The Lunatic In The White House

Donald Trump is out of his fucking mind.

Holy shit.

When I finally sat my ass down last night after an entire weekend of softball and sunscreen and snacks and seventeen pointless errands that somehow required three trips to Target, the grocery store, the mall, the gym and yes, the liquor store (priorities, amirite), plus the specific soul-level exhaustion that comes from keeping children alive and pretending to be a functional adult, I made the mistake of opening my phone.

Friends.

What in the hot, Buckaroo Banzai bronzed hell.

Because while the rest of us were out here doing normal people shit, the so-called “leader of the free world,” the “commander in chief,” the supposed “steward” of this little democratic experiment of ours had apparently spent the entire fucking weekend careening into the abyss online and shit-posting self-aggrandizing hot garbage.

Fifty-two posts.

In six hours.

FIFTY. TWO.

(Screen grab credit Aaron Rupar)

A movie-poster meme casting himself as some legendary military commander. Memes of himself wiping his nose with the American flag. His face on a peace medal. One deeply weird airplanes-coming-out-of-his-body situation. Just relentless, needy, neon-lit narcissist theater from a seventy-nine-year-old president unraveling through whatever psychic paper cut the weekend handed him while the rest of us were yelling from softball bleachers and wondering why we somehow needed paper towels again.

I mean genuinely.

What the fuck.

Look, I’m not a horticulturist, but when my fifth orchid in a row shriveled into something resembling an abandoned beef-jerky shoelace, I knew the thing was probably fucking dead.

I’m not a mechanic, but when my Kia starts coughing, shuddering and making noises that sound expensive, metallic and vaguely accusatory, I know my car needs to go to the shop.

I’m not a dairy farmer, but I still know that when my milk is chunky, I should probably throw it out.

And while I may be a teeny bit crazy myself (that’s right, I said teeny bit and I’m sticking with it no matter what my friends and family say), I am definitely not a psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist or any other variety of professionally sanctioned “ist,” hell, I’m a mom and I’m not even an expert on my own kids, but when I watch a nearly eighty-year-old president spend days wallowing in self-aggrandizement, congratulating himself for cognitive screenings because he successfully identified a camel, a squirrel, a giraffe, whatever accidental petting zoo wandered into the anecdote that day, while stapling his own face onto Mount Rushmore like history is a clearance rack he plans to slap his name on, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is someone who is deeply, deeply fucked in the head.

I think we can all agree on that, right?

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Loco en la cabeza.

Bananagrams.

Several french fries short of a fucking Happy Meal.

The kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest crazy where the word “crazy” itself checks the schedule, sees what is happening, quietly backs out of the room and mutters, “Absolutely the fuck not. This is above my pay grade, bro.”

And while I don’t have an “ist” in my job title, I’ve lived a fairly long and deeply weird life full of folks much like the felon President, and I therefore also know that a level of fucked-in-the-headness like his ain’t perpetually on display unless there’s an accompanying metric fuckton of unresolved, unexplored, untreated psychological trauma brewing like a category 5 hurricane behind the scenes, but hardly out of view.

(Also one that’s extremely wet, from the standpoint of water).

To be more specific — Donald Trump is totally, irrevocably fucked up. I’m pretty sure we all know that by now.

You just don’t end up being the kind of person who can shrug off the deaths of thousands of Americans a day, the kind of person who can incite a deadly insurrection and then pardon everyone who participated and then promise to reward them with billions of our taxpayer dollars, unless something is big-time broken inside.

A lot of somethings.

Despite that fact, and coupled with a whole bunch of willfully stupid, smooth-brained, slack-jawed, grievance-gargling mouth breathers ignoring the evidence of their own eyes and ears and expecting him to “grow into the office,” and lower the price of fucking eggs and stop imaginary brown people from eating imaginary pets and imaginary trans girls from competing in imaginary softball games, he has somehow managed to ascend to the presidency AGAIN.

And as it turns out, things are going absolutely spectacularly. Everything is more expensive. We are embroiled in a protracted, illegal, unconstitutional war. Measles is making a comeback like it’s auditioning for a nostalgia tour nobody asked for. The White House currently looks like some kind of collision between the Beverly Hillbillies, Shameless and Breaking Bad, only with worse impulse control, more substance abuse, and a gift shop (correction: he tore the gift shop down for the Epstein ballroom), but I digress.

