It has been a tough fortnight for THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD.
We say this not because we have any sympathy for the former reality television “personality” who now holds the fate of 8.2 billion people in his greedy little hands. No, just as anyone else would if they were so unfortunate as to find themselves in a confined space with a heavily-armed psychopath, we’re just trying to gauge our chances of survival. Since it has long been the privilege and the duty of the editor of a publication to offer perspective, we must say we are disappointed that, after 13.8 billion years, this is what the universe has come up with.
His biographers have written that happiest times THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD ever spent were at the New York Military Academy. It is no wonder. He got to bully younger cadets, and he was able to dress up in a fancy uniform, resplendent with every imaginable comic opera accessory: medals, epauletes, and braids, sash and sword, shako and plume.
So last Saturday, his 79th birthday, with the U.S. Army staging a parade on his command, should have been a moment of nearly-orgasmic fulfillment for THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD. And yet it was not. Soldiers in formation were out of step, troops in tanks were waving at the crowd and smiling, and the stands weren’t full because security measures made it hard to get in. Someone calling herself @SundaeDivine summed it up this way: “Schrödinger’s parade—the crowd was both sparse and dense.”
Worst of all, it was boring. The guest of honor himself appeared to be nodding off. According to news accounts, the most energy he showed that day was during a phone call reaming out the Secretary of Defense. The soldiers were “hamming it up,” he is said to have complained, instead of looking “menacing.”
Another apparent failure—presuming that it was real—was a parade-related Craigslist ad. An entity calling itself “T-Mellon Events”—no doubt a reference to former local railroad magnate and top campaign donor Timothy Mellon—offering to pay $1,000 in cryptocoin for “Seat Fillers” at the event. That ad may have been bogus, but a very real sponsor of the parade was the cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase.
Just as, in the 1750s, we never bothered to delve into the theory that fire was a manifestation of a substance called phlogiston, so we have done our best—other than to decry its horrendous environmental impact—to ignore cryptocurrency. Because Coinbase sponsored the June 14th parade, though, we sniffed around on it a little bit. Here is a real listing we found: “FARTCOIN is currently trading at $1.24. Fartcoin has seen a 6% increase from its 24-hour price of $1.17, and is 18% up from its week-ago value of $1.05. Fartcoin hit its all-time high of $2.52 on January 19, 2025…”—the day before the inauguration.
In other fake money news, the newest member of Coinbase’s “global advisory council” is David Plouffe, an advisor on the 2024 Harris campaign, and manager of the 2008 Obama campaign. But we digress. Forgive us. It’s just so easy to get sidetracked when we really ought to focus on whether the guy in the cartoon holding up the sign is finally right and the end of the world is, in fact, coming.
As noted above, our current catastrophe is billions of years in the making. That said, a few recent moments deserve attention. Seventy years ago the Dulles brothers staged a coup in Iran. They were acting either in their official capacities as Secretary of State and CIA Director, or as henchmen for the corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. It doesn’t much matter which, since our government is forever on the side of capital.
Democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was on Iran’s side, not Wall Street’s, so obviously he had to go. In came the more-compliant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Sadly, no matter how many of them he jailed and tortured, the Shah’s people failed in their duty to love him. Religious fanatics hung up an “Under New Management” sign—an affront for which the U.S. will never forgive them.
Iranians understand nuclear deterrence. They also know what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they foreswore nukes. So it wasn’t easy to get them to sign the JCPOA nuclear deal. After it took effect in January, 2016, Iran had no uranium centrifuges. Zero.
Later that year Americans elected THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD, who blew up the nuke deal in 2018 because it had Nobel-winner Barack Obama’s name on it, not his.
Inexplicably elected again in 2024, he found himself facing yet another mess of his own making, i.e., Iran, with 15,000 uranium centrifuges. Cranky after a disappointing parade, and jealous Bibi Netanyahu’s fawning press, MOST IMPORTANT ignored Congress, dropped half the U.S.’s inventory of GBU-57 “bunker busters,” and declared that Iran’s nuke program had been “obliterated.”
If we were to take “obliterated” to mean “delayed for a few months,” we could say he wasn’t lying.