave birth to the slogan subsequently embraced by the SS and the Einsatsgruppen (“deployment squads”) of Nazi Germany, whose job was to roam the country and summarily kill anyone deemed an enemy of the Reich. You can see it proudly displayed by the Queen of Puppicide herself, the woman who, if she had a Native American name, it would translate to “She Whose Face of Botox Cannot Move,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

ONE OF OURS

ALL OF YOURS

Get it? If, even in self-defense, you bring harm to one of their patriotic agents, “all of yours” will pay the price. Note, here, that not only are they “not hiding it anymore” as regards ICE’s similarity to Nazi death squads, they’re outright flaunting it.*

This should be, by any normal American standard, morally repugnant, legally dubious, and politically suicidal. A year ago, when Donald Trump talked about mass deportations, we thought: “Oh, come on. That would mean fanning out into neighborhoods and literally grabbing people from their jobs and their homes. It would be physically impossible and grossly illegal. So just stop.”

How wrong we were. But it just goes to show how you’re never too old to learn something new about the character of your (right-wing) government and the intellectual and moral nature of its electoral—here’s an apt term—base. MAGA patriots—who, when they proclaim “Don’t Tread on Me” also mean “But Do Tread on Them”—can take additional pride in the American Exceptionalism they believe makes them exceptional by noting a new and exciting variation on the classic death squad formula. Because ICE isn’t just in it to deport anyone—illegal or citizen, possessing a visa or no, long-term resident or recent arrival—they can get their hands on to meet Stephen Miller’s grotesque quotas. And they’re not just in it for the brutality (if not death) they can inflict on anyone they choose.*

Oh, they’re in it for all those—and for the money, although when exactly they’ll be paid in full seems open to debate. And, as everyone familiar with Donald Trump’s history knows, Trump never pays contractors in full, and sometimes he pays them not at all. But the thugs and sadists and overweight dickheads currently terrorizing Minneapolis and St. Paul may not mind getting stiffed, because this gig offers them something they might have thought would never come their way:

They get a chance to be creative. They get a chance to produce content.

This fact was driven home with especial force the other day by two writers. The first was David Frum. Now, you know, and we know, that Frum has much to answer for as regards the abominable killing and destruction in George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s horrendous fiasco in Iraq. So yes, he’ll spend some time in Purgatory, if not in one of the pleasanter suburbs of Hell itself. But his anti-Trump writings have been pretty good. And so, in the Atlantic, he points out:

ICE is violence-prone in part because the agency has lowered its training standards and ditched much of its background vetting to meet the president’s grandiose deportation targets. But more fundamentally, ICE is violence-prone because its main purpose has become theatrical. Under present leadership, ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.

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We’ve seen this here and there, but it really hit home with the murder of Renee Good. Part of the revolting video of the killing shows the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross (Torment Be Upon Him) taking the extra time and extra care to be sure to produce his phone as well as his gun, and to film with one hand the annihilation he carried out with the other.*

Why? To pander to MAGA’s lust for what Frum calls a “redistribution of respect.” One of the foundations of the MAGA cult’s adoration of Trump is, apart from their (legitimate, if mis-directed) economic complaints, their sense of cultural victimization. Yes, as dumb as it sounds, it turns out that in the beating heart of today’s American fascism is a bit of shtick from Rodney Dangerfield: They don’t get no respect.

Who does get all the respect? Their enemies: Coastal elites. Immigrants. DEI hires. Jews. Lesbians and gays. Scientists. So-called “experts.” Somalians. Anyone and everyone who isn’t a white Christian putz yearning for what Trump correctly intuited was “retribution.”

Frum starts his piece wondering why JD Vance was so quick, in the face of not one but two damning videos (one by the shooter himself), to blame Good’s death on her, to repeat and expand on every self-evidently absurd lie advance by Noem and ICE about a harmless woman trying to drive out of harm’s way. He concludes—correctly—that Vance is pandering—groveling—to MAGA, which he has every incentive to do if he wants a political future. (Actually, he has more incentive than merely signaling that he’s still on Team Fascist. If he has presidential ambitions he already has two strikes against him: One, everyone knows he’s a condescending prick with zero charisma; two, he’s married to a woman who is both a “foreigner” and a Hindu. Good luck securing the mouth-breather-white-supremacist vote, bunky. And even if you get it by debasing yourself to sub-Trumpian levels of disgracefulness, what will you have won? Twenty percent of the vote? Smart!)