A clearly unstable sociopath (and this time, a 34 times convicted felon, adjudicated rapist business fraud) has once again been put in charge of our collective safety which is super inconvenient for all the parties involved because we very much want our collective to be safe, and he very much does not give a damn about any of it.

Remember — this whole shit sandwich is not only about Trump staying the fuck out of the pokey and stealing all of OUR money to enrich himself and his chinless spawn, but also about Trump exacting retribution on anyone and everyone who had anything to do with any consequences of any kind related to the traitorous and criminal things he got in trouble for doing.

He wants revenge on anyone who confirmed he lost in 2020, but this is about more than politics. Somewhere in there sits the boy daddy never praised, still trying to prove he matters.

It’s why he combs the 15 remaining hairs on his head into that weird ass straw bouffant, it’s why he paints himself orange, it’s why he wears a girdle and lifts in his shoes. It’s why he attacks people like John McCain. A man of genuine accomplishment and honor existing in Trump’s world is to him like being pantsed in front of everyone in the lunchroom every single day.

But the spectacle is not the story.

The chaos is the smoke.

The fire has been burning for decades.

For decades Donald Trump stayed juuust slippery enough to dodge humiliation. When legitimacy felt shaky, fake gold wandered in to solve the problem. Giant glowing letters. Decorative clutter with the aesthetic profile of a casino lobby trying desperately to convince you velvet rope equals Versailles. Rooms that look like somebody panic-shopped “wealth” at three in the morning while muttering, “More columns. More marble. More shiny shit. Make it scream billionaire.” When desirability felt shaky, fiction arrived carrying tabloid gossip, whispered fairy tales and the deeply weird little theater of calling newspapers pretending to be his own PR guy because admiration had to be confected, exaggerated, dramatically lit and repeatedly sold back to himself. When competence felt shaky, television rolled in with flattering light, dramatic music and a fake fucking boardroom where bluff briefly dressed itself up as brilliance and half the country briefly mistook performance for substance.

The entire tawdry operation.

A lifetime spent trying to silence the same unbearable noise.

No one wants you.

No one likes you.

You’re not smart.

You’re not strong.

You’re not special.

It’s why the towering letters matter. Why jackhammering his name onto things matters. Why the spray-tanned pageantry matters. Why the pompadoured cosplay matters. Why the whole gaudy, grasping, gold-plated grandpa circus matters. He spends an astonishing amount of psychic energy trying to convince himself, let alone everybody else, that the image still matches the carefully constructed fiction he has been selling to himself and to everyone else his entire adult life.

Because here is the thing about this particular pathology. It has always been the engine. Every grift, every glittering tower, every fake billionaire costume, every stolen valor, every cheat, every lie, every name hammered onto something he didn’t build and didn’t earn — all of it has been in service of drowning out that voice. The one that has been reverberating since his father looked at him and decided he needed to be fixed, sent away, broken down and rebuilt into something more acceptable.

That broken boy never left. He just got older and louder and angrier and meaner and sicker, and handed the keys, not once but twice, to the most powerful office on earth. And now, with his health cratering in ways he cannot hide and cannot outrun, with musician after musician publicly rejecting him — that old wound ripped open again, that old ache of not being wanted, not being chosen, not being enough — with the Kennedy Center excising his name from its walls like a splinter, like a stain, like something that was never supposed to be there, because it was never supposed to be there, the voice gets closer and closer and louder and louder. And it all screams the same thing it has always screamed:

I am somebody.

Aren’t I?

I’ll show you.

I’ll show them all.

Except the mirrors aren’t cooperating anymore. They stopped co-conspiring. He wakes up every morning and has to sit with himself — with whatever is going on with those blackened hands and swollen ankles and the neck rash and the sagging face and the much, much slower step that isn’t fooling anybody anymore, certainly not the voice beneath the bluster and the straw bouffant that has always been there, scratching at the walls, whispering the thing an incomprehensible amount of money and mayhem has never been able to drown out.

That he is not who he says he is.

That he never was.

And that alone — that singular, shattering recognition beginning to claw its way to the surface — is enough to send someone as broken as he is into a freefall the likes of which the world has never seen.

He hates that his name is being pulled off buildings, peeled away from borrowed glory, disentangled from legacies he never earned and only ever parasitized. He hates that the Kennedy memorial, soaked in the kind of genuine American reverence that no amount of burnished brass has ever been able to manufacture, doesn’t want his stupid fucking name on it. That the reflected glow of somebody the world actually loved, actually mourned, actually remembers, is not available for purchase or annexation.

