Splitsville CHECK, PLEASE

The Utterly Exhausted Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

That’s it. We give up.

We have concluded not only that the biggest danger to the United States of America and all its citizens is Donald Trump but that persons and institutions capable of protecting us from him refuse to do so. Why? Oh, you know—the usual: greed, ambition, cowardice, stupidity, all that good stuff.

It’s bad enough that no one has the courage to tell the emperor that he’s naked. What we have here is a situation in which the emperor is a cruel, fat, stupid buffoon (and a pathological liar) who, rather than just swan around from time to time, insists on shoving his bloated (and, by all accounts, malodorous) nakedness in our faces all day every day.

None of this is new, and yes, we’ve been saying for months that it will only get worse. But Jesus Christ on a cupcake, look at this. It’s what Trump posted this past Sunday. The rundown was created by Harry Sisson and comes to us via the excellent Ten Grain and his blog Mock Paper Scissors. Notice how the first two occurred before noon, and all the others were sent in just under two hours.

11:16 AM - AI photo of Kaitlan Collins as Dylan Mulvaney
11:43 AM - AI image attacking Bruce Springsteen
3:22 PM - An AI art installation of Trump throwing a ‘Trump 2028’ hat
3:23 PM - Photo of him standing next to a TV with Biden’s final Oval Office address playing
3:23 PM - AI art of him giving his speech at the WHCD
3:23 PM - AI photo of Chris Christie fighting Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler
3:23 PM - AI image attacking Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert
3:24 PM - Trump 2028 poster that says “give the enemy nightmares.”
3:24 PM - AI image attacking Rosie O’Donnell
3:25 PM - Fake movie poster of him in Star Trek
3:25 PM - Another Trump 2028 poster
3:31 PM - AI poster of the U.S. attacking Kharg Island in Iran
3:31 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker
3:32 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x2
3:33 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x3
3:47 PM - Posts an AI image of an Iranian ship being blown up
4:36 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x4
4:36 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x5
4:37 PM - AI image of him taking over an Iranian oil tanker x6
4:39 PM - AI image of him cosplaying as a Navy Commander
4:39 PM - AI image of him smoking a cigar wearing a Trump 2028 hat
4:40 PM - AI poster of him with founding fathers
4:41 PM - Poster of himself saying “the man who saved America”
4:41 PM - Weird photo of him standing behind a pillar
4:45 PM - AI image of himself saying “Guardians of the world”
4:47 PM - AI image of American jets saying “Guardian Angels of the world”
4:48 PM - Another AI photo of an Iranian ship being blown up
4:49 PM - AI image of himself saying “Guardians of the world” x2
4:52 PM - AI photo of lightning over the Capitol building saying “panic in DC”
4:53 PM - A photo of himself saying “plan trusted”
4:54 PM - AI image of an eagle and a jet saying “America is back”
4:54 PM - AI photo of a beach saying “Trump’s America”
4:55 PM - Photo of him giving a speech
4:56 PM - Photo of himself pointing at members of his cabinet
4:57 PM - AI photo of himself and JFK
4:58 PM - Fake photo of himself wearing a pink Trump 2028 hat
4:59 PM - AI photo of a Trump 2028 mug surrounded by crying people
4:59 PM - Photo of him putting on his Trump 2028 hat at the WHCD
5:00 PM – [Post of a] graph downplaying American casualties in Iran
5:01 PM - AI photo of an air filter between the United States and Canada
5:04 PM – [Attack on] Republican Senator John Thune
5:04 PM - AI image of him as a doctor
5:16 PM - Fake movie poster of him and George Washington in a time travel movie

This is not just crazy. This is not merely insane. This is totally nutz. And, as we always do when citing Trump’s advancing dementia, we must point out its dual nature. One aspect of this spectacle is the thing itself—the grandiosity, the acting out, the taunting, the sheer fat-slob piggishness of it all. And the volume of it—forty-one samples of AI slop in less than two hours. That’s about one every three minutes. What kind of damaged psyche wants to do this? What kind of person decides to issue AI representations of anything, every three minutes, for two hours? What kind of employee flamboyantly demonstrates, on a daily basis, to his employers (us), that he doesn’t do any real work?

But the other aspect, in addition to the impulse, concerns expectation: What did he think the world’s reaction to this would be? Admiration? Applause? The cheers of the MAGA faithful, on whom he would not piss if they were on fire? The owning of the libs shocked at the stunningly bad taste of it all?

