Nine hundred years ago, Henry of Huntingdon wrote of King Canute, a Dane who had ruled England about a century before.
Canute, in Henry’s telling, had his throne carried down to the seashore, where he then commanded the incoming tide to stop advancing before it reached him.
Spoiler alert: the tide did not stop.
Tides come and go, but that story has remained. So it goes with many stories that are open to interpretation. A fool might think that the story shows King Canute to be a wet-footed fool. That ancient monarch knew, though, where his powers ended. He was just trying to drive some sense into the sycophants who surrounded him.
To this day, Canute is remembered as a wise man who was immune to flattery. Today, it’s fair to say, we’re ruled by a fool for whom flattery is the very breath of life.
How dare we call him a fool? What else can you call a man who says “there is no ‘b’ in ‘dumb,’ and expects us to receive like that as a revelation.
One could wonder what our descendants might think of him—and us—a thousand years from now. That feels like a pointless exercise, though. The way things have been going, we can barely imagine making it to January 20, 2029—and even that prospect is fraught.
Consider how our Tormentor-in-Chief spends his days: eating garbage, swilling Diet Coke, and napping while his cabinet member drone on about his purported greatness. Then he rage-posts half the night. What can be keeping him alive? Must be the annual “physicals” he has every six weeks.
Hey, why not? We’ve had 1,000-year floods on an annual basis lately. The man who made Liberace seem less weird is currently having a bunker built under what had been the East Wing of what we might as well start calling The Gold House. Is he above ordering the Army Corps of Engineers to empty Fort Knox? Scrooge McDuck-like, he’ll drool over gold bars from the comfort of the furniture he’s been snatching from Melania’s pied-à-terre, elsewhere in The Residence.
Far-fetched? Sure. Have you read the news, though, lately? Last week NPR reported that “The National Guard will remain deployed in Washington, D.C., through Inauguration Day 2029 as part of President Trump’s anti-crime mission in the city, unless the president deems otherwise….”
“[U]nless the president deems otherwise….” There’s cold comfort. He told The New York Times in January, there is one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
As NPR pointed out, the Guard troops were deployed in August, 2025, in response to a “crime emergency” declared by the President, when “violent crime in the city [was] hitting a 30-year low.” The populace at large, and the news media in particular, have been so thoroughly pummeled by now that contradictions such as these barely raise an eyebrow, except among unregenerate cranks like ourselves.
Fortunately the occasional respectable person, such as Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of Liberty and National Security at the Brennan Center for Justice, will weigh in. She told NPR, “An emergency is a sudden, unforeseen, and temporary state of affairs. Announcing that an emergency will last for another 2 1/2 years means it’s not an emergency.”
And whence cometh all these armed soldiers patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital? An analysis by PeoplesWorld.org, successor to the Daily Worker, reveals that more than 82 percent come from red states.
The Congressional Budget Office has calculated the cost of this al fresco security theatre at $3 million per day. The Project on Government Oversight told NPR that the total tab, through the inauguration, could run between $2.5 and $3.4 billion. Good thing we’ve got a budget surplus and money to spare… right?
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the planet, it seems like our active duty troops, who are housed in flimsy trailers, are getting low on defensive munitions. It’s hard to tell for sure, of course, because Pete Hegseth doesn’t think the public has a right to know.
The President said Tuesday he would leave the White House for a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for three soldiers killed in Jordan. “[I]t’s a great honor for me to do it,” he said ambiguously.
Normal, functioning human beings are too self-conscious to spontaneously utter, in front of network TV cameras, whatever random thoughts might be flitting through their brains. Not this guy. He’s on tape pondering out loud whether or not he’ll get to go to heaven. From this we know that, while he is stone blind to irony, he is aware, at least on some level, that he is not immortal.
Will this Elvis/Liberace hybrid ever leave that building? Or does he plan to entomb himself therein, surrounded by bricks of gold?
Only time will tell. Meanwhile, for your health, remember: skip the veggies to avoid explosive diarrhea. And don’t breath the air—it’ll give you a heart attack.