TW Trumps Stupid Face

“Briefly offline for maintenance, check back later” said the webpage I tried to log into on my newly created wordpress account*. “Been there.” Thought I. But I have one hour of paid parking in which to force myself to sit down and write this newsletter. When I promised nine newsletters ago that this would be a weekly affair, I really hope by now we all understood that said promise was emptier than a hotel minbar when Pete Hegseth checks out. I will TRY, is what I meant. Sometimes, I will write something that is too personal to write about yet and have to scrap it or draft it. Sometimes I will write something that is just not good enough to publish instead of JUST good enough to publish, like my last three newsletters. Self doubt gets in the way, lack of inspiration and writers block take their turns at the wheel. C’est la vie. But it’s been too much time and I also need to get in the habit of forcing myself to write every day whether I send it to you or not so I have planted myself in a chair in a random Starbucks. Yes, that Starbucks (not the famous independent male deer rescue, Star Bucks). I don’t support Israel or anything, it’s just that all the other coffee shops are full of the worst Los Angeles conversations you have ever heard and today I need to actually focus on the thing I am doing and not someone named Gaele explaining why being the progeny of studio execs is really hard on their creative spirit. Sure, Gaele. So, between sips of the most sub-par matcha I have ever seen I will explain the news of the day. First up: Starbucks Matcha is Awful. Subhead: I am a matcha snob.

I have been following this reddit Sub called LeopardsAteMyFace that I might have mentioned here or on the stream or on the podcast. Basically it’s the collected regrets in headlines and screenshots of Trump voters having become the victims of the policies they voted for. It’s a pointless exercise in schadenfreude that I’ve become addicted to since the beginning of Trump 2.0. You look at every comment, every post, and expect to see that one observation that will make it all make sense. Scrolling in a futile attempt to satisfy the nausea of cognitive dissonance that accompanies any semblance of political awareness today. You get it! Recreation!

I woke up today to an alert from the sub with the headline “They did sign up for it actually” -Trump on my watch. Oh right, another thing I am doing for mY MeNtAL hEalTh is leaving my phone in any other room besides the bedroom when I retire, meaning I wake up and blearily stare at all the notifications on my wrist. It’s like trying to doomscroll through binoculars.

While browsing the Leopards sub I try really really hard to remember that cherry picked sob stories and gotchas from random idiots is not a reliable benchmark by which to gage public opinion. At the end of the day, you are either believing a made up Facebook post about a fictional farmer who has no future and is sad or just feeling smug about one random actual farmer’s misfortune. It’s not healthy, I ought to touch grass, etc. But today jumped the Leopard. I think the last decade has felt like a mental tug of war between which people to be more mad at: The oligarchs at the top who are doing the bad things, or the regular people who are facilitating it. Today felt like the rope snapped and I fell ass first into a pile of sad farmers. Simultaneously impoverished and spoiled, Americans drift along on a lazy river of New Deal policies that have been drying up for decades. Those decades were busy ones for the Federalist Society and other groups that were planning their oligarchic coup while democrats…I guess, didn’t plan a coup?** The gradual dismantling of the free press and the public education system is the result of a targeted strike on the self determination of working people. To blame those same working people for being uneducated and misinformed seemed cruel. But then, along came Trump, and a giant swath of those misinformed or intellectually impoverished people showed us the meaning of cruelty. A whole fuck ton of our neighbors and family members seem to have chosen meanness and base prejudice as their coping mechanism of choice for society’s ills, and it becomes harder and harder to feel for anyone who made such a choice.

There’s a thing you learn in improv 101 about constructing a playable comedic game. Either the world is crazy, and you are the one sane person (or you and a friend, which is called peas in a pod, mentioned for cute points), or you are the one crazy person and everyone else is sane. It’s like that with many SNL sketches: In the alien encounters sketches, the rule is that Kate McKinnon is crazy, and everyone else just reacts. Same with the George Washington Nate Bargatze sketch, Washington is the crazy one and everyone else just tries to keep up. In the Domingo sketch, the reverse is true. The whole world is in on Chloe Fineman cheating and only Andrew Dismukes as the groom thinks it’s weird. The concept is symmetrical and creates an automatic template for endless specifics that delight the audience.

In Trumpland, America is one large cacophonous improv team all playing different games. In one instance, we could all be the normal ones, and Trump is the crazy one, bulldozing international diplomacy on the world stage while Emmanuel Macron looks into the camera à la Jim Halpert. But also on the world stage during this terrible improv show you have MAGA, who never comes to practice but always gets to be in the show. An entire population of people hell bent on being as fucking nuts as possible. Wade into MAGA as a normal person and you’re the only sane one, and it’s funny as long as you’re Jordan Klepper and there’s a camera crew with you. But zoom out, and it’s chaos. A crazy guy at the top that is actually pretty funny, unintentionally, when he’s not destroying the fabric of society. Selling cars on the White House lawn is funny when no one is buying. A lot of people are buying. Not Teslas, lol, that ship has sailed. But they are buying crazy by the bushel, along with Trump coin, and they re making weird AI art where Jesus is side hugging Trump and he’s really tall for some reason. There’s a whole universe of crazy, and they are fucking up the sketch. This CANAF (Comedic Analogy No One Asked For) doesn’t even factor in the sycophants in the middle, that group of podcasters, broadcasters and congresspeople who seem to be either in on the joke or sincere, depending on the new cycle. It also doesn’t factor in the other “normal people” who voted for Trump who don’t really identify with MAGA. These people seem to be able to digest plenty of information the rest of us do: Traffic signals, erotic fairytales, whatever aluminum drinkware is the latest craze. Yet they are allergic to even the most basic factual information about politics and government. It’s a mess, and it hurts my comedy brain. So, when in an ABC New Interview with Terry Moran, Trump responded to voters concerns about higher prices as a result of his tariffs by saying “this is what I campaigned on”, It was a relief. Trump lies so frequently that even he might not believe it, but that doesn’t make it untrue. He campaigned on Tariffs, he said he would be a dictator. Even if you don’t get any of your news from anywhere except Truth social, you knew these things were at least a part of a plan. You did know, and you were warned. And to have the man himself all but admonish you on national television for not seeing this coming felt like a break in the chaos, however brief. For just a moment, MAGA is the weird one in a world that is otherwise sane.

It changes nothing, of course, except…well it changed that I had something to say this week that I felt was good enough for your eyeballs. But it’s part of the noise now. The Trump Admin does and says so many fucked up things every minute that it might seem as though there is no point in keeping up. And for sure, things get less attention than they would if they had the context of being one fucked up thing a month instead of 80. But they are still there, and they’re bells that you cannot unring. If I had a moment’s peace from it, and I can give that peace to you, then it matters.

*I made a WordPress account on my own merch shop wordpress site so that I can write my posts there instead of google docs, and so that you can have a place to read them that is not Patreon. I could have written them from the admin account, but it became complicated, so I made myself a new user just for writing. Guys I did it. I became my own employee. Fuck I gotta go, my boss is here.

**Sidenote: I GET being mad at democrats. There are like eight hundo reasons the Dems are fucking themselves over at any given second. But the other side has been driven by a set of villainous mad geniuses who have put in place an epic, decades long plan to take over the fucking galaxy and cement exactly what is happening now. And that is just…demonic. Democrats work with Republicans every day, and they don’t seem like demons probably to them. So, at least on being ready for a hostile coup that is basically an extension of the literal civil war, I give them a pass.