Well, here we are now, one year into the second four-year term of a president who, if he must say so himself, is the most powerful superlative magnet the human race has ever seen. Not even his worst, most hateful critics—a category in which we must declare a certain interest—can deny it.
Who, in recorded history, has ever done more to aggrandize himself? No one. If anyone had, his name—it would have to have been a man, after all—would be on everyone’s lips, and we would know it by the vigorous wiping of those lips to remove it.
He is the biggest. Taft might have been bigger, technically, but no one remembers him so he doesn’t count.
He is the most. He is the personification of the remark often credited to Eisenhower, “Ihings are more like they are now than they have ever been.”
He is the only. No one else would even try to compete with him. Even stupid people would know better than that.
He is the first. No one ever thought of doing what he does. Maybe we’ve just been lucky, who knows?
He is the last. At least, on the one hand, so we hope.
On the other hand—not to get too serious, here, because things are far too serious already—this is also what we fear.
The as-yet-unchecked Mr. Superlative, whose internal filters have obviously eroded thanks to a lifetime spent surrounding himself with sycophantic mediocrities, recently confessed to the New York Times that he’s ready to wreck NATO because U.S. ownership of Greenland is something “I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
In an interview Monday on NPR, Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware met this historical moment with an astute and concise declarative statement:
“Frankly, that’s nuts.”
Coons is absolutely right. But, as every passing day makes clearer, being right means nothing. In fact, all too soon, nothing will mean anything any more, thanks to AI.
About five billion people—more than 60 percent of humanity—may now, if they wish, watch polar bears wielding AK-47s joining harpoon-toting, cigar-smoking walruses, riding along in Greenlanders’ pickup trucks as they rally to defend their country.
It’s all a joke, of course, and a good one. It’s hard to miss when the butt of the joke is a purported leader of the free world who’s been acting like a jerk. When a little guy mocks a big guy, comedians call that punching up. Most people find that funny because they can identify with the little guy.
Authoritarians and their worshipers have a word for punching up. They call it treason. A good time, for them, is watching the big guy crush whoever was the last little guy they were told to hate. Perhaps this phenomenon explains the dearth of funny right wing comedians.
Let us extricate ourselves from this digression with a distressing prediction. Any day now, we could be inundated by a wave of AI-generated videos, produced by basement-dwelling White House trolls, realistic enough to fool viewers across the political spectrum. Designed to convert Second Amendment fanatics into full-blown brownshirts, they might show non-existent, stereotypical, swarthy Antifa terrorists doing unspeakable things to blonde-haired, blue-eyes Nordic maidens. The ensuing havoc would make January 6th look like a church picnic.
Should such a thing happen in a sane world, the Department of Homeland Security would step in and restore order. We do not, unfortunately, live in such a world. Worse yet, Kristi Noem is the Secretary of that department. There is much that can be said about Noem. None of it is nice, but this is a newspaper, not a lesson in etiquette.
She can’t seem to shake the rumor that she’s been having an extra-marital affair with her chief of staff, notorious Granite Stater Corey Lewandowski, since 2021. She is the poster girl for Mar-a-Lago Face. She has confessed to shooting her own dog. None of these things, individually, are any of our business. Taken together, though, they create a clear pattern of extremely dubious judgment.
More relevant and more troubling is how she relishes using her position to engage in Nazi cosplay. Her podium bears the Third Reich slogan: “One Of Ours, All Of Yours.”
A few days ago her boss ordered two battalions of the 11th Airborne, based in Alaska, to prepare to invade for deployment to Minneapolis—which is now spelled R-E-I-C-H-S-T-A-G.
Just as war with our NATO allies would wreak havoc on the global economy, so will the civil war our Peace Prize-coveting President has been fomenting.
Just to be sure, though, and maximize the damage, he wants to replace the Federal Reserve Chairman with an Interest Rate Dial on the Resolute desk, right next to the Diet Coke button.
Oh, for the days when one could say, “Things are going to get worse before they get better.”
Now, in this Doc Brown moment, all we can honestly say, is “Things are going to get weirder. Then they’ll probably get weirder than that.”