Let me see if I have this right.
Donald Trump, that self-worshipping, shrine-building, faux-gilded grifter, adjudicated business cheat, carnival-barking con man, monument-molesting megalomaniac, and TEMPOR-FUCKING-RARY occupant of the WHITE HOUSE, has found nearly a billion dollars for “renovations” to the People’s House, but when hungry children need food, kids with cancer need lifesaving research, or America’s parks and public lands need protecting, suddenly the federal treasury contains eleven dollars, a Pep Boys keychain, three loose Certs, and a 1997 Blockbuster receipt for Dante’s Peak.
Nine hundred and twenty-seven million dollars.
Nearly a BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS because somebody handed the world’s most spoiled fucking toddler a Sharpie, a Caterpillar D9, the keys to a house he does not own, and not one adult in Washington with sufficient upper-body strength to wrestle the goddamn marker away.
So he scribbles over everything.
The East Wing gets erased, the Rose Garden gets paved, the Oval Office disappears beneath another layer of yellow-glazed plutocrat cosplay, then another, then another, then another, until the room looks like King Midas died during a colonoscopy and left the contents of his estate to a North Jersey banquet hall.
The fake gold keeps metastasizing into ornate borders, gilt lettering, trim and tacky commemorative trinkets, every inch sweating that same bilious yellow showroom glare of something meant to look expensive from twenty feet away and feel faintly greasy up close, like a no-tell motel remote marinated in hand lotion, old cologne, ass sweat and whatever the fuck is living between the buttons, a brassy, baroque, bougie bacchanal of bullshit oozing through the People’s House with all the decorative judgment of a Vegas bachelor party six shots deep and digging through a stranger’s wallet.
Up go the presidential portraits, the pompous nameplates, the captions and Donald’s pathetic Walk of Fame, where Joe Biden’s face has been replaced by a fucking autopen because an 80-year-old President of the United States has reached the emotional and neurological terminus of scrawling JOE SUX across a Trapper Keeper with a fat black marker and flashing it around homeroom waiting for Kyle to snort chocolate milk through his nose.
And once you’ve handed eighth-grade spite an unlimited decorating budget, taste doesn’t so much leave the building as get stuffed headfirst into a contractor bag and tossed behind the fucking dumpster.
Elegance was dead three contractors ago. What’s left is gaudy extravagance, counterfeit magnificence, rococo rectal-cranial self-regard, acres of faux-gilded ornamentation and glossy architectural hand jobs administered to the most ravenous ego in the history of fucking time, a man so terminally horny for his own reflection he could walk into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and come out owing every mirror an apology and cab fare home.
And beneath all the gilt-painted peacocking, palatial puffery and preposterous penile pageantry, it all looks cheap as hell.
That Temu-bought tinpot tyrant could be handed Carrara marble quarried by Michelangelo himself, Cleopatra’s emeralds, the Crown Jewels, Tutankhamun’s death mask and a pallet of doubloons recovered from Blackbeard’s asshole, and by Tuesday afternoon the whole collection would be sitting beneath recessed lighting on a mirrored pedestal beside a pleather banquette smelling faintly of bleach, calamari and somebody’s uncle Salvatore wearing too much Drakkar Noir.
The Midas touch in fucking reverse.
Give him history and he makes merchandise, give him elegance and he makes ostentation, give him dignity and he makes spectacle, give him the People’s House and nearly a billion dollars and he makes the whole fucking thing look like it accepts Groupon, which would be funny enough if the place actually needed any of this shit.
Harry Truman had to hollow out the White House because the building was falling apart around him, floors sagging, beams failing, structural supports buckling and his bathtub nearly going through the floor, which is about as persuasive a renovation proposal as any homeowner can receive short of waking up with the refrigerator in the basement.
Adjusted for inflation, Truman’s enormous reconstruction cost around $72 million.
Donald Trump is spending more than twelve times that, not because the White House is collapsing beneath him, but because restraint has never survived prolonged exposure to Donald J. for Genius Trump, and when a man who thinks subtlety is a steak without ketchup gets access to nearly a billion dollars and somebody else’s house, you don’t get preservation.