Frum:

ICE agents who use violence may be counting on superiors to back them up, because they feel disrespected too, and by the whole ungrateful country. Which returns us to Vance and his don’t bother me with the facts defense of the ICE shooter.

MAGA is many things, but above all it’s a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind). You see that redistribution at work in the Trump administration’s project to devalue medical experts and empower wellness gurus and vaccine skeptics, and in its dismissal of “deep state” national-security professionals in favor of TV pundits.

Hence the importance, not only of the brutality, but of the distribution of its snuff-film documentation on social media. It’s the administration’s way of “keeping in touch with its audience,” and saying, “See? Sadistic cruelty toward and outright murder of everyone you don’t like. Who loves ya, baby?”*

Does it work? And what can that even mean?

That brings us to Thomas Zimmer, whom we’ve quoted here before. He used to be a professor of history at Georgetown University. But Zimmer (a native German who, annoyingly, writes in better English than most Americans) decided that he and his family would be better off withdrawing from our disturbing and all-too-familiar-to-a-German-historian scene, and moved with wife and kids back to Germany. From there, on Bluesky, he writes that the administration is—

A regime driven by the desire to create social media content for their hardcore fans on the extreme Right. It is an immensely dangerous situation. But I don’t think this cruel spectacle is an effective way to consolidate authoritarian rule.

Trump is surrounded by people who perceive the world almost exclusively through the prism of a hermetically sealed rightwing information environment. That helps explain why they are vastly overestimating how much support they have for their cruel spectacle.

Talk about Splitsville! If, by that, we mean a situation in which the US consists of two more “nations” residing in a single geo-political entity—and we do—then there you have it: One nation includes men perpetrating violence and brutality against citizens as well as non-citizens; breaking into and entering homes, cars, and workplaces without judicial warrants; flooding into blue cities wearing cosplay jungle camo (in snowy winter) and tactical gear; showing up at Home Depot parking lots and elementary schools as though on the front lines at Falluja; gang-tackling teenagers, shooting unarmed civilians, roughing up grandmothers, dragging mothers into vans and leaving their children unattended, all to consign these abducted victims to either domestic concentration camps or torture prisons in foreign countries and, all the while, filming these depredations for the entertainment of perpetually-aggrieved, self-pitying morons.*

The other “nation” consists of everybody else.

It will not have escaped your notice that none of this makes sense. Videos of this vile, thuggish, and certainly illegal behavior are not going to win new converts to Trump’s fascist team. Nobody is going to say, “I was skeptical of Trump up until now. But when I saw his masked goons shoot some kid in the eyeball, I thought, ‘Hang on, he may be onto something.’”

Meanwhile, videos of this terror spree now circulate around the country and the world. Imagine a burglar filming himself and making the footage widely available. To say it’s crazy is an understatement. Even if the perps’ masks make it difficult or impossible to identify them individually, the entire project advertises its own lawlessness and illegitimacy and promotes its own discrediting. Even if MAGA stays faithful, people who otherwise have little interest in politics are seeing these images and are appalled. Even Joe Rogan is against ICE. See Greg Sargent’s new piece in The New Republic for the mounting opposition to our very own gestapo, and on Democrats’ dawning awareness of how it can be exploited.

And what about the Republicans? Oh please.*

*While the Republicans, who could stop it, do nothing.

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All right, this isn’t funny anymore.

When we wrote The Split (AVAILABLE HERE IN A FINE VARIETY OF FORMATS)—in which we divided the current nation into two new ones, the red-state Confederation of Conservative States of America (CCSA) and the familiarly named blue-state United States of America (USA)—we weren’t being prescriptive. We weren’t saying, “This is what should happen.” We were being satirically descriptive, saying, “This, in effect, is what is happening.” We weren’t literally calling for the breakup of the country.

