It has come to our attention that the Trump administration has released a list of people and organizations who have, it claims, subverted American national security and advanced the cause of tyranny and terror and stuff at the behest and under the malign influence of (of all places) Cuba.

Yes, that Cuba—an island 90 miles from the US, about the square mileage of Virginia, with a population (10.9 million) slightly less than that of North Carolina. Where balmy tropical breezes gently become hurricanes, and the per capita income (in 2024) was $9,605.

That’s the enemy. Not Russia, whose (pro-Trump) meddling in the 2016 election is so well-established, its documentation is included in material the White House itself released last week. Not China, which, by hook (state-sponsored research) and by crook (theft of US intellectual property) seeks to overwhelm us with everything from electric vehicles to flimsy chests-of-drawers to cheap AI. Not the open metastasizing of fascism throughout Europe and, with the GOP’s blessing, the United States.

No, the problem is Cuba, which, according to Secretary of State Little “Liddle” Marco Rubio, is “The Capital of 21^st Century Communism.” This is a bit like calling Burning Man “The Capital of 21^st Century American Witchcraft,” but Rubio, who sold his soul to the devil so long ago Satan has lost the receipt, hopes you, or someone, will find it concerning.

He connects these groups and individuals on the aforementioned list with what he calls “Political Left Terrorism.” For a look at the entire list, go here and thank Ken Klippenstein, who notes:

As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

Communism—or, rather, the accusation of being “a Communist”—is making a comeback these days, as is that quaint, old-timey way of flinging that accusation, McCarthyism. Mike Johnson—Speaker of the House, ardent Christian hypocrite, adjourner-of-Congress-when-things-get-dicey—had some frightening, terrifying words to say about the topic at a House Republican Leadership press conference, which he delivered in that familiar boyish, sincere, “gosh, you guys, I’m just telling the simple truth” voice he uses for lying through his teeth. From his website:

We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to Communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall.

Never mind the fact that the president whom Johnson so slavishly serves is treating the Constitution as a doormat diaper. Just dig that second sentence. With that, all is revealed.

They’re exhuming Communism, stuffing it into a suit of armor, gluing a lance in its fist, and tying it up on a horse, so they can warn us that it is about to attack, and that—not the price of gas and groceries, not the useless and idiotic debacle in Iran, not the destruction of our alliances, not the open grifting and self-dealing and bribery and market manipulation and insider stock trades, not the exorbitant costs of education and housing, not the subversion of the renewable energy industry in favor of climate-warming fossil fuels, not the destruction of Federal medical and science research, not the preposterous tariffs, not the obvious mental deterioration of the President (“We had transgender for everybody. Men in women’s sports came ravaging through our cities.”), not the murders and imprisonments of innocents by ICE, not the blatant corruption of the Justice Department, not the decimation of Medicaid, not the obvious cover-up of the Epstein files in an effort to shield a child sex-trafficking ring, not the ongoing jobs recession while the obscenely rich get obscenely richer—that (Communism!) is the problem, and that’s why people should vote for Republicans in November.

Will it work? Is Communism terrifying enough to drive voters to the polls and spook them into pulling the lever/popping the card/filling in the oval for the GOP? Well…

We asked our new best friend, Claude, what percentage of the US electorate came of age after the fall of Communism. Claude “thought” about it for a surprisingly long time, then said:

…somewhere around 58–62% of the US voting-age population/ electorate turned 18 after the fall of Communism — the lower end if you anchor to the Soviet collapse (1991), the higher end if you anchor to the Berlin Wall (1989). [emphasis Claude’s]

IT’S PLFLASTERSPEKTAKEL LINZ! “What?” IT’S PFLASTERSPEKTAKEL LINZ! “What’s that?” A THREE-DAY STREET FESTIVAL IN LINZ, AUSTRIA. “Okay, b—”

Never mind. Just buy THE SPLIT.

It turns out that running against Communism in this day and age may be not all that different from running against the Illuminati or the Masons. Half the voters (and all the young ones) barely know what Communism was. If Mike Johnson wants to point to Ilhan Omar’s headscarf, or Karen Bass’s L.A., or the Ben & Jerry’s section of your grocer’s ice cream aisle, let him.

Desperate? You betcha. But who can blame them? The leader of their party, whom almost without exception they worship or fear, or both, is a demented mobster, a cross between Al Capone and Jabba the Hutt. His cabinet is almost comically destructive and incompetent. The Republicans in the House comprise a zoo of idiots, racists, meatheads and jerks. The Republicans in the Senate comprise a genteel coterie of liars, traitors, cowards, meatheads, and jerks. There is no reason for anyone to vote Republican other than oligarchs, their heirs and assigns, and their yacht crews and caddies. There is good reason for every other eligible voter in the country to either vote Democratic, or stay home and not vote at all.

And Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio know it. (Donald Trump may or may not know it, too, but to try to figure out what Donald Trump “knows” is to wander into an epistemological Mordor from which few can emerge undamaged.)

As will be plain to every eye, the GOP has nothing to run on. All they have to run against is an imaginary enemy consisting of “antifa”—a pretend designation of a made-up boogie-man organization that doesn’t exist. It’s like running against SPECTRE (James Bond), THRUSH (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), or KAOS (Get Smart!). Oh, and against some people who attended a wedding in Cuba. And, of course, Zohran Mamdani. He’s popular in New York, yes, because (it’s unbelievable) he’s a brilliant communicator and he actually seems to be doing things for his constituents, but look! He has a Z right there, in his name. Like Zod, from the first Superman film. “Kneel before Zod!”, right? If that isn’t scary, what is?

And so Republicans, with their trademark combination of bad faith, blatant dishonesty, total lack of shame, and the assumption (well-justified) that their base audience consists of morons, is publishing this list. Our reaction to it has been, quite frankly, one of indignation and outrage. And we’ll tell you why: Not only because it maligns (or attempts to) people who are profoundly better, more worthy, and more admirable than authoritarian lackeys like Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson, but also because we’re not on it.

Readers of a certain age, if they’re still alive, will recall the last time an “enemies list” surfaced in the news. It was during the administration of Richard Nixon. Nixon’s Enemies List—which has its own damn Wikipedia page, if you really want to know—at first consisted of twenty names, most of which, when read today, provoke a sincere “Huh?” Just about the only one everyone will have heard of is Paul Newman. Maybe you’re familiar with Daniel Shorr (a tv journalist) and, maybe maybe, Mary McGrory (a newspaper columnist).

Obviously, then, being on the list did not confer historical immortality. Just ask S. Harrison Dogole. (“Who?” Exactly.) No, the point is, people on Nixon’s list took it as a point of pride, and everyone else acknowledged their achievement, tendering “Way to go!”s and “Attaboy!”s to all and sundry. What an honor, to be considered so important an enemy of the man we were sure, in our naïvety and summer-child simplicity, would surely be the worst president who would ever possibly exist.

Ah, we were young and foolish then. We know better now. The badness of Richard Nixon is to the monstrosity of Donald Trump as a tummy ache is to the Bubonic Plague. Which is all the more reason to want to be acknowledged by the Trump regime as being a nemesis on par with (the excellent) Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, or the National Lawyers Guild.

Because what are we, chopped liver? We bow to no one in our detestation, not only of Trump, but his cabinet, his advisors, his attorneys, his staff, his golf buddies, his children, the people who fawn on him at Mar-a-Lago, and anyone who talks to, looks at, or thinks about him without disgust. We have mocked him, personally and by name, in no fewer than two books (Monsters of the Ivy League, available here, and The Split, available here). We have denounced, made fun of, and deplored him in this very newsletter for 85 weeks.

“But wait,” someone will say. “How can you be considered worthy opponents of Trump if you have no connection—however tenuous and contrived by Rubio—to Cuba? Have you ever taken part in a Cuban-inspired assassination plot? Or been to a wedding in Havana?”

Almost! One of us (EW) speaks Spanish—or, at least, used to, although he’s gotten pretty “rusty” (“oxidado”) over the years. But then add this: It was no more than three nights ago that he prepared a can of black beans in the Cuban style (onions, green pepper, garlic, cumin, oregano, apple cider vinegar, sherry). He combined them with white rice in a side-dish the Cubans themselves call Moros y Cristianos. Black Africans and White Christians in one dish! You can’t get more Communist, or at least bogus/bullshit “Communist,” than that.

So, maybe next time. Maybe Rubio will publish a revised enemies list, consisting of its current roster of names plus “the guys who wrote The Split and now write Splitsville.” Until then, our congratulations go out to all the people and organizations on the current list, with whom we join, if not in a vile, anti-American document issued by a poisoned State Department, then in our shared little corner of Splitsville.

That, you may know, is our term for a geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In this version of Splitsville, the two of us dwell with the Enemies Listees, as well as with everyone else who opposes the Trump regime (and who, along with us, we nominate for that list). On the other side of the Splitsville tracks reside Marco Rubio, Mike Johnson, and the rest of those pathetic, sick little fucks, along with the millions of vile specimens and benighted numpties who love, like, or tolerate Trump.

Incidentally, neither of us has ever met a genuine American Communist, and all this talk about them has stimulated our curiosity. If you’ve ever met one, please tell us how it went. Was it scary? Smelly? Did you engage in polemical debate? Did he (or she!) wield a hammer and a sickle? Did they seize your means of production? Afterward, did you find yourself fantasizing about abolishing private property, nationalizing all corporations so you could replace the free market with a state-owned and centrally-planned economy, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and massacring millions of peasants?

Because that’s what they all want, whether they exist or not. Just ask Mike Johnson.

READ THE SPLIT. IT’S FUN, IT’S FUNNY, AND IT’S BETTER THAN A POKE IN THE EYE WITH A SHARP STICK. DON’T BELIEVE US? TRY IT.

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It’s Political Death Week! First, rank hypocrite and repulsive warmonger/lapdog Lindsey Graham. Next (if not already), rank hypocrite and party-before-country traitor Mitch McConnell. Congratulations to all who celebrate! But, as we know, these things come in threes. Who’s next?

Oh please. Who else? With a few more burgers and a little bit of luck it will be Donald Trump.

Not that there is any luck. God knows that Trump’s continued existence is dispositive proof, not only that there is no luck, but that there is no God. Nonetheless, all things come to those who wait. One day Donald Trump will die. Seriously. Yes, really. He will die.

We know: “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” That’s not a threat; it’s a promise. Not only will he die, but—get this—once he dies, he will be dead. Forever! “Then let the throng our joy advance/With laughing song and merry dance” (Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado). He will not die and then somehow come back to life. He will not self-reincarnate. He will be, and remain, dead. (Insert John Cleese’s lines from the Dead Parrot sketch here.)

Yes, it is a pleasant thought. And it leads to ruminations on what will be his legacy. Stop laughing. He will have one. It just won’t be the one he wants or imagines.

To approach that topic, we first posit this: Everything Trump does involves a dialectic-like, alternating current clash of conflicting elements. His ambition comes into conflict with his stupidity; his grandiosity is undercut by his pathological, and therefore easily-detected, lying. His need for dominance locks horns with his laziness. His vanity battles with his insecurity. His egotism, his desire to be thought great, slugs it out with his pettiness and obsession with revenge. His narcissism ends up in a fistfight with the fact that he’s losing his fucking marbles.

No wonder, then, he fails at literally everything. (His one indubitable success, The Apprentice, came not because of him, but in spite of him. The public only bought his genius-tycoon schtick after massive amounts of editing, packaging, tidying up, and fixing-in-post.)

No, wait. There has been one other thing at which he’s been successful: what economists call “capital accumulation,” but which we call theft, soliciting bribes, grifting, cheating the credulous, manipulating the stock market, harvesting kickbacks, acquiring “gifts.” And that is headed for the most Trumpian failure of them all: At the climax of the amassing of this large fortune, he will drop dead and get to spend none of it, enjoy none of it.

It sure doesn’t look like he’s spending it now. What is his routine? Rant and rave on Truth Social all night, waddle in to “work” at 11:00, fart up the room (and occasionally take a dump in his diaper) while extorting patently phony praise from flunkies and cynics, and play golf. All this, while worrying: about whether (or when) the Epstein Files will, finally, display to the public the monster he knows he is; what might (or will) happen when the Dems re-take at least the House next January; and how to lie his way out of addressing Iran, the economy, the cost of living, his tanking poll numbers, the depredations of ICE, and all the other scandals, crimes, and failures for which he is responsible.

Yes, it’s been a miserable life of greed, destruction, and cruelty. But all bad things must come to an end. And we’re already getting cranky and resentful about the dignified funeral he will be accorded. It would be great if, when his body lies in state in the Capitol rotunda, the crowd that arrives to pay its respects is as massive and adoring as the one that attended the recent Great American State Fail (sic). But he doesn’t deserve even that.

We think his funeral should resemble the ones held for mob bosses when they (for whatever reason) die, because the kind of autocrat he most resembles is not Putin or Xi or Kim Jong-Un or even Pinochet or Franco but a Mafia don. And we’re not the only ones who think so; the analogy has been around for years. For a recent iteration of it, getta loada Patrick Cockburn writing in The i Paper:

On the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran…US missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran, killing at least 168 children as they sat at their desks along with 14 teachers—according to the Iranian media—in what may be the worst single atrocity in US military history since the Vietnam War.

