Here’s your daily brief from the front lines of a rapidly-devolving reality.
“Mr. Trump, you are the first President in American history to start and lose a war by yourself. You have made America more weak, more alone, and less respected. Congress has to take back the steering wheel from this impaired driver, before we end up in a third quagmire in the Middle East in the 21st century. That starts with ending the escalations. He keeps on trying to escalate vertically, meaning more effects on target. Iran escalates horizontally, bringing in other regional players, other infrastructure assets into the fight. Iran is winning that escalation ratchet. We gotta stop it, we gotta negotiate transit through the Strait of Hormuz, and we have to strengthen the Abraham Accords. But that’s going to be a decadal process. It’s not going to happen in this guy’s term, because he’s too incompetent.”
That’s Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and while his sentiment is not unusual for a Democrat, the forum on which it aired is raising some eyebrows. He was on Faux News yesterday, and the network actually let the entire unedited segment broadcast into the ether without cutting to a commercial for gold coins or survival rations. Faux rarely possesses the institutional spine to critique their favorite golden calf the way he deserves, but allowing this level of heresy on prime-time airwaves is incredibly telling. No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, the sad man behind blue eyes.
He’s talking about the nation’s leading turducken: the chicken ducked out of Turkey. Yes, bad joke, I know. Don’t shoot me. I’m just the piano player. New to this column? Get used to it: it’s all Brechtian political theater here.
In a grand, sweeping gesture of cinematic grandeur, the Catering Truck Commando callously dispatched a pilot, a flight crew, his sycophantic staff (Lil’ Marco Rubio, SS Miller, and SecTreas Wedgie Please), and the White House press corpse onto a decoy aircraft that was apparently in very real danger of being Bam Margera’d out of the sky by Iranian threats because this man is on their last nerve. And where was the commander-in-chief? Cowering in a catering truck like a smuggled shipment of Taylor Farms lettuce.
When cornered on the tarmac later, he did his usual aw-shucks-I’m-just-Mr.-Bojangles-soft-shoe routine: “Well, it’s only up to the Secret Service. I just follow what they’d like to do. So, uh, I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane. Uh, equal safety, but they wanted me to do it, they wanted me to do it, and so I do what they say. I guess there was a threat out there, I didn’t really ask too much about it. I get a lot of threats… I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk.”
Being the celebrated rule-follower that he is, (unless the rules are don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t sexually assault women) he just blindly obeys the unsmiling guards in sunglasses. But let’s have some fun with logic: Did that same ever-watchful, strict Secret Service allow him to stand up, delay an emergency evacuation, and stage an impromptu “Living on a Prayer” fist-pumping photoshoot at his so-called “assassination attempt” in Butler, PA? My Magic 8-Ball says “We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got. It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not.”
Historical contrast is essential, kittens. I remember hearing someone—I think it was Dick Cheney—recounting how, on 9/11, the Secret Service lifted him off his feet and threw him in a bunker before he could even process the word “airplane” and he was careful to note that he had exactly zero say in the matter. Nothing of this gentler, kinder Secret Service choreography makes a lick of sense, but then again, reality stopped making sense in 2020 and we’ve been free-falling through the looking glass ever since.
Brave Lord Dampnut ran away, bravely ran away, away.
When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Lord Dampnut turned about and gallantly he chickened out.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Lord Dampnut.
The Grand Wizard of Mar-a-Lago, aka Lord Dampnut, is shaking in his golf spikes as the midterms loom, and what does an autocrat do when he’s afraid of the scoreboard? He breaks the referee’s whistle. Enter his latest masterpiece of 5D chess: Lord Dampnut tried an executive order limiting mail-in voting by turning the USPS into a moat in which to drown mail-in ballots. I call it “The Ballad of the Mail-in Moat”.
The order attempts to weaponize the Department of Homeland Security to compile hyper-specific lists of voter eligibility, orders the USPS to implement draconian new standard barriers for ballot transit, and instructs the Department of Justice to prioritize hunting down state election officials like they’re international reflecting pool vandals.
But the administrative coup hit a rather concrete wall yesterday. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani stepped up and dropped a massive nationwide preliminary injunction, legally freezing the Postal Service from enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order 14399 for the November midterms. The ruling makes it beautifully clear: the USPS is strictly forbidden from refusing to deliver American citizens’ ballots, completely short-circuiting the administration’s eleventh-hour rules.
The immediate whisper network assumes he’ll simply scuttle up the steps of the Supreme Court, hoping his hand-picked judicial lapdogs will bark on command. But even for a friendly high court, intervening this radically close to an election is a logistical and public-relations nightmare that they are highly unlikely to touch, due to the Purcell Principle.
The playbook has failed, the catering truck has left the terminal, and the mail will continue to move. So, to the architects of this administrative comedy: lay on your ass and get richer, or write your own song.
That’s all I have for you today, kittens.
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