It’s another bullshit morning in Suck City (apologies to Nick Flynn).

The weekend was dominated by the sort of absurdities and and shocks to the system that I expect to be regular occurrences the next four miserably stupid years. And even before dawn today, we’ve been reminded that Trump is a violent fascist.

First, we had Netflix’s embarrassing shitstream of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul “fight” on Friday night that an alleged sixty million may or may not have seen from JerryWorld in Texas. Everyone involved in this pathetic spectacle — a 57 year old washed-up boxer with rubber legs and none of the old thundering bloodsport magic versus some 24-carat Gen Z asshole from YouTube — should be embarrassed and that includes you and me for tuning in. Or trying to, because the streamer’s over-taxed feed was as much news as the sad display in the ring.

But that was just the warm-up. The rest of the weekend brought us a flurry of photos of the president-elect and his wretched cabal of weird supplicants and striving courtiers lording about doing strange shit. There was Trump and First Lady Elon Musk having a feast of McDonald’s on a plane with an especially taut-skinned Robert Kennedy Jr., in what clearly was a Stalinesque humiliation ritual — Bobby Kennedy’s buff and shiny son was put on display eating garbage fast food with a Coke, posed as a political trophy that Trump has added to his collection of conquests. Camelot, probably for the better, has fallen.

The Last Supper but it’s all Judas Iscariots eating slop.

RFK Jr.’s whole schtick is an obsession with healthy eating (and halting all vaccines and medical research and other evil quackery), and as the incoming health secretary, here he was chowing down on deadly slop that’s the dietary staple of the obese elderly new commander in chief.

The price of working for Donald Trump is the surrender of all dignity. And it’s surrendered cheaply to a man with the loyalty and morals of a seasick iguana.

If Kennedy is confirmed, some of MAGA quickly will experience buyers remorse. Enjoy that iron lung, patriots. But many will flagellate themselves for Dear Leader.

The rest of the rotting king’s proposed inner court promises to be a dismal galaxy of feckless brutes, petty tyrants, and clownish jesters, but no wise fool to caution Lear with truths no one else dares to speak to him. No Pucks, all Falstaffs.

We have South Carolina governor and noted puppy killer Kristi Noem up to become Homeland Security secretary. Tulsi Gabbard, a peddler of conspiracy theories and a credulous conduit for Kremlin propaganda, is the proposed next Director of National Intelligence. Real wolf-in-the-henhouse shit.

Trump’s nominee to run the Defense Department is a Fox News host. While that’s obviously insane and on-brand, it gets worse. Pete Hegseth paid off a woman he was accused of sexually assaulting in 2017. But it somehow doesn’t end there: He also is covered in white nationalist/Christian nationalist tattoos. Hegseth also doesn’t wash his hands because he doesn’t believe germs.

He’s unfit to lead a Junior ROTC toilet-cleaning detail, much less the entire Department of Defense.

And we come to the worst appointee of all: Matt Gaetz.

Before we get to the core of why he’s unqualified for the role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, I need to make it clear that I have a personal hatred of Gaetz that runs even deeper than my loathing of Trump. Why? Because Gaetz was arrested for drunken driving in 2008 in the same Florida town where my sister was killed by a drunken driver in 2002. Gaetz’s charges were dismissed under circumstances sleazy even by Florida standards. So fuck this guy.

Outside of that, Gaetz has been investigated for underage sex trafficking and drugs. Senate Republications are demanding to see the new House ethics investigation report, which includes eyewitness testimony, into his conduct. Naturally, House Leader Mike Johnson doesn’t want to report released, which is not something you say when a person is exonerated. Gaetz has a reputation in the House for boasting of his dissolute behavior, and certainly will act as the sort of personal judiciary attack dog that Richard Nixon wanted but never got during Watergate.

I’m not one to kink shame. I enjoy all sorts of vices and proudly tout being a degenerate Bohemian libertine. But my fun is legal and I’m not seeking to become Attorney General of the United States.

If the Senate has a single shred of decency left, it’ll reject Gaetz as evidence that it’ll act as part of the independent legislative branch of government and one of the checks-and-balances rather than a yes-man rubber stamp factory for whatever corrupt and evil shit Trump wants.

And for a bit of comic relief, if we can find humor in any of this, Trump is putting Musk and fellow nerdy asshat Vivek Ramaswamy *both* in charge of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. So not only is it an acronym playing off Musk’s preferred idiotic cryptocurrency, it’s a Department of Redundancy Department moment: Does DOGE need two people in charge?

Napoleon once said a single bad general is preferrable to two good generals, because unity of command is vital to conduct of war. It also is in business and government, and Musk and Ramaswamy will not play nice for long.

Musk also is seeking people to work 80 hours a week without pay, which “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update noted is a classic white South African proposing slavery behavior.

I chuckled at that, but JFC, this is all so painfully stupid. Unserious dangerous people are still dangerous people, and putting juvenile shitposting edgelords with more money than the Pharaohs in charge of hollowing out the government is a guaranteed disaster.

