The Grotty Old Perverts have dropped all pretense. Attempting to dodge an all-but-certain electoral catastrophe in the 2026 mid-term elections, Texas is stealing the House of Representatives before our very eyes. Meanwhile, Ol’ Grabby Grandpa is dancing—we use that term loosely—on the roof of the White House, demonstrating that there are no limits to what he’ll do to distract public attention from the Epstein files.
In the past, from time to time, we have used hyperbole to make certain points. Let us—to paraphrase an earlier criminal Republican president from a more innocent era, whose unjustified rehabilitation helped set us on the dismal road to today’s amoral abyss—be perfectly clear: the paragraph above is simply stating the facts.
A thousand years passed before Gibbon eventually wrote the definitive history of the Fall of Rome. We don’t have a thousand years. Hell, with the climate deteriorating at the rate it is, we’ll be lucky if we have ten. So—with the understanding that we haven’t the staff, the stomach, nor the space to make a full accounting here—let’s get down to a few curated, perhaps idiosyncratic, and certainly sordid details.
Incredibly, Donald John Trump—liar, wage thief, contract breaker, business failure, fortune squanderer, tax cheat, casino bankrupter, double-digit felon—is the President of the United States. Oddly, he also seems to think that he’s the president of Brazil, or a member of its Supreme Court. Maybe both; with him, you never know. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Alexandre de Moraes, who actually hold those offices, are lawfully overseeing the prosecution of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
On January 8, 2023—two years and two days after President Trump laid down the template—Bolsonaro exhorted a mob of his followers to attack and violently overthrow that country’s government. Deeply hurt by the sight of a friend and fellow autocrat being held to account for crimes so similar to his own, our President called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt,” and slapped a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil.
The upshot: U.S. consumers will pay more for coffee because another country has the gall to let the law take its course. Sure it’s bizarre, stupid, and unseemly. Look at it from the President’s perspective, though. If Bolsonaro were ever brought to justice, it would set a terrible precedent. What if it happened here?
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, according to whoever wrote Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, Part One. Our current president does not wear a crown to bed, at least to our knowledge—though something equally peculiar does reside atop his skull around the clock, the maintenance of which reportedly takes up a significant part of his day. Some would say, not enough.
If you rule like a monarch, you should live like one. Hence the president’s plan to add a Versailles wing to the White House. In a rare display of modesty, the 90,000 square foot addition will be a little less than twice the size of the White House, which, according to Wikipedia, has a floor area of 55,000 square feet. An artist’s rendering shows a white, coffered ceiling trimmed with gold, gold chandeliers, gold chairs, with a scattering of gold thingamajigs on white tablecloths.
Ballrooms are, of course, only used on special occasions. Fortunately, the space is suitable for other uses. It could, for example, be filled with slot machines, and billed as Trump Taj Mahal II. With the destruction of the Rose Garden now complete—it’s been paved over and surrounded with “stars and stripes”-styled drainage tiles, so that visitors may now tread upon something reminiscent of the U.S. flag—construction is set to begin next month.
“Gracious sakes,” the editor wrote, channeling his inner Donald Rumsfeld, “where has the space gone?” We’re down to a quarter tank, to use an automotive metaphor, and we haven’t written a word about the administration’s plan to amplify global warming by destroying the Orbiting Carbon Observatories. Not a word yet about RFK Jr. condemning generations to needless suffering by banjaxxing research into mRNA vaccines. The latest job stats were in the tank, so the messenger’s been shot. And what about that ridiculous airplane we’re going to waste $1 billion on, then let The Donald fly away in—talk about a golden parachute!
Trump is suing Rupert for $20 billion over a Wall Street Journal story which reported that he sent a lewd birthday greeting to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Smut connoisseurs salivating over the discovery process will have to wait, though, an agreement has put the depositions on hold.
In other sketchy legal maneuvers, a Deputy AG, who is, coincidentally Trump’s former personal lawyer, interviewed Epstein’s procuress, Ghislaine Maxwell, in her fetid Florida dungeon. Maxwell was quickly transferred, contrary to prison regulations, to a low-security “country club” in Texas.
In unrelated news, Liam Neeson will soon appear as Frank Drebin, Jr., in a remake of “Naked Gun,” perhaps to deliver the immortal line, “Nothing to see here.”