Cockburn goes on to condemn the “moral depravity of America during Donald Trump’s second presidency.” He notes that “Trump boasts of assassinating the 86-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but makes no mention of the killing by his side of his daughter, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter whose name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani.” He mentions the 196 extrajudicial killings of people in boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and ends with:

This goes to the moral heart of the matter. The thought processes and behavior of the Trump administration in these cases resemble those of the gangster underworld, pitiless in targeting the weak and defenseless, respectful only of those who respond to violence with greater violence. If anything, the American Mafia arguably operates with greater moderation than Trump has here, making a distinction between civilians and its criminal rivals.

So, yeah: Trump as mob boss—who, when he kicks, deserves not a solemn cortege through D.C., a lying-in-state, and a series of encomia (however pro-forma, insincere, and universally mocked), but a real Don’s sendoff: in a cramped, crowded cemetery on Staten Island or in Queens, attended by weeping relatives in black (assuming any show up, and any actually weep), overseen by squinty-eyed capo thugs and dumb-as-dirt soldiers, decorated with vulgar floral displays, and all under the open and watchful gaze of FBI agents wielding parabolic audio antennas to catch the mobster chitchat. Good riddance? No. Great, excellent, fantastic riddance, maybe the best riddance of all time.

IT IS—AS YOU KNOW—WORLD SNAKE DAY, NATIONAL CHERRY DAY, AND FRESH SPINACH DAY. DO THE MATH. WHEN YOU SERVE THAT SIRLOIN SNAKE WITH NATIONAL CHERRIES, ONLY USE FRESH SPINACH. THEN—

--buy and read and love THE SPLIT.

And then, finally: What will be his legacy?

He will leave behind, like the criminal boss he is, no clear successor. Many will vie to inherit his power, and at least some of them can credibly present themselves as being just as greedy, dishonest, shameless, and sadistic as the old man himself. But no one (at least of whom we are aware) has his—what to call it?—Star power? Charisma? Twisted appeal to desperate believers? Instead, there will be squabbling family members, lawsuits, appalling revelations, grand jury indictments, trials, convictions, and sentencings. But he will leave behind nothing of value. The idea of a Trump Library is an oxymoron. And we’ve already seen what you get when the Trump family starts a charity (i.e., fraudulence, theft, court-imposed fines, and widespread ridicule).

Meanwhile, here’s the funny part:

The result of all of the self-mythologizing, the preening, the “Sir story” fictions, the gold decorations, the tinpot dictator currency-with-his-picture-on-it, the ludicrous architectural fantasizing, the Cabinet meeting praise-a-thons, the flattering of his fellow-tyrants…his legacy will be the opposite of everything he intends. He will only be missed and lamented by the stupid and the deluded—the suckers and chumps he was happy to exploit but would not have let get within miles of Mar-a-Lago.

His name will go down in history but in the worst way possible. It will become a term of opprobrium and scorn, like “Benedict Arnold” and “Hitler” and “Quisling.” The rich people whose ranks he wanted to join and whose admiration he courted will trade anecdotes about his ineptitude and constant, constant failure. (Fun Fact: A billionaire in New York, when asked to describe Trump when he was running in 2016, called him “a clown living on credit.”) The crappiest sycophants in his Cabinet will crack jokes at his expense—at least up until they’re indicted or sued. People will watch avidly for stories of his children’s failures. The day of his death will be celebrated for years to come.

And that’s what we can foresee now. Imagine how much worse it will get for his reputation and his place in history when the truth comes out—when the rest of the Epstein files are either released or leaked; when the jackals and hyenas who obey him today get their tell-all book deals; when decent government professionals are allowed to put on HAZMAT suits, go back into the agencies and departments the administration has defiled and polluted, and report on what they find.

Because it’s always worse than it looks. When Trump goes, what will emerge about Stephen Miller and Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and Scott Bessant and Sean Duffy and Linda McMahon and Doug Burgum and Howard Lutnick, about their corruption, racism, mismanagement, and stupidity, will curl the nation’s hair. All that, along with the shameful decline and moral bankruptcy of the entire Republican Party, will be part of Trump’s legacy as well.

They will deserve, and we will need, a campaign of legal accountability—at best, a Nuremberg-like tribunal to indict, try, and convict; at worst, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to at least create a public record of the regime’s staggering lawlessness and corruption. No forgiveness without confession. Although we rather fancy a solution cribbed from the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds: let’s (without anesthesia) brand a T on the forehead of every one of these liars, criminals, and killers.

But wait, there’s more. We’ll also need a lot of physical (not to mention emotional) remediation. The White House will have to be fumigated. The Reflecting Pool will have to be re-re-refurbished. Any other material manifestations of Trump’s mashup of dictator-décor and dumb-yutz bad taste that do remain—the gold tat in the Oval Office, the paved-over Rose Garden, the imbecilic “Walk of Fame,” the idiotic/sinister ballroom, the gilt paint on those horses, any column-vandalism he perpetrates, etc.—will, we desperately hope, be removed, undone, imploded, and/or reversed by the first Democratic administration that replaces him.

And not just in D.C. The concentration camp detainment centers must be emptied, their occupants paid compensation out of Trump’s stolen billions, and the buildings be demolished or, preferably, re-purposed as recycling centers or DEI-study institutions or windmill manufactories. The Qatari jet should be confiscated and either auctioned off for charity or dismantled for parts. ICE must be abolished and its murderers arrested and tried.

You read all this, and it’s tempting to think that the less that remains in the public sphere concerning Trump, the better. Take his name off everything, take his mark off everything, take his self-parodying giant headshots down off of government buildings, and let’s say no more about it. We think that would be a mistake. For Americans to try to just forget Trump would be like Germans trying to forget Hitler. Sure, there will be the books, measurable by the ton. (We’re going to need a writer combining the talents of Robert Caro, Norman Mailer, Mark Twain, Martin Amis, Jonathan Swift, Terry Southern, and Hunter S. Thompson to produce the single definitive biography of this monster, but it won’t be enough.)

We’ll need some kind of official, public symbol that reminds us (and future generations) what an absolutely despicable disaster Donald J. Trump was.

The problem is that most such objects take the form of statues or memorials. The former valorize their subjects and the latter respect the victims of the wars they commemorate. Is it possible to create a public symbol dealing with a bad thing—or, in this case, the worst American who ever lived? There sure is! And there’s a prime example of it in the nation’s capital.

We propose the establishment of the United States Donald J. Trump Fascist Regime Memorial Museum (USDJTFRMM), to be created and managed along the lines of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Take it away, Wikipedia:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States’ official memorial and museum dedicated to the history and legacy of the Holocaust. Opened in Washington, D.C. in 1993, the museum explores the Holocaust through permanent and traveling exhibitions, educational programs, survivor testimonies and archival collections. The USHMM was created with the stated purpose of helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

Has the Trump administration been as bad as the Holocaust? No, although it depends on whom you ask. (Maybe talk to Renee Good’s kids. Or the people tracking the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans after the ending of USAID. Or the families of ICE murder victims.) But that’s not the point. When the fat man croaks, after the national (read: global) celebration, and it all comes out, we’re going to need a museum’s-worth of programs and resources to adequately explain what happened and why, so that it never happens again.

“Yes, sounds good, but guys—who’s going to pay for it?”

Trump’s got billions. And he’ll be dead, forever. Take it from him and his skeevy heirs and assigns. Meanwhile, we look forward to this new and exciting version of Splitsville (our term for when a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”). With Trump’s demise, one such “nation” will be MAGA: bereft, inconsolable, and willfully deaf and blind to the damning information that will emerge about their hero’s criminality. Another will consist of Republicans, either scrambling for opportunity or running for cover.

The rest will be us, in the tens of millions: exultant, relieved, and free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we will be free at last.

WANT TO SEE THE U.S. AS IT WOULD BE AFTER EIGHT MORE YEARS OF TRUMP? NO, OF COURSE NOT. BUT A FICTIONAL VERSION OF IT? OK!

That's the whole point of THE SPLIT.

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Granted: Trump’s second administration has been the most corrupt in history, characterized by greed, destruction, cruelty, hypocrisy, mendacity, treason, murder, war crimes, racism, sexism, incompetence, and failure. But come on--does that mean it’s been all bad? Of course not! Because we’ve learned from this experience, okay? And that, notwithstanding the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health of ourselves, all Americans, and people around the world (to which Donald Trump and the Republican Party are a distinct danger), is what’s important.

And so, as the nation celebrates its glorious 250^th anniversary and mourns the utterly rotten administration that governs it, we thought it would be appropriate to review some of those hard-won lessons. Here, in no particular order, they come:

1. Conservatism has always been a fraud. No, seriously. Think about it. Since World War II, conservatism has supposedly stood for two things: anti-communism and minimal government interference with “freedom.” As to the former: mission accomplished, although a) conservatives were never so much anti-communist as they were pro-capitalist, and did not give a tinker’s fuck about other countries’ “freedom” when, like Chile or Cuba, they installed socialist governments; and b) Trump (who couldn’t define the difference between socialism and communism with a gun to his head) is desperately trying to revive anti-communism in a bid to keep two-thirds of the country from hating his guts. (Fun Fact: It’s not working.)

As to the latter: um, no. Conservatives are more than happy to use government to prevent a woman from having an abortion, to foist on one and all their particular stupid brand of Christianity, to endanger the entire populace by blocking decent gun laws, to protect the right of corporations to pollute the air and water and to ignore climate change, to promote a policy of “freedom” that only really applies to whites, to suppress votes, and to advance racist agendas.

In fact, conservatism has always only been truly about one thing: maximizing the wealth of white men—who, in sharp contrast to the language of the Declaration of Independence, they believe to be the naturally superior stratum of humanity and who should rule over all others. For most of our history those men have been Protestant, but lately some Jews and Catholics have been allowed in that club. But you can’t win political power by announcing you stand proudly for racism and greed. (Even MAGA idiots, who might approve of Trump’s greed, thought he was going to do something for them.) Hence, conservative “values,” which exist to be proclaimed and then ignored. A conservative will always be a hypocrite the way a fish swimming in the mighty Pacific will always be wet.

2. The Republican Party hates Americans. Really? “Hates”? Yes. How else explain their unswerving fealty to the disgusting, destructive, deteriorating Trump—a man who has literally done nothing good for anyone else in the US (or on Earth) except himself, his family, and—grudgingly, resentfully--his cronies. And the GOP has stood foursquare behind him, and does so to this very day. Just as there is love and there is true love, there is hate, and there is what the Republican Party feels toward America: true hate. Note, here, that the people the GOP hates includes its own voters. Which is why we say:

3. The two-party system as we’ve known it is over. “Sane” and “Insane” are not political parties. Trump owns the GOP; Trump’s policies are toxic to the interests of the rank and file of the party. Ergo, whoever still remains in the party—i.e., the MAGA faithful, who continue to worship Trump as he robs them blind—are either insane or so deeply stupid they might as well be insane. What the party will do when Trump is gone is beyond human imagining. We can’t wait to watch what happens! Meanwhile—

4. When they go low, we go—something. Home? Shopping? Actually, the premise of this is incorrect. They are low, they don’t have any need to “go” anywhere. So the problem to be solved is: How do we deal, on what we must assume to be a permanent basis, with a class of people who choose to wallow in the most depraved types of thinking—and behavior—that humanity has ever devised? (When we solve this it will truly be a Lesson Learned.)

5. The Supreme Court has rotted from the inside out. Yeah, yeah, you already knew that. You (and we) figured that out in 2000 after Bush v. Gore, and then in 2010, when the ruling in Citizens United v. FEC held that “corporations are people.” The first ruling was obviously partisan bullshit and the second was, and is, an absolute catastrophe for a democratic republic in which people are people. But we sort of managed to live with them—until this past year.

Now the cat, to the extent that it was ever really in the bag, is out: When SCOTUS convenes, it is (with the exception of the three liberals) like the gathering of the Five Families in Godfather 1, with Amy Coney Barrett occasionally demurring about the wisdom of getting involved with the heroin trade. Thomas is a waddling bobble-head doll of corruption, Alito demonstrates daily (as did Scalia before him) that no one is more smug than a pious Catholic with a lifelong sinecure, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh barely pretend to actually care about the law, and Roberts brings comedy gold by playacting that he is a paragon of judicial rectitude fervently toiling to insure his “legacy” will be that of a paragon of judicial rectitude.

This has taught us another valuable lesson, namely—

6. The Supreme Court’s very structure must be changed. Lifelong tenure, which was supposed to shield justices from political influence or temptation, has proved to accomplish just the opposite. And nine justices—an arbitrary number—is far too few. The law of the land should not depend on the health or illness of a single person. (We like The Nation’s Elie Mystal’s idea: Raise the number to 21 or more; have them—like a Court of Appeals--hear normal cases in groups of three, and have hearings en banc for important matters.)