It speaks unfortunate volumes about how just fucked we are that our best hope is that Trump quickly tires of Musk’s weird look-at-me man-child act and exiles him. Trump doesn’t share the spotlight, but that’s not much of a guardrail against people that want to cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget.

While such a drastic austerity measure is catnip to the cruel buffoons on the Right, it requires every member of Congress to go back to their districts and explain why Uncle Sam will no longer be funding constituents’ Social Security, Medicare, VA, and innumerable other programs and entitlements.

If members of Congress value anything, it’s not any “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” sense of duty to democracy, the Constitution, and the people, but their goddamn seat. And they don’t get to keep their seat and access to deep-pocket lobbyists and K-Street parties if pissed-off voters send them packing because Grandma cannot pay for her meds and Gramps can’t get his radiation treatment at the veteran’s hospital and the mail doesn’t show up anymore.

So for all the drain-the-swamp bluster around DOGE, the public is going to hate what it means for their lives. Everyone wants to cut other people’s entitlements and programs and benefits, not their own.

Musk and Ramaswamy are promising to fuck over everyone, which should lead directly to a Democratic-controlled House in 2026 and probably a blue White House in four years. Or that’s what it should mean; American voters have proven they will fill out a ballot for candidates promising economic insanity as long as that candidate will punch down and hurt people voters have been told to be scared of. So who knows what the fuck will really happen, or even if we’ll ever get to vote again. King Fatass certainly has entertained the thought of a dynastic presidency.

But hoping we still are a democracy in coming years, Trump will have no one else to blame as the incumbent that wrecked the American economy and the welfare state. Americans like their benefits even if they don’t understand how they get them.

While it’s probably me being too Pollyannaish again, perhaps voters will experience a political satori and realize that the federal taxes they pay now, that they insist are too oppressive … are because of Trump’s 2018 tax law that doesn’t expire until 2025 and adversely affected 75 percent of taxpayers (not the rich, of course).

But no. People will continue to blame Democrats, liberals, radical Leftists, communists, trans people, and every other bogeyman rather than the people actually responsible.

None of these Trump nominees have any business being in charge of these critical agencies, and certainly do not possess the skills or work history to oversee vast bureaucracies. But here we are. Trump is back and unbound, without guardrails and few Republicans willing to challenge his worst impulses. The future looks like the government of the third largest nation on Earth trying to kill itself, and many of its citizens, out of cruelty, ignorance, hate, and self-loathing and insecurity. White nationalists, Nazis, race science ghouls, neo-Confederates, women-haters, and every type of corrupt grifter and amoral freak is given permission to run amok. Those Nazis marching in Ohio and Michigan were shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump” for a reason.

Trump and his cronies are claiming the mandate of Heaven despite the ongoing vote count showing he’s right at, or slightly under, 50 percent of the vote with 98.1 percent counted.

It’s a squeaker. Incumbent administrations typically get some punishment at the polls, and Harris took it on the chin for Biden’s unpopularity. But the public didn’t hand Trump an actual mandate. We haven’t seen that since … Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes in 2020. Trump barely matched his vote total from four years ago, so don’t buy into the false rhetoric that the people have enthusiastically bought into his program of moronic tariffs and concentration camps.

Johnson and other NPCs in the MAGA Cinematic Universe are slavishly insisting Trump has the imperial authority to make recess appointments, which many Republican senators reject. Even the repulsive sleazy shell of what was once Bill Buckley’s The National Review thinks Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do this.

But who knows what actually will happen. Trump is a corrupt and lawless oaf and sees the presidency in totalitarian terms to fit his whims, and there’s no reason to believe that he will not attempt to rule that way — and will arrogantly challenge a gelded Congress and broken judiciary to do anything about it.

“Fuck the pope! How many divisions does he have,” is something Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said to future Vichy leader Pierre Laval in the 1930s. That statement is extremely Trumpian and Trump openly admires autocrats. You can imagine him saying something similar.

Closer to home, there’s an apocryphal quote attributed to Andrew Johnson about the 1832 Supreme Court decision in Worcester vs. Georgia: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Trump would say something like that, too, if there was any chance at all he understood the critical importance of that complicated case.

Do you see the current Supreme Court as willing to enforce anything Trump opposes? I do not. Today, at 4 a.m., he reaffirmed he will declare a national emergency and use the active-duty military to round up millions of people to put into concentration camps and deport. That will be challenged in court, but if SCOTUS ruled against him, would it matter?

There are ugly, violent days ahead.

We’re all marooned on this terrible island, but there are small reliefs. For one, Twitter is widely being abandoned by decent people and Bluesky is gaining millions of new users because it’s not a digital Klan rally. This is what Twitter is today — a sleazy cesspool of racists, bigot, misogynists, homophobes, Russian bots, and meathead crypto peddlers, all proud of being low-intellect shitty people and freely attacking all perceived enemies of Trump. They’re free-range Biff Tannens and have no problem using slurs and threats.

You can find me on Bluesky here. I plan to keep my Twitter account until I reach a critical mass on Bluesky, then will mothball the old account.

I’ll write again this week and I promise it will not be about Trump. It might be about my favorite fucked-up Christmas traditions, or maybe my current midlife crisis. Who knows! Tune in to find out.

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