You get a pay-by-the-hour honeymoon suite with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi looking over the property line and yelling, “Jesus Christ, tone it the fuck down.”
By now the crimson colostomy bag’s little arts-and-crafts rampage has swallowed the East Wing, paved the Rose Garden, hardened the security perimeter, added a new helipad, stacked up more concrete, more steel, more barriers, more fencing, more holes in the ground, and fed another chunk of American history into whatever ricocheted through that orange pachinko machine of grievance and appetite between breakfast and his first of fifteen daily Diet Cokes.
Money meant for the National Park Service gets sucked toward Washington while projects across the country wait, because Yellowstone has had 150 years to get its shit together and the febrile little pharaoh needs a fucking walkway, so trails can crumble, bridges can rot, rangers can disappear, retaining walls can slowly surrender to gravity until somebody’s Subaru Forester winds up halfway down a ravine with a Golden Retriever still smiling out the back window because nobody told him this wasn’t part of the vacation.
But Donald needs an arch, a great big obscene middle finger planted in Washington, a colossal fucking FU to Abraham Lincoln and the American heroes buried across the Potomac at Arlington National Cemetery
With OUR fucking money.
Mine, yours, the cashier working a double at ShopRite, the roofer whose knees sound like somebody crushing a sleeve of Saltines every time he climbs down a ladder, the nurse eating peanut-butter crackers over a trash can at 3:11 in the morning because that counts as lunch now, the single mother doing arithmetic in the cereal aisle, the guy driving an hour and fifteen minutes each way with the check-engine light glowing like a tiny orange prophecy on his dashboard.
We work for that money, trade pieces of our lives for it, hours and weekends and cartilage and sleep and birthdays and dinners we miss because somebody needs the overtime, and the government takes a piece because there is supposed to be a bargain underneath the whole fucking thing: we pool our earnings to build roads, maintain parks, fund science, care for veterans, feed families, help children, and send grain, medicine and emergency supplies into places where human beings are starving, sick, displaced, bombed out of their homes, or born into circumstances so catastrophically unlucky that the difference between living and dying can be a sack of American wheat arriving before somebody’s body gives up.
Donald Trump took that bargain, turned it upside down, shook out everything intended for somebody weaker than him and started checking the pockets.
USAID went first, gutted by this gilded regime as programs delivering medicine and humanitarian assistance to some of the most vulnerable people on Earth were dismantled, supplies we had already purchased stranded in warehouses and emergency provisions marked for destruction.
We had already paid for the grain, the pallets were sitting there while actual human beings were starving, and this kleptocratic clown court and his chainsaw-juggling, ketamine-gobbling, cocksucking South African trillionaire side piece still located the particular species of bureaucratic barbarism required to look at nourishment on one side, an empty human stomach on the other, and decide the appropriate use of American power was to stand between them holding a fucking match.
Parents are sitting beneath the antiseptic fluorescent glare of pediatric oncology wings learning words nobody should ever have to associate with the small person whose Spider-Man pajamas are still balled up on the bathroom floor at home, words like glioma and progression and experimental protocol, while this collection of budget-slashing bastards and deficit-defecating demagogues looks at four million dollars for research and starts patting its pockets.
Sorry.
Can’t afford it.
But the ambulatory casino carpet needs a ballroom.
His fucking war gets a bottomless checking account, an infinitely capacious fiscal wormhole swallowing bombs, missiles, aircraft, fuel and another obscene pile of American cash while sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln spend month after month trapped at sea, families describing shortages and exhaustion, and service members pushed so far some have tried to jump the fucking ship.
Four million dollars for pediatric cancer research is extravagance, billions in food assistance for hungry Americans warrants a trip to the Supreme Court, humanitarian aid can rot, national parks can wait, bridges can crumble and researchers can pack their shit, but the sentient probate dispute in a red tie wants a $400 million vanity hall and suddenly the federal government has the financial flexibility of a recently divorced orthodontist wandering through a Porsche dealership with three martinis in him and nobody left at home to tell him no.
FIRE UP THE FUCKING BULLDOZERS.
Sick kids, hungry families, starving strangers, scientists and park rangers all become expenses the second the bill lands on his desk, while Donald Trump’s $400 million ego annex transmogrifies into heritage and his marmoreal, masturbatory, malignant fucking makeover gets treated like an essential function of the state.