IT’S NATIONAL SUGAR COOKIE DAY. DON’T CELEBRATE IT. IT’S TIME TO TAKE THE COUNTRY BACK FROM BIG SUGAR COOKIE. INSTEAD—

Celebrate THE SPLIT!

7. The Electoral College is a disgrace. Yes, “duh.” It is absurd that the vote of an idiot in Wyoming is ten jillion times more powerful than the vote of an idiot in California. We need a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the College (good luck with that) or, at worst, that popular vote compact deal as explained by Wikipedia thus:

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, regardless of which ticket won more votes in their individual state/district. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.

Thus far, 18 states and D.C. have signed on. It’s a start. And fuck those states that don’t like it.

8. Billionaires are a danger to the US and to humanity. Why? Because they have too much money, which means they have too much power. It’s not that they can buy any election they want. (They can’t.) It’s that they can buy many, many elected officials at the state and national level, influencing what laws do and don’t get passed, and making things great for themselves often at the expense of everyone else. Among many other things, they buy and pay for lax oversight. This leads to predictable disasters like financial bubbles, recessions, mass food poisonings, bridges and buildings collapsing. It also leads to a failure to address climate change (hence “danger to humanity”). Which makes the next lesson—

9. Get money out of politics. Yes, it’s a lovely thought. But it’s become a cliché that “goes in one ear and out the other.” Our current system is innately corrupt (Cf. Citizens United and billionaires, above). Politicians require vast amounts of money to stay afloat, which requires them to make deals with the ultra-rich, which increases the wealth of the ultra-rich, which increases their ability to buy politicians, etc. etc.

How about we start using new phrases to grab people’s attention. “Get corruption out of politics!” “Rich people own politicians!” “Big campaign contributions have bought your country!” “Shorter campaigns + no corporate money = less corruption!” “The 1st Amendment doesn’t mean politicians are for sale!” Think of others. Say them out loud and put them on posters when you march.

10. The mainstream media—contra to Republican propaganda—has a conservative bias. Every day, in every public statement, Trump either lies or utters nonsense. (Yesterday he mentioned, with the condescending air of someone displaying his esoteric knowledge, “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”) His late-night social media rants are lurid, racist, and unhinged. NATO allies treat him like a deranged uncle who must be indulged for the sake of the Thanksgiving gathering. But nowhere do the major newspapers or television news networks acknowledge that the man is crazier than two waltzing mice. (H/t Raymond Chandler). The sanewashing continues.

The Failing New York Times and the Washington Post do great investigative stories (even if their reporters often sit on the results for a year, so as to reserve them for books). But the editorial stances of those papers is contemptibly feeble when confronted by a president who has been a pathologically-lying thug and bully all his life, and is now a demented pathologically-lying thug and bully. So support alternative news sources.

We could keep going—and we intend to, sooner or later—but that’s enough for now. No doubt you have your own lessons learned, your own realizations of how simple-minded and naïve you used to be about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and all of that a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it shit, your own slack-jawed moments of disbelief at how repulsive, corrupt, incompetent, murderous, soulless, criminal, and stupid these people are and how they often get away with it, your own fucking just…fucking inability to just…fucking…

But that’s enough for now. Except for the Splitsville (our term for a single geo-political entity in which dwell two or more distinct “nations”) angle. On one side are those who can learn, and are learning, these and many other lessons; learning and yearning and burning to put those lessons into action. On the other side are those who think the only lesson to be learned from our present circumstances is that Trump is God. And then there’s the third side that’s all, like, “Whadaya talkin’ about?”

BUY—AND READ—THE SPLIT. IF NOT YOU, WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN? IF NOT HERE, WHERE? IF NOT BECAUSE, WHY? IF NOT THIS, WHICH? IF N

Do so here.

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You think Trump is bad?

If so…you’re right! He is! He’s not only bad, he’s the worst President ever—although we don’t like that use of the word “ever,” because it sounds childish. (“This is the yummiest ice cream cone ever!”) We prefer the more adult, intellectual, “He’s the worst fucking President in history.” Which he is.

Of course, we’re not historians. (Then again, neither are you, so shut up.) Still, to prove he’s the worst President in history ever, we’ve compiled a rundown of the major scandals that have plagued and besmirched the office of POTUS since the very beginning of the nation of the country.

You’ll see, by the time you get through the list—physically exhausted, emotionally spent, morally devastated--that not only is Donald Trump’s administration the worst that there ever was, it is worse than all the other non-Trump administrations put together. That’s a bold claim, but we back it up with a graph, which means it’s science.

But first, we admit it: We used artificial intelligence—Claude, to be precise—to help us dig up 250 years of presidential scandals. Here’s one of the good—great!—things about AI: it saved us countless hours of research (i.e. Googling). It came up with an enormous list of presidential scandals in less than a minute. In fact, the list was too enormous to be usable: who wants to read a dozen dense pages of presidential scandals? Not us! And, we think, not you. So we re-queried Claude, asking him, her, or it to give us only the five worst scandals of each president. Much better.

Here’s what Claude him-, her-, or itself had to say about the assignment: “I’ve been selective—only including scandals that were historically significant, widely recognized, and genuinely damaging to the president’s reputation…. A handful of presidents have no entry—William Henry Harrison (died after one month), Zachary Taylor (died after 16 months), and James Garfield (died after 6 months) simply didn’t serve long enough to accumulate significant scandals. A few others, like Monroe and Arthur, had relatively clean administrations by historical standards.

“The most scandal-plagued presidencies by this accounting are Grant (pervasive cabinet-level corruption), Nixon (criminal in multiple dimensions), Harding (his associates were openly criminal), and Trump (two impeachments plus criminal conviction). Clinton, Reagan, and George W. Bush also rank high….”

On top of Claude’s work, we’ve done our own editing, both for brevity and…what’s the word?…oh, yeah: comedy.

1. George Washington. Two (mediocre, Frenchy) scandals.

The Jay Treaty: It was secretly negotiated with Britain, and Francophiles saw as betraying the French alliance. Since one of us (SR) is a Francophile, we now (upon learning of this abomination) deplore the so-called father of the country for his treachery.

The Citizen Genêt Affair: French envoy Edmond “Citoyen” Genêt undermined US neutrality by recruiting American privateers (aka pirates) to attack the Brit navy. Washington demanded Genêt’s recall and was sternly—and appropriately, we’re sure—reprimanded by pro-French Americans as caving to Britain.

2. John Adams. Two (mediocre) scandals.

The XYZ Affair: French agents (mysteriously labeled X, Y, and Z) demanded bribes. Adams disclosed the scandal but, proving that it’s always been thus, he was attacked by his critics nonetheless. This doesn’t seem like much of a scandal, but what the hell.

The Alien and Sedition Acts: Adams criminalized criticism of the government, jailing journalists and political opponents. This sounds all too familiar to us. Off with his head!

3. Thomas Jefferson. Three (so-so) scandals.

Sally Hemings: Jefferson had children with the enslaved Sally Hemings. This—owning slaves, making babies with a slave—was a bad look for the “all men are created equal” guy.

Burr conspiracy: Jefferson’s former Vice President (and Hamilton-killer) Aaron Burr was accused of plotting to seize territory in the west. Jefferson advocated that Burr be tried for treason; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court acquitted him; Jefferson was embarrassed.

Embargo Act: To avoid war with Britain, Jefferson placed an embargo on foreign trade. (Please don’t ask us to explain.) This came close to crippling the American economy—although it was a boon for professional smugglers—and was viewed as an authoritarian, king-type overreach in a “no kings” country.

4. James Madison. One (kinda creepy) scandal.

The Burning of Washington: The Brits burned down the White House and the Capitol during the War of 1812. Madison fled, which naturally caused people to mock him as a coward and criticize his warmaking capability.

5. James Monroe. One (confusing) scandal.

“Corrupt bargain accusations”: This had something to do with Monroe’s inability or refusal to oversee his succession after, or maybe during, the election of 1824. We’d dispute its inclusion as a scandal but we’re too ignorant to do even that.

6. John Quincy Adams. One (confusing, not even original) scandal.

“Corrupt bargain,” yet again: Although Andrew Jackson won the vote in 1824, the House proclaimed Adams president. Then Adams turned around and appointed as Secretary of State the congressman who had swung votes his way, Henry Clay. This, unsurprisingly, was seen as a fine example of quid pro quo.

7. Andrew Jackson. Two (pretty bad) scandals.

The Indian Removal Act aka Trail of Tears: Jackson, as asshole, forced thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. All of them suffered; many died. We now call this “ethnic cleansing.”

Institutionalization of the spoils system: Jackson replaced qualified government officials with ass-kissing, sycophantic party loyalists, thus imposing the blight of corrupt political patronage on our naive young nation. We’re glad that’ll never happen again.

8. Martin Van Buren. One (obnoxious) scandal.

The Panic of 1837: A major economic depression followed on the heels of his election. He didn’t much like the idea of using the government to alleviate the suffering of the nation’s citizens, and for this he was widely regarded as a fucking dick.

9. William Henry Harrison. Zero (0) scandals.

10. John Tyler. One (sort of fun) scandal.

Expulsion from the Whig Party: Here’s a president who vetoed almost all of the legislation proposed by his own (Whig) party. Cool! Then his entire cabinet resigned. Even cooler! Then the Whigs kicked him out of the party. Coolest! This hasn’t happened to any other president. Yet.

IT’S WORLD UFO DAY AND NATIONAL LINT AWARENESS DAY. SO IF YOU ENCOUNTER AN ALIEN, MAKE IT AWARE OF LINT. AND THEN—

buy it a copy of THE SPLIT.

11. James K. Polk. One (familiar sounding) scandal.

“The Manufactured Pretext”: Polk thought it would be a good idea to have a war with Mexico. Here’s how he got one: He provoked an attack by sending troops into disputed territory just north of the Rio Grande (“Big River”). As expected, the Mexicans attacked. Voila: the Mexican–American War. “Honest” Abe Lincoln, a funny-looking congressman from Illinois, accused Polk of lying to start his war of choice. Many believed he was right.

12. Zachary Taylor. Zero (0) scandals.

13. Millard Fillmore. One (racist) scandal.

The Fugitive Slave Act: This act, signed by Fillmore, ordered northern states to pursue, catch, and return to their southern hellholes anyone who had escaped slavery. This really pissed off right-thinking people up north and was one more, uh, nail in the coffin of the lead-up to the Civil War.

14. Franklin Pierce. One (racist) scandal.

The Kansas–Nebraska Act: Pierce, possibly in the middle of a lifelong alcoholic stupor (and, until recently, considered the worst president of all time), signed another racist act, this one precipitating a two-year guerrilla war (known as “Bleeding Kansas”) between pro- and anti-slavery factions.

15. James Buchanan. Two (racist) scandals.

Dred Scott interference: While the justices of the Supreme Court were deciding Dred Scott, Buchanan (improperly) lobbied them to make it as harsh as possible. The decision--which among other awful things denies citizenship to enslaved people as well as former enslaved people and their heirs, and is considered one of the worst ever made by our Robed Untouchables—was overruled, ridiculed, and shat upon after the Civil War.

Pathetic inaction as the Union collapsed: The southern states had started seceding. Buchanan stated that secession was illegal, but that’s as far as he went, saying he had no power to stop it. Enable the Civil War much, James?

16. Abraham Lincoln. One (measly) scandal.

Suspension of habeas corpus: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus without congressional approval in order to keep a bunch of Confederate traitors from helping to overthrow the government of the United States of America, God bless him. The mean Supreme Court ruled aspects of this unconstitutional.

17. Andrew Johnson. Two (one of which was racist) scandals.

Impeachment: He was the first president to be impeached, for violating the Tenure of Office Act by firing the Secretary of War. He was acquitted by one Senate vote.

Sabotage of Reconstruction: He undermined Reconstruction by pardoning Confederate leaders, vetoing civil rights legislation, and smiling benignly when Southern states enacted Black Codes that essentially restricted freedmen to living like slaves again.

18. Ulysses S. Grant. Four ($$$$$$) scandals.

The Crédit Mobilier scandal: Officials close to Grant received discounted shares in a corrupt railroad construction company that defrauded the government of millions.

The Whiskey Ring: A sprawling conspiracy involving Treasury officials, distillers, and Grant’s personal secretary defrauded the government of millions in tax revenue.

Black Friday gold panic: Financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk, with help from officials close to Grant, attempted to corner the gold market. The ensuing panic ruined thousands of investors.

Indian Ring corruption: Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, sold trading post contracts at Native American reservations. He was impeached after resigning to avoid prosecution.

19. Rutherford B. Hayes. One (racist) scandal.

Stolen election of 1876: After Hayes lost the popular vote, the disputed electoral count was resolved by a corrupt, racist commission, which made this deal: in exchange for the presidency, Hayes would end Reconstruction and abandon any federal efforts to protect Black Americans from the predations of the ex-Confederate crackers who still ran the south.

20. James A. Garfield. Zero (0) scandals.

21. Chester A. Arthur. One (pre-presidential) scandal.

Spoils system past: Before becoming president, Arthur had been removed as Collector of the Port of New York for running one of the most patronage-corrupt offices in the country under the spoils system.

