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Yesterday was one of those days where everything felt like too much.
It was hot as balls here in Jersey. The air was so thick it felt like somebody wrapped the entire state in a damp wool blanket and forgot to take it off. My Twitter account got hacked and then, thank God, restored, though I can’t say the hours in between did wonders for my blood pressure. And every time I picked up my phone, there was another fresh hell climbing over the previous day’s fresh hell like shoppers trampling each other at a Black Friday sale.
They’re STILL hiding the Epstein files, despite a law requiring their full release.
There’s a tarp over the White House now. An actual tarp, draped across the front of the building. God only knows what Knockoff Nero is doing to the place this time.
I get why stories disappear.
I get why our attention spans have become triage units.
There is simply too much.
A handful of massively consequential stories broke this week and they aren’t even making a dent in this dystopian hellscape of a timeline.
Last week, that melon-hued madman denied $227 million in disaster aid to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Four states still dealing with the aftermath of the February blizzard that buried the Northeast under record snowfall and hurricane-force winds, snapping trees and power lines and plunging nearly 300,000 people into the dark. All four past the damage threshold that’s supposed to trigger federal help. Two days earlier, he approved aid for six Republican-led states and spent the announcement praising their “incredible Patriots.”
Under this malevolent mob boss moron, a blue state’s request for disaster relief gets approved 23 percent of the time. A red state’s? 89 percent. It is now three times harder to get help from your own federal government if your governor happens to be a Democrat.
And last month, FEMA announced it will withhold 20 percent of its antiterrorism grants, more than a billion dollars meant to protect subways, stadiums, and crowded public places, from any state that refuses to rewrite its voting rules the way he wants them written. Purge your rolls. Verify citizenship.
Do it his way, or the TAXPAYER money that keeps your commuters safe stays in HIS pocket.
This shit is so grotesque, so morally deformed, so fundamentally incompatible with the presidency that I honestly don’t know how every television network in America isn’t leading with them tonight and every night.
Donald Trump is a sick motherfucker.
How many fucking times does he have to tell us who he is before the cult finally believes him? How many times does he have to peel back another layer of himself, revealing the same shriveled, spite-soaked hollow where a soul should be?
Nobody is waiting for the other Trump to show up. Not one living person is holding out for some undiscovered vein of benevolence buried beneath the bronzer. Not his critics. Not his most fervent supporters. Not at this fucking point.
They know he’s not decent. They know the mendacity is the whole operating system, not a glitch in it. They know he’s a grievance-gorged, gilt-gaudy cathedral of cruelty, a bile-belching basilica of bullshit, a petulance-powered, pity-proof resentment refinery masquerading as a human being, forever feeding every imagined insult into the blast furnace of his own vanity until it comes roaring back as another loyalty test, another theatrical tantrum, another demand that the rest of humanity rearrange itself around the fragile architecture of his feelings.
He’s spent a lifetime converting perceived slights into political fuel, polishing petty affronts until they gleam like vendetta-varnished family heirlooms, mistaking domination for leadership, intimidation for strength, obedience for patriotism, applause for love, and vengeance for justice, dragging the rest of us behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a getaway car while insisting the deafening racket is the sound of greatness.
And somewhere along the way, millions of people convinced themselves that as long as the punishment kept falling on somebody else, the immigrants, the liberals, the blue states, the people they didn’t like, it wasn’t really punishment at all. It was entertainment. It was justice. It was somebody else’s problem.
Except resentment doesn’t respect property lines. Vindictiveness doesn’t stop at county borders. Sooner or later the fire reaches neighborhoods that thought they were standing safely upwind.
That’s the thing about fires.
They never stay where you lit them.
And none of this is new. It’s a pattern stretching back years, visible from space.
In the first season of this shitshow, he ignored Washington state’s request for wildfire relief because he was nursing a personal feud with the governor. He threatened to strip New York City, the city he used to call home, the city he once claimed he helped clear rubble in after September 11th, of its counterterrorism funding. He is now rejecting disaster aid for Democratic-led states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of FEMA, blocking a quarter of a billion dollars that every previous president, including the first-term version of himself, would have approved.
Disaster relief.
Counterterrorism.
The safety of actual human beings, dragged into one man’s endless catalogue of enemies, blood feuds, and compulsive need to dominate every room he walks into.
Remember what he did during COVID, when he wasn’t golfing or watching TV or tweeting or predicting a deadly global pandemic would “miraculously go away” with the warmer weather?
He stood in front of cameras telling governors they needed to “treat us well” if they wanted help from the federal government.
Treat.
Us.
Well.
Families were saying goodbye over FaceTime because they weren’t allowed inside hospital rooms. Doctors and nurses sleepwalked through shifts that felt less like medicine than triage in a war zone. Refrigerated trucks became morgues. And the President of the United States stood at a podium dangling life-saving federal assistance like a carrot in front of people who were literally fighting for their next breath.
The carrot was never the point.
The performance was.
He wanted governors groveling on national television. This kowtow-craving, genuflection-junkie of a president wanted an entire country to understand, in its bones, that survival itself now flowed through him — that the hose ran through his hands, and he could crimp it shut any time the mood struck.
And we’re not guessing about the rot. His own people said it out loud.