He wants his face on the currency. He is building monuments to himself while he still has the power to make people build them, somewhere beneath the orange and the bombast and the bullshit knowing no one will honor him when he’s gone. That history, the real kind, the kind you cannot buy or bolt your name onto, reserves reverence for people who deserved it.

He is terrified of being remembered as what he actually is. A failed president. A national disgrace. That is why the Kennedy thing lands like a bruise. Because symbols sting when the story you want told about yourself starts slipping out of your hands.

He hates that every musician with a shred of self-respect has rejected him, turned down his small-in-the-pants party, refused to be associated with any of it — a rejection that lands exactly where all rejections have always landed, right on that same raw nerve, that same unhealed place.

He hates that Epstein won’t stay buried. He hates being trapped in a war of his own making, cornered by consequences he cannot bully or browbeat his way out of.

And more than any of it — more than the lawsuits, more than the losses, more than the names coming off the buildings — he hates his own mortality. The one opponent that does not care about painstakingly assembled mythology. The one thing his father’s money, his television persona and his entire apparatus of noise cannot negotiate with, cannot outspend, cannot outlast.

What we saw over the course of the past few days, what will only get much, much worse, was the collision of all of that rejection, all of that humiliation, with his increasing awareness of his failing health.

This weekend was an masterclass in melon-hued mania. All his trademark pathologies running hot at once: the narcissism, the paranoia, the sadism, the spite. His gut a simmering stew of agitation, rage and desperation. His disordered brain ricocheting between paranoid revenge fantasies and grandiose delusions of greatness that have never actually existed outside of the story he tells himself.

He’s confounded that he — all that he is, all that he ever claimed to be, his decades of deception and damage and false constructs — is vulnerable to exposure. That the whole elaborately lacquered edifice is showing its particle board. That the cracks are visible now, even to him, even in the mirrors that used to lie so cooperatively.

Donald Trump has no interest in healing the wounds of his childhood. We are too far gone for that. His demons have consumed him whole. And what we have seen in the past few months, and what we will continue to see, is just going to get worse.

This is not going to end well for anybody, least of all him.

And boy oh boy, wouldn’t it be nice not to be in the splash zone — not to be tethered to the spit roasting over the fire of his fucking disastrous mental state while he keeps insisting with the sweaty confidence of a man losing an argument with gravity that everything is perfectly fine.

I’d pour myself an enormous glass of wine, get the biggest bucket of popcorn known to mankind, and watch this entire decomposing circus with the energy of someone with nowhere to be and nothing to lose, if this deteriorating, ego-hemorrhaging, grievance-guzzling wreck of a human being did not have access to the nuclear codes.

But he does.

He has the nuclear codes.

Forget politics for one second.

What the fuck would you think if somebody in your own life spent an entire weekend behaving like this?

Grandiose nonsense. Self-mythology. Visible deterioration. The kind of behavior that would have everybody in their orbit quietly exchanging looks and texting, “Hey… are you seeing this?” because something feels deeply, visibly off.

Except this is not some random guy embarrassing himself in public.

This is the President of the United States. The person supposedly handling wars, intelligence briefings, public health, immigration, markets, disasters, diplomacy and about nine thousand other genuinely consequential things.

And if Joe Biden had spent one weekend doing even a fraction of this shit, Republicans would be foaming at the mouth before sunrise demanding investigations, cognitive evaluations and impeachment.

Instead everybody is supposed to stare directly at this and pretend it is normal.

The president of the United States is out of his fucking mind. And he is getting worse. Fast.

So no, this shit is not normal.

And it is not fucking okay.

And with that, today’s song:

Thank you to everyone who’s been here with me — reading, sharing, commenting, or even just quietly following along. I don’t think I say it enough, but your support has held me up in ways you may never fully see. This space has helped me take care of my kids and given me a sense of purpose on days when I really needed one.

I’m committed to keeping my work free for anyone who needs it. But if you’ve been thinking about subscribing or switching to paid, please know that it truly makes a difference. It gives me the room to keep digging deep, telling the truth, learning out loud, and showing up with as much honesty as I can.

Thank you for being part of this with me. It means more than I can put into words.

Stay strong, stay safe, and stay far, far away from that nutjob in the Oval. 👀

💙 Jo

And Abbie’s team won! She had a nice little double too!