22. Grover Cleveland. Two (meh) scandals.

Illegitimate child scandal: Cleveland admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock, paying for the child’s care. His opponents chanted “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” during the 1884 campaign. Today, it’s apparently no big deal for a presidential candidate—or, indeed, a president—to have had an affair with his second wife while still married to his first wife; to have had an affair with his third wife while still married to his second wife; to have fathered children with all of them; to have had a liaison with a porn actress while married to one or the other of his wives (who can keep track?); to be adjudicated guilty of sexual assault, and so on and so forth. Nope. No big deal.

Pullman strike intervention: Cleveland got a court injunction to break the strike and used federal troops to break some heads. This did not endear him to the labor movement.

23. Benjamin Harrison. One ($$$$$$) scandal.

“Billion Dollar Congress”: Look no further than Harrison’s administration for runaway spending, big-time patronage, and a Congress that appropriated a billion bucks in peacetime (a first!), a big, corrupt chunk of which went to pension fraud.

24. Grover Cleveland. Zero (0) scandals.

25. William McKinley. One (grandiose and racist) scandal.

The Philippines adventure: McKinley “annexed” the Philippines and fought a brutal war against Filipino independence fighters, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

26. Theodore Roosevelt. One (racist) scandal.

The Brownsville Affair: After a shooting in Brownsville, Texas, Roosevelt had the army issue dishonorable discharges of all 167 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry without trial or evidence, stripping them of pensions. Congress slapped his wrist.

27. William Howard Taft. One (nasty little) scandal.

The Ballinger–Pinchot Affair: Richard Ballinger, Taft’s Secretary of the Interior, corruptly opened public lands to private mining interests. Taft naturally fired the whistleblower, forester Gifford Pinchot.

28. Woodrow Wilson. Two (mostly racist) scandals.

Resegregation of the federal government: Wilson, a Southern Democrat racist piece of shit, resegregated federal offices, cafeterias, and restrooms, reversing decades of post-Civil War integration, causing serious harm to Black federal employees, who thought they were finally doing well in these here United States.

The Palmer raids: Prominent member of the Wilson administration Attorney General Mitchell Palmer conducted mass warrantless (natch) arrests and deportations of thousands of immigrants and so-called radicals in what was considered (until today) the worst assault on civil liberties in US history.

29. Warren G. Harding. Three (big) scandals.

Teapot Dome: In a familiar—it’s practically a cliché—type of scandal, Interior Secretary Albert Fall secretly and illegally leased federal oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming to private companies in exchange for—wait for it!—bribes! For his unfailing devotion to corruption, Fall became the first Cabinet member ever to be imprisoned for crimes committed on the job.

Veterans Bureau fraud: Veterans Bureau chief Charles Forbes embezzled millions (when a million dollars was a lot of money) meant for WWI veterans’ hospitals and medical care. Harding apparently knew about it and did nothing to stop it.

“The Little Green House on K Street”: This was the headquarters of Harding cronies who, for a couple of years in the early 1920s, sold government jobs and pardons as well as running a high-end protection racket. These things are illegal. Seriously corrupt. A number of highly esteemed people you’ve never heard of were investigated, caught, and punished (or at least given enthusiastic slaps on their respective wrists).

30. Calvin Coolidge. One (famous) scandal.

Teapot Dome aftermath: Coolidge inherited and spent a lot of energy trying to bury the Teapot Dome investigation. Many corrupt officials of the previous—Harding—administration were grateful.

31. Herbert Hoover. One (stupid, arrogant) scandal.

Dissing of veterans: Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to violently—with bayonets and tear gas—chase World War I veterans out of Washington, DC. The veterans were there to protest the government’s refusal to pay them the bonuses they’d been promised.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Three (one of which was a biggie) scandals.

Japanese American internment: FDR forcibly relocated 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment (i.e., concentration) camps without due process. Many were forced to sell or lease their businesses and farms below market value. Sometimes their property was just seized by what today we refer to as “scumbags.”

Court-packing plan: After the Supreme Court struck down New Deal legislation, FDR attempted to add several additional justices to change the balance of power at the court. Many critics claimed this highly reasonable proposal was nothing more than a blatant power grab. We don’t consider it a scandal, but it’s on this list because we’re pathologically open-minded.

Extra presidential terms: Limiting presidents to two terms was a tradition or norm, not a law. His enemies saw his decision to run for a third, then a fourth term as an outrageous power grab. Guess who didn’t mind: the voters of America. Nonetheless, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, limiting presidents to two terms, passed in 1947 (after our only four-term president had died).

33. Harry S. Truman. Two (piddly) scandals.

The five-percenters scandal: Several close Truman associates were exposed for peddling influence in exchange for such treasures as fur coats and deep freezers.

The IRS scandal: A sweeping investigation in 1950 uncovered widespread corruption in the IRS. Over 160 IRS employees were fired and several faced the wrath of the law.

IT’S ALSO NATIONAL ANISETTE DAY, THIRSTY THURSDAY, AND I FORGOT DAY. DON’T PRETEND THAT’S A MERE COINCIDENCE.

Put down the anisette and buy THE SPLIT.

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Two (one cliché, one interesting) scandals.

The Sherman Adams scandal: Eisenhower’s chief of staff accepted gifts (a vicuña coat! hotel stays!) from a businessman seeking government favors.

The U-2 lie: The Soviets shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane over their territory. The administration, assuming the pilot had been killed, falsely claimed it was a weather aircraft. Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, produced Francis Gary Powers, the captured and very much alive pilot. Oops! The deception was exposed, scuttling an upcoming summit.

35. John F. Kennedy. Two (one geopolitical, one domestic) scandals.

Bay of Pigs debacle: A CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles failed disastrously in its attempt—approved by JFK—to overthrow Castro. It was the quintessential Cold War embarrassment.

Extramarital affairs: Kennedy, a confirmed horndog, had a number of “friends with benefits” while in office, including Judith Exner (who was also involved with Mafia types involved in CIA assassination plots, creating national security risks monitored by the FBI) and (so they say) Marilyn Monroe.

36. Lyndon B. Johnson. Two (one geopolitical, one venal) scandals.

Gulf of Tonkin deception: LBJ used a largely make-believe North Vietnamese attack on American ships to secure congressional authorization to escalate the stupid Vietnam War.

The Bobby Baker affair: When Johnson was Senate Majority Leader—before he became Vice President—his protégé Bobby Baker used political connections to amass a fortune through tax evasion, fraud, and theft.

37. Richard M. Nixon. Four (political/awful) scandals.

Watergate: The appropriately named CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President, aka Nixon’s campaign—sent a team to break into Democratic Party headquarters. The perps (“the Watergate Burglars”) were caught. Then came the cover-up. Then the certainty of Nixon’s impeachment. Then his resignation to avoid impeachment—the only president (so far) to resign. Good times.

Secret bombing of Cambodia: Nixon illegally ordered massive bombing of Cambodia, falsifying records to conceal it from Congress and the public.

Enemies List / IRS abuse: Nixon compiled an “enemies list” of political opponents and journalists. The plan: to order the IRS to audit and harass them. This is illegal.

Agnew’s corruption: Nixon’s thuggish Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned and pleaded no contest to felony tax evasion for accepting bribes as Maryland governor and as Vice President. He was the only VP (so far) to be forced from office for criminal conduct.

38. Gerald Ford. One (quid pro quo?) scandal.

Pardon of Nixon: Ford, who Nixon tapped as his VP after Agnew’s flameout, and who became President after Nixon’s flameout, unconditionally pardoned Nixon of all his crimes. Citizens of the nation despised him for this, and showed their feelings at their earliest convenience (the election of 1976).

39. Jimmy Carter. One (dumb) scandal.

The Bert Lance affair: Carter was upright and scandal-free, but his budget director, Bert Lance, was a bit of a scumbag. Lance resigned after his skeevy banking practices back home in Georgia blew up big-time, embarrassing the upright and formerly scandal-free administration.

40. Ronald Reagan. Three (rather serious) scandals.

Iran-Contra: The Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran and illegally funneled profits to Nicaraguan Contra rebels, defying a congressional ban. Reagan claimed befuddlement, but evidence suggested otherwise.

The HUD scandal: There was widespread favoritism—i.e., fraud—in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Reagan, in which connected developers were awarded no-bid, low-income housing contracts.

The Savings and Loan crisis: Reagan deregulation allowed banks to engage in reckless speculation. The inevitable collapse cost taxpayers $130 billion, the largest financial scandal in US history at the time.

41. George H.W. Bush. Two (rather serious) scandals.

Iran-Contra pardons: On the eve of trials that could have implicated Bush, he pardoned six Iran-Contra figures—including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger—which special counsel Lawrence Walsh called a cover-up.

“Passportgate”: State Department officials, ordered by political appointees, searched the passport files of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential campaign. This is illegal.

42. Bill Clinton. Three (two horndoggy, one bullshit) scandals.

Monica Lewinsky…impeachment: Clinton had a sexual relationship with “that woman,” a White House intern, then more or less lied about it under oath; this led the throbbing members of the House to impeach him for perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate frowned severely but acquitted him.

Whitewater: A tedious independent counsel investigation into a failed Arkansas land deal convicted some Clinton associates; there were no charges against Clinton, but the investigation was (purposefully) deeply damaging.

Sexual misconduct allegations: A number of women, including former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, accused Clinton of sexual harassment and assault. The Jones lawsuit led directly to the Lewinsky investigation and broadcast throughout the land questions about his treatment of women.

43. George W. Bush. Five (rather serious) scandals.

Iraq WMD deception: To whip up public support for going to war against Iraq, the Bush administration trumpeted bullshit “intelligence” to insist Saddam Hussein had amassed a vast collection of weapons of mass destruction. And, no, there were no WMDs.

Abu Ghraib torture: Disgusting photographs revealed US soldiers yukking it up as they waterboarded (which is to say: tortured) and otherwise humiliated Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The ensuing scandal undermined America’s moral standing among the nations of the world (you may recall when America had moral standing) and revealed the moral rot of the “W” administration.

Warrantless surveillance program: The NSA, directed by George W and without court orders, wiretapped the international communications of US citizens. This, of course, violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Hurricane Katrina response: The catastrophic failure of FEMA to respond to Hurricane Katrina, in which over 1,800 Americans died, exposed gross incompetence and cronyism in Bush’s appointment of the tragically unqualified Michael Brown as agency director. “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie,” said Bush, unironically.

US attorney firings: The nominally independent Justice Department fired eight US attorneys for political reasons such as allegedly ignoring voter fraud claims or prosecuting GOP miscreants. Perjury investigations of senior Department officials followed.

44. Barack Obama. Three (one serious, two less so) scandals.

NSA mass surveillance: Edward Snowden revealed that Obama’s NSA was (still!) surveilling phone records and internet activity of US citizens.

IRS targeting of right-wing groups: Obama’s IRS was accused of improperly examining the Tea Party and other wingnuts who sought tax-exempt status; the administration’s handling of these accusations was clumsy.

Fast and Furious: An ATF operation allowed guns to flow illegally to Mexican drug cartels in the hope that the guns, like bread crumbs, would lead directly to the lairs of the bad guys. One of those guns was used to kill a US Border Patrol agent, predictably causing the wingnuts to blow all their fuses.

45. Donald J. Trump. Five (rather serious) scandals.

First impeachment: By withholding military aid, Trump tried to squeeze Ukraine into announcing it was investigating Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent in the upcoming 2020 election. Trump was acquitted by the Senate GOP majority.

Second impeachment: After the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot by MAGA shitheads seeking to overturn the election, Trump was impeached, this time for incitement of insurrection, and was again acquitted by the Senate GOP majority. He is the only twice-impeached president, which doesn’t mean he won’t be the first thrice-impeached president.

Russia, Russia, Russia: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and multiple instances of potential obstruction of justice by Trump. Mueller inexplicably declined to press charges.

Campaign-finance violations: Before the 2016 election, Trump paid hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from, among other things, describing his peculiar mushroom-shaped phallus. Those payments contributed to his conviction of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records. No other president has ever been convicted of a felony.

Classified-documents thievery: When he left office after his first term, Trump illegally brought hundreds of classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, where they were beautifully stacked in a gold-ornamented bathroom. The federal indictment that inevitably followed was dismissed on a technicality.

46. Joe Biden. Three (mid-level) scandals.

Classified documents mishandling: Biden took with him some classified documents from his tenure as Vice President, storing them in unsecured locations around his house. A special counsel characterized him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and declined to prosecute.

Hunter Biden: Joe’s son no doubt traded on his father’s name to lubricate foreign business deals. This caused House Republicans to salivate uncontrollably, but they never came up with evidence that would enable them to impeach, hang, and/or apply thumbscrews to Hunter’s father.

That debate: Biden’s pathetic performance at the first (and only) debate with Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 election caused the Democratic Party to melt down, led to Biden’s reluctant withdrawal from the race, and left the replacement candidate, Kamala Harris, with little time to prepare for the battle.

47. Trump again

Where to start? When, if ever, to end? Claude whittled it down to eight, and we just added two three four more. “Is that all?” No, but how much time do you, or does anyone, have?