There is no sane answer to that question. There is no good reason to do something like this. We may all have slightly differing understandings of what we mean by “crazy,” but there is no doubt that what Donald Trump spent this past Sunday doing was completely mad.

Yet even that isn’t what has driven us to give up, to throw in the towel, to fold, to raise the white flag, to blink, to admit complete, utter, and humiliating defeat. Because, really, what else is new? He’s been acting unhinged for months. Possibly since forever. Recall that he recently announced that he had “stopped the war between Cambodia and Armenia,” countries which are 4,000 miles apart and who were not at war. The status of his (pointless, idiotic, illegal) war in Iran changes daily. As this was being written, Trump announced, “Anytime you see windmills, you see a failing country.”

IT’S NATIONAL CHEESECAKE DAY. IT’S ALSO PAPERBACK BOOK DAY. SO BUY THE SPLIT EITHER IN PAPERBACK OR IN CHEESECAKE.

We already know you can’t believe a word he says and that he is morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically incapable of telling the truth. We already know he is surrounded by people who support his obsessions and shield him from reality itself. His innate incapacity, his psychological inability to interact with the real world, is therefore sustained and encouraged by those around him. The result—and this is no news to you—is that the President of the United States is a delusional maniac. Oh, and, just FYI: he’s a maniac who’s conducting a war.

To which we know you respond with a resounding “duh.” Yes, granted. Duh. That’s not what is so dispiriting. What is dispiriting, what makes us want to give up, go off the grid, and bury our heads in the sand is the question suggested by that maniacal spew of AI images on Sunday. Look at it again. It’s not just an impulsive burst of three or four childish ideas. It’s a two-hour fusillade conducted by someone completely oblivious, not just of what it implies, but what it proves.

Then ask yourself, “What is it going to take for non-insane people in authority to remove this insane man creature from power?”

Of course we know what the default answer is: “the use of a nuclear weapon.” Whether aimed at Iran, Minneapolis, or Rosie O’Donnell, only then will (some) Republicans, and the mainstream media, decide that he, and this lunacy, have gone too far. Only then will feckless Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries take their eyes off the kitchen table and address the issue of the maniac at the Resolute Desk.

And, of course, by then it will be too late. It’s already too late for many families—those of the fishermen murdered in the Caribbean, those of the hundreds of thousands of Africans starved by DOGE, those of citizens and immigrants killed by ICE, those of the schoolchildren in that bombed school in Iran, those of the thousands of other Iranian civilians killed in his war-crime-a-thon, those of the American service people killed in action (whose number Trump is trying desperately to conceal). Meanwhile, does anyone here think Trump doesn’t want to use a nuclear weapon? Does anyone think Pete Hegseth won’t eagerly obey such an order?

What we’re saying is, if this AI spew isn’t dispositive proof that Donald Trump is significantly demented, and that attention must be paid, then we don’t know what to tell you. Although, wait. Actually, we do know what to tell you.

It—life itself—is now exhausting. The injustice of it all. The naked, proud greed of it all. The blatant corruption of the entire administration and its hangers-on. The vile racism. The stupid, short-sighted crippling of agencies from the NSF to NASA. The imbecilic architectural projects. The ubiquitous gold clutter. The open bribery. The pardoning of criminals. The pointless war and its hobbling of the global economy. The obvious mental dysfunction. The constant lying from Trump and his surrogates, with no pushback from the press. (When, on Meet the Press, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz was asked by the frequently-useless Kristin Welker about US weapons stockpiles being depleted by the war in Iran, Waltz explained that a) the depletion was Joe Biden’s fault, and b) the weapons stockpile is not depleted. Welker did not respond to that as she should have: by standing, pointing to an exit, and saying, “Get your ass out of here, you worthless lying fuckhead.” Maybe next time.)

Put them all to-geth-er, they spell Splitsville, our term, of art for a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In this version, one nation consists of us and everyone else who is as exhausted as we are. The other nation is everybody who isn’t exhausted and dispirited and disgusted and who, quite frankly, can go fuck themselves.

And so we beat on (and sometimes beat off), boats against the current. Except no more. It’s too much. Wake us up when he’s dead. Until then, we can’t go on. We can’t go on.

What?

“You must go on.”

We can’t go on. We’ll go on.

IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW. IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOU DON’T KNOW. BUT YOU ALSO DON’T KNOW YOU DON’T KNOW, YOU KNOW? SO BUY THE SPLIT. BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW.