I’m so ready to start writing fan fiction about the incompetent gang of keystone fascists currently LARPing as a presidential administration. I’m thinking Veep meets The Purge.
This won’t be my first speculative spiral (I pretty much live there these days). I tend to slip into alternative timelines of my own making when I just can’t anymore. Take the piece I wrote back for Slate in 2017 when Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord: Indulge Your Climate Rage in Fantasy.
So, since satire is dead, let’s go full faux-feminism and “lean in” to the fan-fic possibilities surrounding these cast-off community playhouse understudies currently stumbling their way through the collapse of a republic.
And maybe we can crowdsource the storyline for these characters. I’ve pre-shipped them for your convenience.
A human dial tone trying to effect a coup, Stephen Miller shrieks in the background with big no wire hangers energy. A sulfuric miasma in a suit, he skulks the sidelines, desperate for attention, hungry for love. At night, when his wife and child are asleep, he retreats to his study where he dresses up as Bette Davis—All About Eve era, natch. Because he’s always seen himself as the Margo Channing of Washington, even if no one else does. As he sits in the Fox News green room waiting to undergo his nightly unraveling about MS13 gang members, he gazes at his reflection and thinks You’ll see…you’ll ALL see. Unshippable.
This little guy used to be a regular conservative, who stood behind debate lecterns and delivered lectures that were the equivalent of a sternly worded letter. But look how far Little Marco has come since he decided remaining in politics was worth dismantling democracy. It’s a cuck-eat-cuck world, after all. Initially seen trying to sink into sofa cushions like Homer Simpson retreating into a hedge, Little Marco quickly graduated to asking why a U.S. president would have to follow a SCOTUS decision. On weekends, he self-flagellates in the basement to atone for his February 2016 comments that Donald Trump is a “con man.” We ship him with JD Vance.
Bringing full swamp glamor to Washington, Pam took a wrong turn on her way to an infomercial shoot and ended up Attorney General. Wearing a diamond-encrusted crucifix around her neck during Fox News appearances in which she agitates to execute Luigi Mangione, she delivers her legal analyses like a pageant coach. She carries the Epstein Files with her like it’s the nuclear football. We ship her with Pete Hegseth.
Deputized by Trump as the Oval Office sartorial police (yasss queen) and thank-you monitor, VP Pick JD Vance is as uncomfortable as a VC masquerading as a hillbilly whose high school sweetheart was upholstered. His kohl-rimmed eyes brim with tears when he scrolls through memes of his ever-widening face, because this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He was going to finish up those how-to-be-normal lessons, learn how to pick doughnuts like a person, practice holding trophies, finally understand how to hold a dog on a leash. He was going to throw people off his extraterrestrial trail by offering a convincing performance as a human. In his off-hours, we see him return to the Mother Ship for comfort, succor, and advice. We ship him with Marco Rubio.
Her legendary spin on her dog-murdering ways—it shows I’m not afraid to make the tough decisions—earned Kristi Noem a Cabinet position. That, and her willingness to kill innocent living things for expediency and clout. So she packed her extensions and her copy of Accessorize Oppression One Hat at a Time, and left South Dakota. Originally self-shipped with Cory Lewandowski, this season she has been shipped with her high school sweetheart and husband, Byron. In between flights to internment camps, Kristi works tirelessly to convince Byron that she is, in fact, the same woman from their wedding pictures.
Pete Hegseth coming soon. Who else should we include?
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