The crypto and financial conflicts: Trump (and his wife) launched a “memecoin” that foreign interests could—and did!—purchase as a way of currying favor with the President. Example: The UAE made what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history, a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which critics describe as essentially the president’s personal crypto fund. In return, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of US-produced AI chips than allowed under the Biden administration.

The Qatar plane: Qatar offered Trump a luxury 747 jet, which he sought to use as the new Air Force One. Democrats attempted to block it, characterizing it as a straightforward foreign gift to a sitting president. Critics noted that beyond the ethics questions, it reflected Trump’s desire to be treated with the trappings of royalty.

The Signal scandal: In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal group chat in which military strike plans against Houthi rebels in Yemen were discussed—before the strikes happened. A second Signal chat then emerged in which Hegseth shared sensitive information about the same imminent attack with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, none of whom work for the government.

DOGE and the Musk fallout: Elon Musk was installed as the effective head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which conducted sweeping layoffs, shut down agencies, and eliminated programs at a pace and scale that triggered more than 127 lawsuits in the administration’s first two months. Legal scholars argued that many early actions violated federal law and the Constitution. The elimination of the US Agency for International Development is estimated to have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest people (including many children), with other estimates predicting the total will be in the millions.

The Iran war: Trump’s attacks on Iran, made without Congressional approval and for a series of self-contradictory reasons, have killed thousands (including [at least] 13 Americans,), injured tens of thousands, played havoc with the world economy, taught Iran that its control of the Strait of Hormuz makes it a dominant Middle East power, and made America’s relationship with Israel even more fucked up than it had been previously. That it looks like Trump’s constantly changing announcements about peace, war, ceasefire, and renewed hostilities have enabled manipulation of the stock market has become a mildly interesting footnote.

The Epstein files: Despite a December 2025 legal deadline requiring the release of all Epstein files, lawmakers maintained that around 50% remained unreleased. Trump and his Justice Department are literally covering up evidence concerning a child sex-trafficking ring which will implicate Trump and a number of other soon-to-be infamous people.

Defiance of courts: A Washington Post analysis found that by mid-2025, the administration had defied judges and court orders in roughly one-third of all cases filed against it, a level of defiance described by legal experts as unprecedented in American presidential history and raising fears of a constitutional crisis.

Crackpots and creeps in the Cabinet: RFK Jr.’s leadership of Health and Human Services was marked by anti-vaccine decisions, mental health grant cuts, and a decimation of medical and scientific research. Pete Hegseth is a Brylcreemed buffoon. Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director centered on accusations of politicizing the bureau and using FBI resources for personal vendettas. Sean Duffy’s role as Secretary of Transportation is a joke. Todd Blanche’s replacement of Pam Bondi, making him Acting Attorney General, stands as a new low for the office. Wrestling executive-made-Secretary-of-Education Linda McMahon called AI “A-One.” Et fucking cetera.

ICE: We’re frankly astounded that Claude didn’t mention this. (See? AI has its “issues.”) Trump, Jewish Nazi ghoul Stephen Miller, and former head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, have overseen a Gestapo-like attack on the immigrant community, sweeping up the innocent as well as the possibly-guilty-but-not-properly-charged, dispatching them to dangerous countries or hellhole concentration camps, murdering in cold blood two protesters in Minneapolis, and utterly trashing the rule of law.

The Pardons: Trump’s second term has seen a historically unusual use of the pardon power, both in volume and in the nature of the recipients. He has granted executive clemency to more than 1,700 individuals as of June 2026, and a June 2026 Reuters review found that 96% of clemency grants failed to meet longstanding DOJ standards. Those pardoned or granted clemency include: the January 6th Capitol rioters (who, among other things, attacked and killed cops and shat on the House floor), 2020 Election “Fake Electors” (including Rudy Giuliani, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman), Changpeng Zhao (founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, who had pleaded guilty to violating money laundering laws and who had worked extensively with the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial business), Ross Ulbricht (creator of Silk Road, sentenced to life in prison for his role in facilitating illegal markets, including convictions for distributing narcotics), George Santos (colorful but repellent New York Republican liar and fraud), and corrupt politicians, including Henry Cuellar and Glen Casada. There are more, obvs.

The depraved alterations to the nation’s capital: The summary destruction of the East Wing of the White House; the gaudy besmirching of the Oval Office and the surrounds with gold tat; the paving over of the Rose Garden and its conversion to a Mar-a-Lago patio; the no-bid “restoration” of the Reflecting Pool into an algae-clogged swamp: the list goes on and on. And don’t even mention that proposed Triumphal Arch.

The Hijacking of America 250: Trump funneled taxpayer money from the Congressionally-created America 250 celebration to his shady, unregulated Freedom 250 and deceived donors into sending their contributions to the latter. Where all that money went remains a mystery—it certainly didn’t end up being spent on The Great American State Fail (sic), which is an ongoing embarrassment.

And that’s—what? What about NATO? And Venezuela? And Canada? And tariffs? And Greenland? And “Cuba’s next”? Fine. Feel free to compose your own list. The point—that Donald Trump’s second term has been and will continue to be the most criminal, corrupt, scandal-drenched administration in history—is splendidly illustrated in the following graphic.

We were going to posit an average of two scandals per day, from January 20, 2025, until today (which is two days prior to America’s 250^th birthday). Then we thought: “Let’s be fair. Let’s be conservative.” So we’re calling it one scandal a day, to which we added those of Trump’s first term. That figure vastly outnumbers those of every other presidential administration put together. Read it and weep:

Appalling isn’t the word. Bear in mind, too, that all of this has taken place within what we might call the ambient meta-scandal of Republican complicity: The GOP could have put a stop to this years ago, let alone last month. They chose not to and, we predict, no matter how wretched things get, they will continue to choose not to.

Which leaves us, once again, in Splitsville, our term for a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In one, there are those (call them “the morons”) who regard all this corruption, theft, lying, and criminal activity, and think, “YEAH! THAT’S FOR ME! I LOVE TRUMP!” In another are the Republicans—voters, office holders, party apparatchiks, propagandists; call them “the assholes”—who don’t actually love all this crap but, for reasons of ambition, greed, or sloth, promote or minimize it or try to ignore it.

In the third are the rest of us.

Happy Fourth of July.

WHEN MAGA FINALLY SECEDES AND CREATES THEIR OWN COUNTRY, PREPARE FOR YOUR FIRST (UNWISE) VISIT BY READING THE SPLIT.

Start here.

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And now, some good news for a change.

If you’re like us, you’ve read stories about conservatives, MAGA choads, religious numpties, and var. and sundry other douchebags around the US of A who, when it comes to matters of public health, “don’t believe in” the science of it. They resent having to be inoculated during a worldwide pandemic. They eschew the wearing of masks, the better to sneeze their way to Typhoid Mary-like notoriety. They agree with notorious lunatic RFK, Jr. when he asserts that vaccines cause autism. (Editor’s Note: Vaccines do not cause autism.) They hold “measles parties” to better enable their (helpless, abused) children to actually contract the disease.

More? You bet. These imbeciles blame Anthony Fauci for COVID; they do not blame Donald Trump for his counsel to a) wait until the disease just goes away; b) wait until summer, when the disease will just go away; c) eat horsepaste; and d) inject bleach. They took Trump—whose preening vanity about knowing anything is directly proportional to his abysmal ignorance about everything—seriously when, regarding the COVID virus, he asserted, “I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too... So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute—that’s pretty powerful.” They applauded when Pete Hegseth—who we think of as The Shame of Princeton but who is more accurately identified, for all time, by Wonkette’s own Evan Hurst as “Secretary of Hair and Makeup”—ended the requirement that members of the armed forces get a flu shot. This policy, mind, had been in place since 1945; in fact, George Fucking Washington himself insisted that his Continental soldiers get smallpox vaccinations. The result of Hegseth’s mandate? Let’s ask The Daily Beast from last week:

The numbers are getting worse by the day. As of Tuesday, at least 222 recruits at Lackland Air Force Base had been diagnosed with flu, and four had been hospitalized… That is up from 159 cases and two hospitalizations a week earlier.

Also, if you’re like us, you read these stories and you think, often in so many words, “GOOD. LET ‘EM ALL DROP DEAD.” Or, if you’re in a somewhat more reflective mood, you might think, “Okay, wait. Don’t let them all drop dead. Rather, let some of them first infect their friends, loved ones, and like-minded colleagues, that they, too, may, in the fullness of time, drop dead.” And then you—or, at least we—think, “IT’S CALLED NATURAL SELECTION, BITCHEZ.”

It seems fair and just when, because of their moronic beliefs, science-denying nitwits get sick and croak. But do they, really?

Well, sort of! Because look: Here comes Wonkette’s own Robyn Pennacchia with the unimprovably-entitled piece, “Conservatives Now Owning the Libs by Dying More.”

A study published in Nature last month found that conservatives are dying at higher rates than are liberals, as opposed to back in 2010 when we all died at more or less the same rate. Curiously, it’s not just COVID-19 deaths, either. Multiple studies have already shown that Republicans were at least 15 percent more likely to die of COVID-19, particularly after the vaccine dropped. What this shows, however, is that they’re more likely to die of every other cause as well.

Be still our beating heart! Robyn quotes a piece in Fast Company (“A New Study Points to a Mistrust in Medicine”):

By 2016, the gap had begun to appear in biomarker measures. By 2020, it was showing up in deaths from causes such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Since then, the gap has only widened. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.

Interestingly, it’s not that conservatives see doctors less than liberals do. In fact, both cohorts are about equally likely to consult a Primary Care Physician. It’s that conservatives are less likely to trust their PCPs and take their advice.

IT’S NATIONAL CATFISH DAY, NATIONAL LEON DAY, AND NATIONAL HANDSHAKE DAY. SO FIND A CATFISH NAMED LEON AND SHAKE ITS HAND.

And then buy THE SPLIT.

Let us, for a moment, meditate on the profound stupidity of this. Cast your mind back to the late 16^th century, when Sir Francis Bacon, the Father of Empiricism, first enunciated what would become the Scientific Method. For four and a half centuries man-and-womankind has made steady progress in the science of medicine. Like leprosy, smallpox, and bubonic plague, measles had been eliminated from the US. And now it’s back. People who would not hesitate to consult a mechanic about their car or a stylist about their hair suddenly “don’t trust” a doctor who spent twelve years mastering the profession (let alone who has been working on infectious diseases for decades).

Why? What is it in the conservative—make that Republican; these people are not conservatives—mind that rebels against this particular aspect of modernity? They can’t all be Amish. They partake of technology. They use computers and drive cars and fly in planes. Why, when it comes to the most fundamental thing of all—the protection and maintenance of their stupid precious bodies—do they turn into spiteful teenagers for whom defying Mom and Dad becomes the supreme test and proof of their identities?

Is it religion? That’s Robyn’s theory:

I guess if you don’t believe in evolution, if you don’t believe in climate change, if you think vaccines are bad for you, if you imagine that there is some kind of conspiracy among scientists to put out information just to ruin your day or make you question your religious beliefs, it wouldn’t make sense to believe doctors, either, when they say you need to lower your cholesterol intake.

Yes, and: It looks like these people don’t trust institutions (academia; science; “experts;” “the government;” “the media”) but do trust individuals: Trump, Fox News bobbleheads, hate radio yakmeisters, influencers. Does this reflect their rejection of the Catholic church (the biggest, oldest, most powerful institution on Earth) and their embrace of Protestantism, with its personal relationship with the personal Jesus? Could be!

Then again, many Trumpers are Catholic, so maybe not.

In any case, these, you will note, are the rugged individualists, so-called because each of these individuals keeps a rug under which they sweep their various hypocrisies. They’ll post a flag (of a, um, snake) that says Don’t Tread On Me, but if their going maskless during a pandemic brings a risk of spreading their infection to others—well, as we say in the original Latin, uff-tay it-shay. They’ll cheer when Trump natters on about “freedom” and “our Country,” but cheer louder at (or utterly ignore) his racist attacks on an ethnic group or on immigrants. The rule of law, the right to vote, the checks and balances of government as enshrined in the Constitution: There isn’t one supposed tenet or value of “conservatism” that all of them, from the US Senate down to Cletus and Brandine in Possum Holler, don’t betray and violate and kick in the balls, every day, in their fealty to Donald Trump.

Bear in mind that, even after the last few weeks of absolutely wretched, loser-level failure on all fronts, from Iran to the Reflecting Pool, Trump still polls, per the Failing New York Times, at around 38% approval. Thirty-eight percent of 350 million people is 133 million. Granted, many of these who approve of Trump are children, the senile elderly, and bots. Still, we can’t believe it either. That’s 132 million too many. So we need them to continue to refuse medical attention and to die move swiftly along to a Better Place.

Until they do, we’re stuck in Splitsville—our term for when a single geo-political entity is occupied by two or more distinct “nations.” In this version one nation consists of us: sensible people who, for all our faults, know enough to get a fucking vaccine and pay attention when our doctor says something regarding our health. The other consists of those who, after centuries of medical advances, don’t believe in the existence of germs because you can’t see them. Bless their myocardial-infarction-due hearts.