In the spring of 2020, Jared Kushner’s shadow task force built a national testing plan. Real logistics. Real experts. Ready to launch. Then it vanished into thin air. According to Vanity Fair’s reporting, someone on that team argued a national plan made no political sense because the virus was tearing through blue states, or and if the bodies kept piling up, “they could blame those governors.”
Those bodies weren’t data points. That was somebody’s grandmother suffocating in a hallway bed in Elmhurst. Somebody’s father. Somebody’s bus driver, somebody’s nurse, somebody’s kid’s third-grade teacher. And a roomful of smug, unelected failsons looked at all of that dying and saw a messaging opportunity.
That should have stopped the country cold. That should have been the moment every Republican with a functioning conscience stood up and said, “Enough.”
Instead, here we are. Again. The same instinct. The same poisonous puerility. The same venal arithmetic. The same depraved appetite.
We’ve watched him nurse his grudges the way gardeners tend roses. Watering them. Pruning them. Protecting them. Waiting patiently for the next bloom of outrage, and greeting every human tragedy with the only question he has ever asked: “How can this serve me?”
He mistakes the presidency for a mirror, and he has discovered that the mirror flatters him most when somebody in the glass is on their knees.
The Lilliputian smallness of it. The emotional circumference of a man whose inner world is so cramped, so claustrophobic, so stupefyingly solipsistic that an entire nation can be on fire and he can’t see anything past his own face in the smoke.
What kind of human being looks at a family standing in the ashes of everything they own, looks at a city that carries the scars of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, looks at communities praying for help… and sees another opportunity to settle a score?
I’ll tell you what kind.
A sociopath.
Not the internet-diagnosis kind. The textbook kind. The kind who experiences other people’s agony as leverage and other people’s terror as tribute. The kind for whom a mother weeping on the news isn’t a tragedy, it’s a proof of concept.
And it’s not that he doesn’t give a fuck. Indifference would be an upgrade. Indifference just means the machine runs with nobody at the wheel.
Somebody’s at the wheel.
And he’s aiming.
What we have is a creature that savors it. A connoisseur of other people’s desperation. A smirking sommelier of sorrow, swirling each misery-marinated calamity around, nosing it, checking whether it serves him.
He gets off on holding life and death in those twisted little hands and feeling their weight. He gets off on the sight of proud people begging, on making governors audition for oxygen, on an entire republic shrunk to an antechamber where he alone chooses whose name gets called.
The pleading isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of his policies. The pleading is the product. The whole grotesque apparatus exists to manufacture one thing: the ghoulish delectation of a small, broken, malignant thing as his countrymen discover that staying alive is now a favor.
That’s not politics.
That’s not even corruption.
That’s pathology in a flag pin. Malice with a motorcade.
And the entire hostage scheme depends on one filthy little fiction: that this country comes in two colors. That there are red states full of patriots and blue states full of enemies, and the map tells him who deserves saving.
We need to stop calling them “blue states.”
I’m in New Jersey. Technically a blue state. I’m surrounded by Trump voters every single day. Millions of Republicans live in California. Millions of Democrats live in Texas. Millions of independents live everywhere.
Wildfires don’t stop to ask how you voted.
Floods don’t care which cable network you watch.
Terrorists don’t check your voter registration.
Viruses don’t ask whose flag hangs from your front porch.
Catastrophe has never been partisan. Compassion isn’t supposed to be either.
Families who lost everything to the flames. Parents digging through floodwater looking for photographs they’ll never get back. Hungry children here at home. Schoolgirls overseas caught beneath bombs. Commuters climbing onto trains in New York City trusting that somebody, somewhere, is taking their safety seriously.
To him, every last one of them is a chip to be played. Whose kid is crying, whose home is underwater, whose town is smoldering, whose family is shattered — these aren’t tragedies to him. They’re inventory. Assets in the only ledger this carnage-collecting con man has ever kept, the one where every column adds up to the same merciless sum: who waits, who suffers, who comes crawling, and for how long.
The presidency isn’t supposed to work like that.
The oath of office isn’t a fucking revenge fantasy.
It isn’t a hit list with a letterhead.
It isn’t permission to make innocent Americans pay because you resent the way they voted.
It’s a promise.
A promise to protect the people who put you there…
AND the people who didn’t.
That’s the job.
That’s the whole fucking job.
Not revenge.
Not retribution.
Not punishment.
Protection.
Our presidents don’t have to be perfect. God knows none of them ever have been. They’ve lied. They’ve failed. They’ve disappointed us. They’ve made colossal mistakes. But at the very fucking least, they understood that when Americans are drowning, burning, grieving, starving, or burying their dead, the presidency is supposed to become a shelter.
Not a weapon.
And to every dumb fuck with his sunglasses on the back of his head and truck nuts dripping from his pickup, everyone who spent the last decade-plus convinced you were a diner at this restaurant, standing at the buffet of American cruelty with a plate in your hand, pointing at whoever looked appetizing…
The immigrants.
The liberals.
The people who don’t vote like you.
Or worship like you.
Or love like you.
Or look like you.
You thought you were the ones choosing who got eaten.
Wake the fuck up.
Because you’re on the goddamn menu too.
And with that, today’s song (one of my all-time favorites):
I love you guys!
Please stay safe out there! Stay strong, and stay connected to each other!!
💙 Jo
