Splitsville ETERNAL INFLECTION

The Spiritually Exhausted Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

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?

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….