YOU THINK LIFE UNDER TRUMP IS BAD? GET A LOAD OF LIFE IN THE CONFEDERATION OF CONSERVATIVES STATES OF AMERICA.

Read all about it here.

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Number 80--!!

Wait a minute. This is Splitsville Number 80? Being written and published during the week Donald Trump turns 80 years old? Like the guy in the old internet video, high (we think) on LSD and viewing a double rainbow, we want to shout: WHAT DOES IT MEAN? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Okay, hold it. We’re doing the math. Maybe it means that we started writing Splitsville the week Trump was born, and if we stop writing it, he’ll drop dead. Right? Isn’t that how things work? Please?

No? Too much voodoo woo-woo and/or wishful thinking? Okay, fine. We’ll keep writing and publishing, and one day he will drop dead. We just know it. It won’t be soon enough—that deadline (sic) has long passed—but it will nonetheless, when it happens, be unto us as a blessing, a benison to ourselves and our issue, and a cause of great rejoicing throughout the land.

Until then we have Trump’s fading health to think about, to…not worry about so much as to root for, as one loudly or quietly roots for one’s favorite sports team (or, more likely, the defeat of one’s hated nemesis). This attitude, this abiding waiting, resides in the back of our minds, a ubiquitous promise (and threat) that settles in like a front of mental weather that surrounds and maybe slightly influences everything we do and say.

Except that Trump’s deterioration possesses something that weather does not: a concrete endpoint. So maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that Trump’s demise is like an asteroid speeding toward a collision with Earth, and that when it hits—which it inevitably, unstoppably will—great changes will ensue.

Not that it’s the only one. In fact, these days we’re prepared to suggest that there are no fewer than three (3) asteroids heading our way. One may miss us entirely. Another will certainly hit, but we don’t know when. The third will absolutely hit, and right on schedule.

Any and all impacts will be consequential. Let’s take them in ascending order of predictability.

I. AI GEVALT

You know what AI is. You’ve used it. It’s “amazing.” You’ve prompted Claude to explain itself and been absurdly pleased when it complimented you on the astuteness of your queries. You’ve asked ChatGPT the best way to kill your boss with over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and it’s obliged. Or whatever. You know what agents and tokens are. You can’t wait for the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, which will be a simulacrum of human consciousness and will revolutionize every fucking thing on earth as much as, or more than, the Industrial Revolution itself.

But if you know all that, then you also know that a lot of smart, persuasive people are contradicting all the hype and promises of Sam Altman (Open AI—ChatGPT) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic—Claude, Mythos, Fable). What those contradictors are saying is that a disastrous collapse is coming. (That’s our first asteroid.)

Why? Because the economics don’t add up. As explained by the scathing, funny Ed Zitron in his (free) weekly newsletter Where’s Your Ed At:

1. Companies were happy to use AI when the two giants (Open AI, Anthropic) were subsidizing the use of their Large Language Models. Then, in Jan. 2026, both companies reverted to charging what it actually cost, and people freaked out. Uber ran through its yearly budget in a single quarter. Zillow ran through its budget by the end of May. The previous $20/$100/$200 per month all-you-can-eat became an a la carte nightmare.

2. No one was, or is, able to really calculate how valuable AI is—meaning, what is its Return on Investment (ROI)? This is true even for the vaunted “AI can write code” argument, since the code it writes is janky, flawed, and doesn’t stand up well. Because--

3. AI always makes mistakes (“hallucinations”). If that means it delivers a “photo” of Margot Robbie with three arms, ha ha, that’s good clean fun. If it means drafting a motion your law firm gives to a judge, who points out that some of the cases cited don’t actually exist, it’s not so funny anymore. And to the extent that you need actual humans to review and police that, you undercut the premise of AI’s automating wonderfulness.

4. Of course, one way you can quantify gains is by eliminating droves of human workers. See here for a concise discussion, between Chris Hedges and Zitron, about the social and political consequences of that.

5. THE WHOLE INDUSTRY NEEDS TOO MUCH FUCKING MONEY TO SURVIVE. The expenses of AI are vast: an endless supply of chips (mainly from Nvidia); data centers and their profligate use of power and water for the ever-increasing amounts of “compute;” continuous re-training of the models. The labs (Open AI; Anthropic), and the “hyperscalers” (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) have spent and/or borrowed gigunda (to use the technical term) sums to build the infrastructure for all this, and are now sub-leasing them to each other, or investing in each other, in a giant display of clapping to keep Tinkerbell alive.

Yes, AI can do cool things. But saying that is like saying, “But those tulips are so pretty!” in the Netherlands in 1637. The problem is the financial insanity behind it all, driven by hype, p.r., groupthink, FOMO, stupidity (what Zitron refers to as Business Idiots), and the unquenchable desire, in the computer and finance industries, for the next, internet- or smart-phone-like Big Thing.

After the SpaceX IPO and following the assumed IPOs of Open AI and Anthropic, something like 40% of investment capital in the stock market will be in AI. Can you imagine? No, you can’t, and neither can we. What happens if the bubble pops? Disaster, like that which followed the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in 2008: Little companies, and some big companies, go under. A ton of money is lost as the value of huge investments shrivels. Data centers (equipped with chips that are now obsolete) going—like commercial real estate in 2009—unused. Unemployment, recession, etc.

And then the societal response. People who watched, enraged, as the government bailed out the banks and investment houses after 2008, and only one stupid schmuck went to jail after all that Ponzi-like hustling, will be, um…unsympathetic to calls to bail out the billionaires. You think Occupy Wall Street was intemperate? Wait for Occupy Silicon Valley.

IT’S NATIONAL PANIC DAY. BUT CALM DOWN. IT’S ALSO SEYCHELLES CONSTITUTION DAY. THEY CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT. SO WHY NOT

Buy and enjoy THE SPLIT?

It might not happen. That asteroid may miss the Earth. We should be so lucky. But—

II. TRUMP IS HEADING FOR WHAT DANNY DEVITO IN L.A. CONFIDENTIAL CALLS “THE BIG ADIOS”

Granted, this is not our idea of a disaster. It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished, and is one of our asteroids only insofar as when it hits it will trigger big changes. And, whether or not you walk around thinking, “Gee, I wonder if that AI bubble will burst and, if so, when,” we know you walk around thinking, “Isn’t it time for Trump to drop dead?”

You’d think. And so would we. And we’re not the only ones. Here’s the punchy, amusing Dean Blundell on Trump’s recent visit to the G7 in Evians-les-Bains, in France.

The President of the United States spent three days in the French Alps looking like he was being escorted through an airport he didn’t recognize. World leaders had to physically point him in the right direction. He sat slack-jawed and vacant while everyone else posed for the camera. He needed Narendra Modi to help him up a single stair. And this morning, lost again, trailing behind the South Korean President because he didn’t know where his own chair was, he turned to the most powerful people on Earth and announced — I swear to God — “I’m the boss.”

We’ve written about this before. The point is not Trump’s diminishing faculties. (Blundell’s best line: “The family photo on Tuesday? He wandered off. Wrong direction. Had to be herded back into the group of grown-ups like a toddler at a wedding.”) The point is, we all walk around all day entertaining thoughts and emotions centered on the imminence of his croaking—a combination of rational, sensible expectation and blow-out-the-candles birthday wish. Is that how devout/nutso Christians feel about the impending return of Jesus? That deliverance will come at any second?

Or, okay, not any second. Soon. Or soon-ish. How you live with it, how it affects your day-to-day mood, must be a function of your fundamental character. For some, we assume it’s a source of constant frustration. (“What? He’s still alive? Come ON.”) For others, a source of quiet hope. (“Any day now…”) In any case, that asteroid is coming. When it hits—especially if it happens while Trump is still in office—the aftershocks will be unavoidable.

MAGA will be distraught and cry “fraud.” Vance will become POTUS. But—Fun Fact--everybody hates him. Will there be an immediate plotting of a palace coup? Will the cowards and toadies who currently kiss up to Trump do so with the new Prez? With no Trump—and therefore no MAGA voters—to fear, how will Republicans in Congress react? Who—among the meatheads, connivers, and outright Nazis on the right—will strive for the MAGA crown? How will Dems react, especially as regards the Epstein Files? What will become of the Cabinet, the universally-loathed Stephen Miller, the walking embarrassment Kash Patel, etc., etc.? We may have to tap the Strategic Popcorn Reserve to cover the national demand as the dramas unfold.

And maybe this will happen before—

III. THE MIDTERMS: JUDGMENT DAY

This is our most predictable asteroid, because even if you think Trump will somehow “cancel” the mid-terms, that itself would be cataclysmic. We don’t think he will, both because it can’t be done, and because it will be—if it isn’t already—beyond him physically and emotionally.

The question is, will he and the GOP be able to cheat enough to overcome what will be a huge repudiation of him and his party? They’ve already started, with voter suppression, bullshit about mail-in votes, gerrymandering, etc. But the polls for Trump and the Republicans are abysmal; many of their incumbents are retiring, creating a vacuum into which are rushing a cohort of cretinous, corrupt candidates; and the MAGA faithful will be far less motivated to turn out than the masses of outraged and disgusted Dems and Independents. Each MAGAt who remains on the couch is half a vote for the good guys.

If the cheating is blatant and there’s intimidation—or actual violence—at the polls, what will the Dems do? What, for that matter, will we—and you—do? Okay, let’s table that one for the moment.

But if (as we expect) the election proceeds normally, and (as we expect) the Dems win at least the House, what will Trump do? Call for another January 6^th-type insurrection? Hop—sorry; waddle—onto a plane to Moscow or Argentina? As for the members of the administration—the sleaziest, most corrupt heap of mutants ever assembled—expect them, when confronting their impending overthrow, to panic. To betray one another. To slip incognito onto flights to places whose names they can’t pronounce. To jump off ledges and fling themselves off bridges. Or to just acquiesce as they’re ushered by Big Strong Police Officers into cars with flashing lights on top. Pass that popcorn!

So there’s that—dependably; inevitably—in our future.

Three bombshell detonations. One possible but not fated; one definite but at an unspecified time; and one en route and scheduled to arrive COD in about five months. Each one will shatter the US into a fresh version of Splitsville (our term for when a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”). Any—let alone all—of these cataclysms will lead to a rapid splintering into a variety of political and social sub-groups, each demanding its own version of justice, recompense, revenge, protection, and security.

Indeed, we’re halfway there today, pre-split like a Hershey bar pre-scored into tidy little separate squares for easy snacking and sharing.

Happy 250^th, us. E Pluribus Unum? More like E Unum Pluribus, arewerite?

SPEAKING OF: WANT TO SEE WHAT IT WOULD LOOK LIKE IF THE RED STATES FORMED THEIR OWN STUPID COUNTRY? VOI-FREAKING-LA:

It's all in here.

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Well, what he speaks in can often be punctuated as sentences by a professional punctuator. And the sentences seem at least vaguely relevant to the questions they’re intended to answer or the issue he seems poised to address. In what, then, one is tempted to inquire, does his nutsiness consist?

How much time do you have?

IT’S NATIONAL CERTIFIED NURSING ASSISTANTS WEEK. IT’S ALSO NATIONAL MEN’S HEALTH WEEK. MERE COINCIDENCE?

This will help you make sense of it all.

One aspect of his craziness is the incoherence, not necessarily of a given statement, but of the wacko picture created by multiple, contradictory statements concerning what is supposedly a single, coherent reality. Take, for example, Trump’s various assertions, about the war in Iran, delivered over last weekend and after Monday’s NBA finals game. As summarized by the exemplary Mary Geddry, we got this:

…the incoherence is total. On Sunday, the deal was “one or two days” away. On the [Lindsay] Graham tele-rally, it was “total victory” in two weeks. To the BBC, it was already too late, the missiles already “on their way.” And now, post-game, it is two or three days again, except he also said, in the same gaggle, that the United States could “spend another two or three weeks bombing” if it chose, and that a signed deal would somehow be stronger than the bombing he was still threatening.

Within a single news cycle, the same war is two days from peace, two weeks from total victory, already past the point of control, and one bombing campaign away from resolution. It is narrated by a man who, the night before, could not decide whether his own blockade was sealing Iran off completely or letting enough oil flow to keep prices down.

The timeline is not a forecast. It is whatever the sentence needs it to be while it is being spoken. Peace is always two or three days away precisely because “two or three days” is not a measurement of anything. It is a verbal tic that means the subject is now closed.

Her last point is something we’ve been thinking about. Until recently, Trump’s answers to questions were geared to accomplish one thing: self-promotion. Yes, they were all (all) lies. But they were lies in the service of bragging, preening, and soliciting applause. They were concocted to assert how great he was, both in and of himself and in comparison to his (weak, sleepy, failing, little, crooked, low-IQ, etc.) opponents.

That has changed. Now the purpose of each reply is not to answer (however dishonestly) a question, but to neutralize it. “It is a verbal tic that means the subject is now closed.” It doesn’t matter, to Trump, if, from one answer to another, nothing makes sense. It never occurs to him to try to be consistent, if only consistent in his mendacity. What matters is, he’s successfully whack-a-mole’d one question into submission and is thus prepared to whack the next. The sub-text to each answer is, “There. You got a response. Happy? Now shut up.”