But now that you mention it…

What the President and his party are doing is so dangerous, so destructive, and so loathsome, we’re starting to think splitting the country into two separate nations might be a darn good idea. The list of Donald Trump’s crimes, lies, betrayals, desecrations, and corrupt acts gets longer literally every day. The chaos—like the expansion of the universe itself—not only continues, it accelerates. After spending months murdering people in boats and lying about fentanyl, Trump invades Venezuela, kidnaps its president, and abandons the whole “it’s about the drugs” pretext. He proclaims that the US taxpayer will EPSTEIN! provide the billions of dollars necessary to upgrade Venezuelan oil processing capacity for the benefit of the Venezuelan people (yeah, right) and US corporations. Fresh off of “acing” a cognitive test (his third) that a six-year-old could pass, he gives a speech featuring vast swathes of malarial-fever gibberish that would have any self-respecting psychologist reaching for her prescription pad. (And the Republicans in the audience applaud like trained seals in fancy suits.)

He openly threatens to “acquire” Greenland (not to mention Cuba and Colombia). His EPSTEIN! pet vampire, Stephen Miller, goes on TV and, like a frothing Nazi in a B movie, announces that the US has the right to attack, subvert, or take over any country it wants in the Western hemisphere.

This is absolute madness, but we are at the point where we can’t, with a nervous laugh, wave it off as Trump-being-Trump. Instead, we join others in asking: Why?

Why Venezuela? Big Oil doesn’t particularly EPSTEIN! want that oil, because a) there’s a global oil glut already, b) it’s an especially difficult form of crude to refine, and c) it would mean investing a fortune (which would take years, if not decades, to recoup) in a politically-unstable country which has already, in recent history, nationalized its oil industry once.

Why Greenland? Any action involving a forcible takeover of that island would put the US in conflict with fucking Denmark and threaten the existence of NATO—which, along with the UN, has been EPSTEIN! a bulwark of the past 80 years of relative peace and prosperity. (All NATO nations are pledged to come to the defense—the military defense—of any NATO nation that is militarily attacked by another nation. What are the odds that this is common knowledge in the Trump klown kar?)

Why Miller’s Amerika-uber-alles boast? As though the last sixty years of US foreign policy have not proved, over and over, that such actions always result in a waste of lives, a waste of money, and epic failure.

We can think of four possible reasons. But first, let’s pause for a little joke.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: Because she wanted the Epstein Files to be released in their entirety.

The first and most plausible reason for all this insanity is that Trump himself is insane. As we know you know, we mean that literally. We’ve said as much many times in these “pages” and as recently as two weeks ago. He’s been a malignant narcissist all his life, but now it’s obvious that he’s a crazy malignant narcissist. And that’s bad, especially because the people who could put a 25th-Amendment or impeachy stop to his depravity do nothing. Republicans cheer him on or look the other way. Democrats, who should be taking extraordinary measures (forming a shadow cabinet; publicizing the administration’s crimes every day, everywhere), are instead taking ordinary measures (lamenting the cost of health care and beef; minding their manners in the House and Senate; voting to confirm most of Trump’s nominees to government posts). The mainstream media (with a few exceptions) allow liars who defend him to go unchallenged on TV, or publish headlines carefully crafted EPSTEIN! to give Trump and his collaborators the benefit of every doubt when there is no doubt. The White House press corps, such as it is, listens to Karoline Leavitt lie to their faces, then say thank you.

You have to wonder where they think all this is going. Because Trump is not due to become more sane. Au contraire.

The second reason for the chaos is ideology. Trump is, and always has been, a useful idiot under the control, not only of Vladimir Putin, but of domestic interest groups. One of these consists of plutocratic reactionaries who want to un-do the New Deal; another, of nutball Christian theocrats who want to un-do the Enlightenment. Both have been happy to usher Trump-the-bull into the china shop of life-as-we-know-it, and watch him wreak havoc.

For a third reason we look to good old greed and lust for power. These, in fact, are how Rachel Maddow, as well as the excellent writer Mary Geddry explain the Venezuela invasion. Trump may EPSTEIN! blather on about “we’re going to run the country” but there is obviously no plan for that and no acknowledgment that some Venezuelans may not be crazy about the idea. He talks about how “we’re going to take back the oil and the land that they stole from us,” but even your beloved cat (who doesn’t follow politics) knows that is nonsense.

