Oh, I get it now. I’ve been baffled for the past eight months, but now I see what kind of government we’re living under: a cartoon presidency. It’s the only scenario that makes sense, because nothing else does.
Once you realize this isn’t a serious administration, but a cartoon, a parody, a satire, it all fits. Imagine this as flat animated cartoons and it all falls into place. The villain has taken over the United States government and is raking in all the goodies.
Picture this: a megalomaniacal, ridiculously grandiose president with a vomit-toned spray-painted face that doesn’t match his surrounding skin and a comb-over like a mud flap on a tire, surrounded by absurdly heinous henchmen. He nominates the most outlandish people possible to key positions. He builds a “YUGE” ballroom beside the White House, and a nuclear reactor on the moon! He asks another country to give him a bloated jet, and Congress votes to let him keep it–after taxpayers have paid for its renovation. He orders armored vehicles and armed masked men into city streets to grab gardeners to hold in concentration camps, leaving lawnmowers running, and detains flower vendors and food truck operators and sends gay makeup artists to torture prisons in other countries. He cuts funding from rural hospitals and nursing home patients. His social media posts would embarrass a middle schooler. He tells reporters to be quiet. He fires a statistician because he is humiliated by the data, cheers when a comedian is fired, prepares to pardon a convicted pedophile, wanders around on the White House roof yelling down to reporters, sides with the world’s bad guys and destroys food shipments to avoid sending aid to starving people, all while declaring himself the best deal maker and smartest person ever, and demanding the Nobel Peace Prize. I nearly forgot–he’s also been convicted of 34 felonies. Totally outrageous, right? We’ve been saying you couldn’t make this stuff up–or that if you did, no one would buy it.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. He is the ridiculous evil villain, the superhero’s nemesis, the cruel landlord tying the innocent girl to the railroad tracks. How can satire even compete?
Where have you gone, Andy Kaufman?
Millions did buy it, though. They thought it was a joke, he didn’t mean it, no one could be that outrageous for real, and anyway, he could never get away with it! They thought they were voting for a functional president and administration, not for all the bad things he said he would do, someone would stop him, and in their spite they laughed and cheered. Turns out it’s not just a bit that went too far. Despite my idle fantasy, the late Andy Kaufman didn’t suddenly resurrect himself by unzipping a Trump costume.
Now we’re ruled by caricatures, sycophants living in the artificial bubble of the super wealthy, who don’t understand the lives we flesh and blood humans lead. They are dragging the whole world into the villain’s lair, and no superhero is coming to save us.
But it’s for real
Because this is real life. Real people are suffering thanks to cartoonishly cruel decisions this government is making. Many lives have been destroyed and families torn apart by terrifying deportation raids and unconstitutional detentions. The richest man in the world fired hardworking civil servants in essential jobs. Thousands of people are dying since we stopped sending foreign aid, and starving Gazans are still being killed by US-provided weapons. Devastated health care, public health and research systems threaten millions of Americans with disease, destitution and death when all the cuts and pseudo science kick in. The government wants our private information for their own purposes–not to help us. Republicans openly try to gerrymander Congressional districts before the midterm elections to hold onto power. And the president turns the White House into a state-sanctioned event venue/used car lot complete with outsized flags, fake gilding everywhere and a ballroom so big it will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot historic “People’s House” beside it.
This 90,000-square-foot ballroom isn’t the biggest travesty, but it will be, by far, the biggest, most visible symbol of what we have lost and what we have become. The unassuming, intentionally unpalatial White House symbolized the ideal of the presidency: the humble servant of the people, the serious person whose job it is to manage the executive branch to maximally benefit us, the citizens. The person whose job it is to find ways to improve our lives and our safety in the world, to get along with the good intentions of other nations, to promote learning, science and well-being for Americans. The person who sets their own profits aside for their term, who turns down bribes and avoids the possibility of blackmail, not the person who openly enriches himself at the expense of the nation’s present and future.
The president claims that he and his donors will pay for his gilded monstrosity. If they can do this, donate millions to the ballroom, then they should be paying that money in taxes, not getting a big tax break. Raise taxes on the wealthy people who are not paying their fair share. Get that money into the public coffers, not into an obscenely opulent display of decadence and presidential immorality of no benefit to ordinary Americans.
“From the needy to the greedy”
Democratic Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland said it best the other day, “From the needy to the greedy.” This place we’re in, this time of scandal, degradation, corruption and mindless, heedless opulence from the “top” while ordinary people suffer, looks more and more like the court of French King Louis XVI and his Queen Marie-Antoinette. We all know how that ended.
Unlike the daily bombardment of mostly complex, abstract scandal that is difficult to message about, this ballroom will be stunningly simple to understand, a big tumor of a building, visible all day and all night, every day in the nation’s capitol. When people lose their homes and can’t afford medicine, they will see this let-them-eat-cake monstrosity, and oh, how they will resent it. It will also remind them of a place where Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein lured young girls away for soul crushing abuse, where young “calendar girls” were paraded before two men. This will be a permanent, blunt, inescapable symbol of psychopathic contempt for the people. I don’t think the president understands that.
Though galling, it could be a good thing they will begin to do this before the 2026 election. As we watch the golden monument to greed and dictatorship rise to overwhelm the People’s House, let’s make sure we get out and vote, vote, vote these dangerously ridiculous people out. We need a real president, and a real Congress, a 3-D government of public servants, not a government of absurd goons who would make the cartoon villains gasp.