Is that “crazy”? Not necessarily. It can be argued that it’s strategic, a way of evading inquiry and shutting down your journalistic enemies. What’s crazy is thinking that it will work, that no one will notice. To be fair, up until around the last five months, it has worked—not because no one except idiots believed him, but because almost no one challenged him. No reporter, when given a blatantly false answer, had the temerity (or the professional self-respect, or self-preservation instinct) to say, “That’s not true.” To the mainstream media and the prestige press, the assignment has been, “Ask the question, and report what he says.” (They did the same with George W. Bush, with catastrophic results.)

What’s different now is that the answers have degraded. Trump has always been essentially a salesman. For seventy-nine years he has lied, bragged, and postured with one goal in mind: to make the sale. Of his buildings, his steaks, his “university,” his own personal super-duper greatness.

Now, though, he doesn’t care. He’s too tired. He’s the opposite of Michael Palin’s lumberjack—he works posts all night and he sleeps all day.

He now consistently seems either oblivious of or indifferent to the fact that the things he says don’t make sense. Querying the President of the United States about the status of a war in Iran or an alarming rise in inflation is now like asking someone what time it is, and having them look at their watch and say, “It’s twelve-fifteen, but it’s also nine-thirty, and in about half an hour it will be next week.”

This is bad, yes. Over at The Contrarian, in “The President is Bonkers,” Jen Rubin notes:

Certainly, Trump’s mental and physical disintegration has been on display for many years. However, it is easy to lose track of the velocity of Trump’s decompensation.

As a group of 36 mental health professionals recently explained in a stinging written statement, Trump’s outbursts are not “momentary lapses nor political theater”; they instead “reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.” And this was before Trump’s explosion on Meet the Press, among the most cringeworthy presidential media appearances ever.

Recall, if you dare, how, on Meet the Press last Sunday, Trump reacted when Kristen Welker (a doormat no longer!) asked him for evidence that the L.A. mayoral and California gubernatorial elections were rigged. Trump’s reply? “All you have to do is look.” When Welker pointed out that “that’s not evidence,” Trump launched into a diatribe we’re filing under Great Moments in Presidential Discourse. (Hat tip to Jeff Tiedrich’s sober, coolly-reasoned analysis, “Colicky Piss-Baby Melts Down, Stumbles Off the Set of Meet the Press”.)

Donny: “They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.”

Welker: “To be fair, sir, I’m not crooked.”

Donny: “Really? Well, you play right into their hands. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. You know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.”

Welker: “You’ve never presented evidence that it was rigged.”

Donny: “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Okay, let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling.”

(Errata: 1) In fact, according to top scientists and knowers-of-things, it is Trump who is crooked and stupid. 2) Trump’s 2024 election win was not so much a landslide as a brief, silent collapse of ground coffee in a Melitta filter during a four-cup pour-over. 3) “Your elections” is silly. Welker doesn’t have elections. 4) Trump’s denunciation of those networks surely left executives at PBS asking, “What are we—chopped liver?” 5) Tiedrich omitted Trump’s final words, which were as loony as anything else: “Have a good time.”)

It’s hilarious, although of course it’s not funny. What is to be done? Rubin has ideas. (Itemization ours, not hers.)

• …Demand a robust debate in public, in Congress, and on the midterm campaign trail about the gravity of leaving a patently unfit, raving lunatic in the Oval Office.

• …Pro-democracy forces must educate the public, compel legacy media to cover his breakdown as vigorously and consistently as they did Joe Biden’s health after his 2024 debate, and pressure Republicans to remove or at least restrain him.

We pause, and openly guffaw at the idea that any Republicans in Congress (let alone on the wretched Supreme Court) have the will and guts to remove or restrain him. Okay, we needed that. Go on, Jen.

• A serious, sober subcommittee (perhaps drawn from both the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee) with professional staff should conduct methodical public hearings and assemble a comprehensive report documenting Trump’s deterioration.

• At the end of the process, Democrats (and any patriotic Republicans inclined to prevent grave harm to the country) should present a series of specific, feasible recommendations, including legislation to compel the release of all presidential medical records and to require independent medical evaluation of presidents and vice-presidents.

• (Democrats) should make clear that once they have subpoena power after the midterms, they will supplement findings by calling witnesses to testify under oath as to his observable behavior. If Republicans defend his indefensible conduct and block common-sense measures, they will take on full responsibility for the wreckage that ensues from sheltering an unhinged, unwell president.

Here we must intercede and ask the reader to join us as we greet the notion of Republicans taking “full responsibility” for the wreckage that ensues with the derisive snorts and armpit farts it so richly deserves.

• Republican House and Senate candidates need to be put on the spot in every public encounter: Do they think the president is of sound mind? What do they intend to do to, for example, protect nuclear codes? Why shouldn’t the public have full visibility into the health of a president whose conduct has been so obviously aberrant? Democrats should pound away at the issue in floor speeches, media spots, op-eds, and public forums.

Fuck yes, provided that “in every public encounter” means not just in press gaggles shuffling down House corridors or clustered in front of their offices, but every-goddamn-where. These clowns, traitors, and fascists should be confronted at the theater, when they get into and out of cabs, and over their Dry-Aged NY Strip au Poivre with Courvoisier Cream ($76) at the Capital Grille.

Because, no matter how insane Trump is, no matter how lunatic his babbling (“I love the inflation,” he said this week, following it with a non-sequitur about oil), no matter how obnoxious his treatment of others (“Quiet, piggy”), Republicans are every bit as much the problem. Any horrible thing he does from now until the end of time is due as much to their complicity as to his dysfunction.

In fact, we’re prepared to argue that their behavior has been worse. Trump has always been a monster. Now that he’s demented, he’s a demented monster. While he should be held accountable for his crimes, misdemeanors, and atrocities, no one expects him to know better or to behave decently. But, while there are indeed many Republicans in Congress who are irredeemably stupid, religiously insane, or hopelessly bigoted, there are some who do know better. And they’ve all gone along with this nightmare, both for the first term and now for the second.

Trump, in his madness, should be examined, exposed, and removed from office. Those in every branch of government who defend him, or who impede that process, or who try to change the subject to Biden (or Obama, or FDR, or __your name here__), should be identified and made to justify a bill of particulars as long as the mighty Mississippi, or even the nearly infinitely tall Reflecting Pool. Starting yesterday.

Until then, the Splitsville we all inhabit (i.e., a single geo-political entity—let’s call it “the United States of America”—which consists of two or more distinct “nations”) will be one in which the population of one of those nations knows its head of state is destructive, greedy, pathologically mendacious, and certifiably fucking insane, while the other nation consists of people who, for whatever reason (greed, stupidity, fear, self-interest) look the other way and pretend this is normal.

WE GUARANTEE YOU’LL LIKE THE SCENE IN WHICH LORINDA AND STIMPY TAKE THE RAPTURE RIDE.

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Don’t look now, but there’s a new strain of the Ebola virus flaring up in Africa. And while the odds are v. remote that it will cause problems here in the United Snakes, they (the odds) aren’t zero. Ebola has been here once before, if you really want to know. And for that, we should actually be grateful—because it was from our experience in 2015 that we developed, as it were, medical and institutional antibodies (drugs; techniques; protocols) enabling us to deal with it should it ever make it here again.

That fact would be reassuring under the best of circumstances. It’s especially crucial now, because what we’re dealing with, of course, are the worst of circumstances. The nation’s health is overseen by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (a crackpot, a cretin as regards medical science, and possibly a sociopath), and Donald J. Trump (a frontotemporally-demented ignoramus, a malignant narcissist, and possibly—no; definitely--a fuckhead). One is hostile to science and the other is hostile to humanity. We saw how Trump “handled” COVID. Does anyone think his managing a new pandemic would be any less stupid, dangerous, and cruel?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll start with last week’s stats. From the Daily Beast:

The World Health Organization has revealed that the death rate for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a devastating 30 to 50 percent. Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Friday, Anaïs Legend of the WHO’s high threat pathogens team called the death rate “huge,” and said it means “five out of 10 people are likely to die.” The organization has recorded 10 confirmed and 223 suspected Ebola deaths in the DRC since the outbreak was declared on May 15, out of more than 1,000 confirmed and suspected cases.

This strain of the disease seems to actually be a bit deadlier than the one that hit Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in 2014-2015. But there are similarities between the two outbreaks, as detailed in National Geographic:

For Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease doctor and founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, the initial details took her back to 2014’s massive West African Ebola epidemic.

“The delay of months for identification, the presence in multiple urban areas before detection, cases in many different geographically disparate places,” she said—all these were parallels to the present and indicated an outbreak that had simmered undetected for some time before boiling over.

The situation “on the ground,” though, is worse today than in 2014, because of civil war:

Ongoing armed conflict in the area also creates conditions that favor viral spread locally and beyond the DRC’s borders, especially when international observers and funding are abruptly cut off as they have been recently, says Bhadelia. Less funding to diagnose and treat malaria and other Ebola mimics means it’s harder to find an Ebola signal in the noise of many other flu-like illnesses. Furthermore, borders in Central and East Africa are porous and the capacity to identify, isolate, and treat Ebola is scarce, fueling fears that the virus will spread beyond Uganda into other neighboring countries.

The virus spreading into other neighboring countries would be a bad thing, and not just because it would mean more illness and death. It would also increase the chances of something happening today that happened 11 years ago, when America’s attention was finally drawn to what was originally ignored as being just Africa’s problem.

Ebola emerged in Guinea in late 2014. In September of 2015 a Liberian citizen named Thomas Eric Duncan flew from his native country to Dallas, Texas, to visit family. If he was asymptomatic on the flight, he was totally fucking symptomatic after he arrived. He was hospitalized on September 30 and, on October 6, he died. Within a week, two nurses who had been caring for him also died.

OKAY, LOOK. IT’S BOTH NATIONAL HUG YOUR CAT DAY AND NATIONAL CHEESE DAY. RECONCILE THOSE TWO, PERHAPS BY HUGGING CHEESE.

Then buy THE SPLIT.

As everyone who has seen Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, or Pluribus knows, communicable diseases and a robust global transportation system form a marriage made in Hell. One of us (EW) is currently writing the biography of a man who spent 25 years working for NGO’s in humanitarian aid and rescue. The purpose of one of his postings, to Liberia and Sierra Leone during their Ebola outbreak, was to wire up remote areas of each country with satellite dishes (and, often, with electricity itself, via generators and diesel fuel). This, so PhDs in the field from WHO and other organizations could track infections and send data to the countries’ capitals, WHO offices, and the CDC.

One of his colleagues put it best: “We were all deploying and coming to the disaster area because if we didn’t do it, the disaster area would come to us.”

It was only when the disaster area arrived in Dallas, in the person of a Liberian citizen, that the US response to Ebola got into gear. (With a vengeance. They sent the Army Corps of Engineers to Liberia with heavy equipment, flattened acres of jungle, and built Ebola care centers—which, at least at first, were little more than warehouses for people waiting to die. Later, as medical science got a grip on things, they became clinics.)

We should note here that the poorest town in the US is a medical paradise compared to many villages in rural Africa. More from Nat Geo:

The way Ebola is transmitted—by close contact with body fluids, not through respiratory routes—and the broad availability of tools to diagnose and respond to the disease in high-resource countries means the infection is not a threat to the international community, says Bhadelia.

(snip)

In the United States in particular, infectious threat response systems like the National Special Pathogen System have created “a ton of capacity” to treat infected patients and protect health care workers, she said.

There’s a possibility sporadic cases could be imported into the U.S., but Bhadelia is not concerned that would lead to a stateside pandemic.

And thank Gawd for that, because—like the woman who complains that the food on the cruise is terrible “and such small portions!”—we are saddled today with a president whose ineptitude at dealing with a dangerous disease is mitigated only by his increasing indifference to the job itself.

Jim Stewartson, who writes sharp psychological analyses of Donald Trump, concludes that Trump, after a cascade of failures in Iran, the courts, and in the polls, has succumbed to a fundamental kind of apathy:

Apathy is not just inaction; when the machinery to judge what matters fails, it can be very dangerous.

For example, over the last month, the President of the United States has said he doesn’t care about:

· Whether Iran negotiations are over
Trump told CNBC: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” He also said the talks had become “very boring.”

· Oil prices
When asked whether he was worried about oil prices after the apparent breakdown of talks: “No, I don’t worry about that, no.”

· Americans’ financial situation
Asked whether Americans’ financial situations affected his Iran decision-making: “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

· The midterms
During a Cabinet meeting: “I don’t care about the midterms.”

· Criticism of the war
Trump posted that Iran talks were continuing “at a rapid pace” and told his critics to “sit back and relax… it will all work out well in the end.”

Well. Give him uncharacteristic honesty points for “I don’t think about anybody.” Still, it takes a certain kind of callousness or obliviousness to tell people concerned about a war, in which people on both sides are getting injured or killed, to “sit back and relax.”