Every slab, every fake-gold frame, every paved garden, every inscription and every ridiculous piece of this narcissistic renovation spree starts looking less like decoration and more like loot, because that lacquered bundle of appetites is not spending his money.
He’s spending ours.
Money earned in bad backs, missed dinners, double shifts, dead-eyed commutes and every miserable fucking Tuesday morning somebody dragged themselves out of bed because the mortgage company remains tragically unmoved by human fatigue.
They take a piece of that paycheck and he gets a taxpayer-funded reception barn, they take a piece of the next one and he gets a nameplate, a shiny new fixture, a vanity project, another taxpayer-funded erection from a man treating the United States Treasury like the petty-cash drawer at Trump Fucking Incorporated.
His handpicked Kennedy Center board is trying once again to put his name on a memorial to an assassinated president, because even John Fitzgerald Kennedy cannot remain peacefully dead without this monument-humping motherfucker showing up with five brass letters and the emotional boundaries of mildew. His name came down, the tarp stayed up, and now they want him inscribed on the facade, one more federal surface commandeered by a man who has spent his entire life using TRUMP as architectural spackle for whatever substance was missing underneath.
Marble is a hell of a lot easier to polish than a record.
The first season of this fucking shit show ended with a pandemic gnawing through the country, refrigerated trucks squatting behind hospitals full of bodies because the morgues had no room left, millions of jobs vaporized, storefronts papered over like dead eyes, families saying goodbye through glass, and the Capitol getting its windows punched out by a frothing mob after he lost an election and decided reality was negotiable, blood inside the Capitol, lawmakers running, and a fucking gallows outside Congress like somebody had left a medieval stage prop behind after the worst community-theater production of fascism in American history.
That was the finale.
Not prosperity.
Not peace.
Not greatness.
A plague, a cratered economy and an insurrection.
And the sequel is already choking on its own fucking exhaust. We’re hemorrhaging jobs, GDP growth is sliding backward, consumer spending is careening off the side of a fucking cliff, prices are still climbing and chewing through whatever people manage to drag home in a paycheck, households are getting squeezed hollow, and every goddamn arrow that matters feels like it’s pointing toward the basement.
The whole economic dashboard resembles a 1986 Chrysler LeBaron somebody’s aunt Linda has been driving for three weeks with smoke curling out from under the hood because her boyfriend Dennis said it was “probably just a belt,” and rather than fix the fucking engine, Donald Trump keeps bolting his name onto the garage.
Concrete.
Steel.
Signage.
Names.
Buildings.
He cannot manufacture a legacy of accomplishment, stability, competence or sacrifice, so he manufactures square footage and trusts the masonry to do the fucking lying for him.
For all this frantic building, one thing conspicuously absent from the blueprints is an exit.
He is hardening the place, fortifying it, building a drone port, building what amounts to a military-armored, bulletproof bunker, pouring steel and concrete around a residence he seems to regard less like borrowed property than the fucking family homestead.
He clearly does not intend to leave.
Fine.
He can intend whatever the fuck he wants.
Donald Trump does not own that house.
He does not own that office.
He does not own that title.
He does not own Washington.
And he sure as fuck does not own this country.
He can fortify the windows, harden the walls, pour concrete around himself, hammer his name onto every surface that will take a screw, dig himself a moat, commission a drawbridge and start measuring the Rose Garden for fucking archers if he wants.
He will be leaving.
Maybe not willingly.
Maybe not peacefully.
Maybe not cooperatively.
Maybe with his fingernails embedded in the Resolute desk like a furious fucking barnacle.
But one way or the fucking other, Donald Trump is leaving the White House.
And no amount of gaudy, grotesque, taxpayer-funded garbage he builds on OUR dime as a monument to himself is gonna change that fucking fact.
And with that, today’s song:
I love you guys!
Thank you for your incredible support. This work is my passion, and so much of that is because of all of you. You make it possible for me to keep doing what I love while supporting my kids, and there simply aren’t enough words in the world to tell you how deeply grateful I am.
Stay safe out there! Stay strong and stay connected to each other!
💙 Jo
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