Geddry:

This was not about fentanyl, or justice, or even about oil in any serious economic sense. It was about power, about setting a precedent that the United States can bomb, kidnap, occupy, and extract at will, laws and norms be damned.

Creeps like Congressman Andy Ogles (we swear we’re not making up that name) and Stephen Miller claim Trump is only interested in exerting his omnipotence in the Western Hemisphere, at least for now. So that’s a mercy. And if something about this seems familiar, it should. It’s the old Spheres of Influence, which is not only a great band name, but was the model of global power distribution that brought us such unforgettable hits as World War I and World War II. Trump wants it because—although he EPSTEIN! couldn’t run casinos without going bankrupt—he wants to be king of the Western Hemisphere. That way he can think of himself as a peer of Putin (who wants it because he wants to be the boss of Europe) and of Xi Jinping (who wants it so China can rule Asia).

Meanwhile you’ve got the startlingly repellent Rick Scott fantasizing, “This is the start of changing Venezuela, then we’re gonna fix Cuba, Nicaragua will get fixed, next year we’ll get a new president in Colombia. Democracy is coming back to this hemisphere.” Uh-huh. Not EPSTEIN! that you asked, but just bear in mind that the Spanish word for “fiasco” is “fiasco.” With this Latin American rampage under the direction of Donald Trump and Pete “Hic!” Hegseth, (alternate mocking nickname: HAGUEseth) the question isn’t, What could go wrong? But, rather, What could go right? Democrats should start, today, asking MAGA moms how keen they’ll be to have their kids in the military get killed in foreign countries that pose no threat to us. They might not like the idea!

Two guys are chatting in an office. One says, “By the way, who was that lady I saw you with last night?” And the other guy says, “That lady was my wife, who was expressing a desire for the immediate release of the complete Epstein Files with only the victims’ names redacted.”

Which brings us to reason number four: All of this—the boat bombings, the Venezuelan incursion, the leering goo-goo eyes directed at Greenland, the blatantly Orwellian re-writing, on the White House website, of the history of the January 6^th Capitol riot, Trump’s nightly Truth Social caps-lock hysterics, etc., etc.—it’s all to Distract From the Epstein Files.

Now, Democrats have their own stupid history with the idea of “distraction.” On the advice of consultants, they’ve spent a year ignoring or minimizing or temporizing over a wide array of Trump’s crimes and offenses, calling them a “distraction” from the only really important issue, which is the “kitchen table” matters of affordability EPSTEIN! and health care. As though one of the country’s two major political parties is somehow incapable of doing both—articulating positions on economic issues and leading a robust campaign against open corruption, illegality, and cruelty. Trump is a monster and the GOP is a party fully committed to fascism and white supremacy. If you think that’s somehow a distraction from something more important, well then you’re just a dummy. Or an agent of Satan.

But back to the Files. That distraction thing—has it been working? Have Trump’s destructiveness, avarice, criminality, and rampant egomania successfully drawn our attention away from that vast trove of evidence and documentation about behavior we would find disgusting and appalling, if only we could remember to think about it but somehow can’t?

Well. If you’ve read this far, we think you’ll agree we’ve pretty decisively proved otherwise. Even in a rundown of his most blatant, vicious acts, we can’t keep from yelling EPSTEIN! time and again.

Yes, it’s obvious that Trump desperately fears the release of the Epstein Files—when he whines that it will “hurt his friends” we note he’s careful not to say, “—and me, too.” He would like nothing better than for the world to forget such evidence exists. (It’s unimaginable—given the growing recklessness of his resistance—that he’s not prominently featured in damning testimonial word and revolting photographic image.)

And thus do we arrive at the latest iteration of Splitsville, our term of art for the existence of two or more distinct “nations” within a single geo-political entity. One nation consists of those of us sick to death of Trump, his lackeys, his Republican enablers, his corrupt Supreme Court, his corporate supporters, and the prestige media who refuse to identify him as the demented tyrant that he is. Another consists of everybody else: those who still support him, those who don’t approve of some of what he does but hate liberals more, and those not paying attention. Of that latter contingent we think we can say without fear of contradiction, Fuck them. The idea of getting the blue states together and taking our Constitution and starting over is more appealing by the hour.

EPSTEIN!

It’s time for some reverse psychology.

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