The thing is—and there is always a thing, with Trump—even if you think his professed indifference to these many crises and issues is a bad-faith/sour grapes pretense—a child’s huffy “I don’t care if you didn’t invite me to your birthday party because I didn’t want to go anyway”—Stewartson’s thesis still holds. A less exhausted (or demented) Trump would know that you’re at least supposed to pretend to care about them.

Paul Krugman puts it a different way:

Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.

All of which should make us extra-glad that we don’t have Ebola here. It’s icky. It’s dangerous. It’s deadly. And Trump would respond to it with even more stupidity and indifference than he displayed during COVID—while the rest of his administration, like the Nazis (and every other authoritarian regime) before them, are waging a war on science itself. Per the (Failing) New York Times:

The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.

Trump may be increasingly apathetic, but his narcissism won’t let him stop fearing and despising anyone who knows more than he does. (Which is to say: pretty much everyone in the world. But he particularly hates and fears those who obviously, verifiably, know more than he does. Hello, scientists!) In this Trump proves himself the useful idiot of the religious nuts behind Project 2025, who can’t wait to repeal the Enlightenment, make everyone a Biblical literalist, and bring back feudalism. Back to the NYT:

The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.

In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.

But wait. Why are we pussyfooting around by talking about something that could happen? It—the administration’s sabotage of science, both home and abroad—already has! As the excellent Robyn Pennacchia reminds us in her amusingly-entitled Wonkette Substack, “Oh Good, We’ve Reached The ‘Flesh-Eating Screwworm’ Stage Of The Trump Administration”--

Remember DOGE? Well, DOGE cut about 15 percent of the USDA’s workforce. They also slashed USAID to bits, killing funding for over 5,300 programs around the world. This included programs dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm populations. Also avian flu, swine flu and — wait for iiiiiiiit! — Ebola! Which, you may have noticed, is also a pretty serious problem right now.

In fact, they specifically cut $250 million from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Health Security Program, which ran many of these monitoring programs.

Of course, if Ebola did somehow spread around the US, there would still be a sizable number of people who would believe it when Trump told them to do nothing, or drink motor oil, or blast an air horn up their ass; who would proudly wear t-shirts that say REAL MEN EXHIBIT SEVERE VOMITING, DIARRHEA, AND BLEEDING; who would refuse vaccinations (if one were devised) and would wait for it to magically go away which, with their deaths, it would.

That’s because we live in Splitsville, i.e., a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In one are sensible people who respect and admire the accomplishments of humanity, including (but not limited to) science. In the other is a mob of fucking, brain-scrambled morons manipulated by the greedy, the bigoted, the religiously insane, and a bloated, checked-out wannabe king.

TRUMP’S MAGA BASE WILL NEVER ABANDON HIM. WHEN A DEM IS ELECTED POTUS, THEY’LL PUSH TO SECEDE. WHAT WILL THE RESULTANT RED-STATE COUNTRY BE LIKE? WE ALREADY KNOW. LOOK!

I.e., in THE SPLIT

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One thing you can certainly say about the United States of America is, it’s a land of contrasts, bitches.

Like how and such as? Well, take the two “hottest” topics in the news these days: Donald Trump’s destruction of everything he interacts with, and Artificial Intelligence, which around here we refer to as “AI.”

With the one we confront world-historical levels of stupidity and incompetence mitigated only by the presence of actual psychological dysfunction and/or outright e-vil. Either Trump and his gang of meatheads, douchebags, and toadies are not trying to fuck everything up, and are failing in that effort, or they are trying to fuck everything up, and are succeeding admirably.

With the other—AI—we encounter a remarkable achievement in science and engineering. No matter how much you deplore AI “slop,” anyone who has ever used Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, or its lesser-known brethren has to admit that there’s something amazing about it. Recently, one of us (EW) told Claude to “read” a 40,000-word manuscript and deliver a 300-word rave review of it. The program did so, perfectly. It comprehended the document; it appreciated its intent; it quoted salient examples to support its (resoundingly positive!) critical conclusions. All in less than one freaking minute.

So…yeah. Contrast. And we’re alive to witness both. Idiot-shithead Trump/brilliant-helpful AI. Orange Man Bad/Large Language Model good. It makes ya wonder: Is there any way these two phenomena overlap? Is there any Venn diagram middle space?

Why, yes! Both can lead to disaster.

And not only separately, but arm-in-arm, together. Just ask Miles Taylor, who, in his newsletter, Defiance, writes that “if nothing is done about the current situation…two explosions could hit the US economy at the same time.” Behold:

The first is a bomb of Trump’s own making. He built it, he lit the fuse, and he is, at this moment, holding it in his hands. The Iran war has done exactly what every serious economist warned it would. Oil prices have surged and Americans are paying for it at the pump. Worse still, the economic disruption has rippled so far across the global economy that, even if the war stopped this week, we’ll be paying higher prices across the board well into 2027 or beyond. Add to that the self-inflicted wound of Trump’s tariffs, and you’ve got a full-blown, manmade catastrophe.

IT’S INTERNATIONAL HAMBURGER DAY, NATIONAL BRISKET DAY, AND WHOOPING CRANE DAY. COINCIDENCE? DON'T MAKE US LAUGH.

Instead, read THE SPLIT.

So far, so bad. But we knew this. We knew and know that Everything Trump Touches Dies, and Trump has been busy touching many things—the economy; the immigrant population; our relationship with our allies; science and medicine; the environment; good taste in architecture; decency itself—for more than a year. Of course, knowing it, and not being surprised by it, has (at least in this case) nothing to do with preventing it.

So what is Taylor’s other explosion? This:

Think of this one as a ticking time bomb, buried under every single American workplace. I’ve been hearing it tick for the last three years, and wondering when it will go off (whether we’d have enough time to defuse the worst of it before it did). That weapon is the AI replacement of the American workforce. Unfortunately, Trump’s economy bomb might detonate this other one, years ahead of schedule.

As opposed to the likelihood that Trump will wreck everything, this one is subject to debate. AI’s proponents hold that, while AI will indeed replace thousands (if not millions) of white-collar workers, leading to mass layoffs and job scarcity, it will also create new jobs of which we cannot yet conceive. Its opponents, however, scoff. To them, that’s like saying that (as in the Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th century), the replacement of a hundred factory workers was compensated for by the hiring of one or two floor managers and a couple of repair mechanics.

Taylor’s point is that, while the Trump disaster is almost here, it was reasonable, until recently, to suppose that the AI disaster was some years in the future. The Trump calamity would be a recession which, all things being equal, would play out in a familiar cycle like previous recessions: Republicans cause it. The stock market tanks. There’s widespread unemployment. Democrats take over. Republicans instantly accuse the Dems of ruining the economy. To the extent they can overcome Republican obstruction and subversion, Dems implement good, sound policies. The economy recovers. Republicans lie about it, take credit for things they didn’t do and deny having done things they did, another Republican is elected President, and big wheel keep on turnin’.

But, says Taylor, all things aren’t equal. The improvements in AI have been startlingly fast. Some in the field claim that ordinary, ho-hum LLM AI has already been surpassed, and that Artificial General Intelligence—a close-enough analogue to human consciousness—has been achieved. Granted, most people are skeptical of that. It still remains to be seen if any AI, of any degree of sophistication, can actually create something new, as opposed to reproducing already-existing things in different arrangements—that is, whether AI can be anything other than what TenGrain at Mock Paper Scissors calls “fancy autocorrect.”

But so what? Even as is—and as anyone using a computer or a smart phone knows—AI is ubiquitous. Taylor:

A report published days ago found that ninety-nine percent of CEOs surveyed expect AI-driven layoffs at their companies within the next two years. Ninety-nine percent. Ninety-nine. They all see what’s coming because they’re the ones planning for it. In the first quarter of this year alone, around 80,000 tech workers were laid off, with nearly half of those cuts directly attributed to AI replacement. Meanwhile, an MIT simulation estimated AI could already replace twelve percent of the entire U.S. workforce.

Thus, when the Trump recession hits and workers are laid off, the options open to CEO’s will be different than before.

Once a company replaces a human team with an automated AI system and runs it for a year — as they wait for Trump’s recession to end — they’ll realize they like the new setup a whole lot more than the old one. They’ll see the consistency, the higher productivity, the absence of healthcare costs and HR complaints, no one taking time off for vacations, and they’ll decide that they are never, ever hiring those workers back. Layoffs are usually framed as “cyclical,” but this one will be indefinite.

The result: what Taylor calls a “permanent recession.”

Of course, this is not to say that AI itself, all by its lonesome and without Trump’s assistance, can’t bring about catastrophe. When SpaceX (Grok), Open AI (ChatGPT), and Anthropic (Claude) issue their Initial Public Offerings soon, it’s estimated that forty percent of the total investments on Wall Street will be in the AI industry. AI companies are furiously planning (and investors are avidly putting their money into) “data centers” which are becoming widely despised by the communities in which they’re being planned or constructed. They drive up the cost of electricity, use a wildly disproportionate share of the local water, and create artificial zones of heat which affect the local ecology.

All this, and no AI company has yet to show a profit.

Hence the widespread talk of “the AI bubble” which, if/when it bursts, will probably have as disastrous an effect on the national economy as did the 2008 prime-mortgage meltdown.

And what if both things happen? What if there’s both a Trump recession and an AI bubble-burst? Would these two intersecting “waves” create reinforcement (double the disaster) or cancellation (shrinking AI would be less available to replace laid-off workers)?

Let’s ask Claude! (It took three seconds to get an answer.)

These two shocks would not be independent — they’d amplify each other through several feedback loops.

How a Recession Would Hurt the AI Sector

A Trump policy-driven recession (through tariffs, trade disruption, reduced consumer spending, etc.) would hit AI hard in specific ways:

• Corporate spending freezes. AI adoption is largely an enterprise story right now. In a recession, IT budgets are among the first cut. Companies would delay or cancel AI subscriptions, cloud contracts, and implementation projects.

• Venture capital dries up. Recessions tighten risk appetite. The speculative funding that sustains many pre-revenue AI startups would evaporate, triggering waves of failures among smaller players.

• Ad revenue collapses. Many AI companies (especially consumer-facing ones) depend on advertising or consumer discretionary spending — both of which crater in recessions.

• Higher borrowing costs strain leveraged AI firms. If the recession is accompanied by stagflation (possible with tariff-driven inflation), the Fed can’t cut rates aggressively, leaving highly leveraged AI infrastructure companies in a bind.

How an AI Bust Would Worsen a Recession

A deflating AI bubble would add its own recessionary pressure on top:

• Wealth destruction. AI-inflated stock valuations have added trillions to household and institutional wealth. A significant correction would produce a negative wealth effect, reducing consumption.

• Tech sector layoffs at scale. A bust would mean mass layoffs concentrated in high-wage tech jobs — significant multiplier effects on local economies (especially SF Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, Austin).

• Banking/credit exposure. If lenders have significant exposure to AI startups or data center buildout debt, defaults could tighten credit conditions more broadly.

• Collapse of the “picks and shovels” trade. Nvidia, TSMC suppliers, data center REITs, and energy companies that bet on AI demand would suffer, spreading the pain across sector

The Combined Feedback Loop

The dangerous dynamic is the doom loop:

Recession → reduced AI revenue → AI valuations fall → wealth effect worsens recession → more corporate belt-tightening → further AI spending cuts → deeper bust

This is structurally similar to what happened with the dot-com crash (2000-2002), where a broader economic slowdown and a tech bubble burst were mutually reinforcing — though that recession was relatively mild. The better (worse) analogy might be Japan’s 1990s “Lost Decade,” where an asset bubble burst coincided with structural economic stress.

(snip)

The Key Uncertainty

The critical variable is how much of AI’s current valuation reflects real productivity gains vs. pure speculation. If AI is genuinely transforming enterprise productivity (evidence is mixed but growing), the bust would be shallower. If it’s mostly hype and the ROI isn’t materializing, the correction could be severe — closer to dot-com than a typical sector downturn.

Any questions? Um, yes: What does this have to do with Splitsville?

You mean, with our term of art denoting a situation in which a single geo-political entity harbors two or more distinct “nations”?

Glad you asked. In one of our many nations are people who live in fear of a Trump recession. (Count us in.) In another are those who live in fear of the AI bubble bursting. (We’re agnostic.) In a third are people who expect the recession but think that, eventually, AI will usher in a glorious era of prosperity for all. (We think those people are, at best, nuts, and, at worst, liars. They’re the very people who fight tooth and nail to keep corporations from having to pay taxes. Are they going to support a Universal Basic Income distributed to everyone made unemployed by AI? As if.) And finally there are those, as always, who don’t think about any of this.

Oh, wait. There’s one more. There’s the MAGA die-hards, who still think Donald Trump is going to usher in a new Golden Age. Don’t get us started.

OKAY, DON’T READ THE SPLIT. HAVE SOMEONE READ IT TO YOU.

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[Guaranteed 100% AI-free.]

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?

NOW DO YOU WANT THE BLUE STATES TO SPLIT OFF FROM THE RED?

In THE SPLIT, they do!

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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:

BUY AND READ THE SPLIT. THEN BUY AND READ IT AGAIN. THANKS.

Here.

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