Sorry I’m late today. I’ve been in a mood.

gather ’round, kiddies. Uncle Couchfuck is going to read to us again from the Big Book of Things That Never Happened the Most.

“this is how wars ultimately get settled. if you go back to World War 2, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”

hang on, what kind of fever-swamp revisionist fairy-tale bullshit is this? Word War Two ended because of negotiation?

fact check: fuck all the way off.

oh, come on. this such a stupid and easily-batted-down lie. World War Two ended with the unconditional surrenders of Germany, Italy and Japan.

but oh no no no, insists Couchfuck. World War Two was negotiated.

that Harry S. Truman, he must have been one fuck of a negotiator, to get Hitler to agree to put a bullet in his own head — and wouldn’t you have loved to have sat in on the phone call where Truman bargained Mussolini down to being a urine-soaked corpse hung upside down in the street?

Benito, have I got a deal for you.

look, JD Vance is highly educated. he graduated from Yale with a law degree. he knows how World War Two ended — so why on earth would he spew such laughable twaddle? does he think we’re that stupid? spoiler alert: yes, JD Vance thinks we’re that stupid. he also knows that MAGA is that stupid, and will believe anything he tells them. fair point, JD. we’ll give you that one.

but mostly, JD Vance is performing for that Audience of One who’s in the White House, glued to the TV while jamming burger after burger into his gluttonous face.

Donny — a preening, broken-inside bottomless pit of need — is watching, so JD has to flatter the shit out of him. he can’t just simply mumble something semi-reasonable about how Dear Leader’s going to deal his way out of thiswar — he has to twist the bullshit dial all the way to 11, and pretend that all wars that have ever been fought have been ended via negotiation.

so, Donny’s going to negotiate an end to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine?

fat fucking chance.

I guarantee that when Donny imagines himself as The Great Negotiator, this is what he sees: Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element, entering with guns blazing and then asking ‘anyone else want to negotiate?’

yeah, no, Donny. we’ve seen you operate. we know who you really are, when it comes to negotiations.

the fact is that Donny is shit at negotiating. Donnie Dealmaker is a character he played on a game show. it’s complete farce.

here’s a fun story that Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker, during Donny’s first reign.

in the 1980s, when Donny was looking for someone to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal, he asked journalist Tony Schwartz to do it. Schwartz absolutely did not fucking want any part of it.

He knew that if he took Trump’s money and adopted Trump’s voice, his journalism career would be badly damaged. His heroes were such literary nonfiction writers as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Halberstam. Being a ghostwriter was hackwork.

so here’s what Schwartz did: he asked for a ginormous amount of money, figuring no one would be fuckwit enough to agree to it, and that Donny would then go find someone else to ghostwrite the book. problem solved, right? wrong.

He told Trump that if he would give him half the advance and half the book’s royalties he’d take the job.

Such terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Trump, despite having a reputation as a tough negotiator, agreed on the spot. “It was a huge windfall,” Schwartz recalls.

Donny got played — and it took all of ten seconds.

you know what percentage of royalties a ghostwriter usually receives? it’s zero. nothing. zip. nada. ghostwriters are generally paid a flat fee. but Tony Schwartz asked Donny for half — and The Great Dealmaker agreed to it, without even ten seconds of negotiating.

oh, and spoiler alert: ghostwriting The Art of the Deal turned out to be a nightmare.

But the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”

For the book, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting.

bored, irritable, with the attention span of a coked-up squirrel. all the shit that makes Donny impossible to deal with was already in place in the 1980s — and now you can throw advanced dementia into the mix.

this is the low-wattage stumblefuck who’s going to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine? oh please. stop insulting our intelligence, JD.

oh wait, it seems Couchfuck isn’t finished thoroughly debasing himself. was there something more you wanted to get off your chest, my dude?

“what I admire about the president is he’s not trying to focus on every nitpicky detail of how this thing started three and a half year ago, he’s trying to focus on the nitpicky details of now.”

sigh.

RUSSIA STARTED AN UNPROVOKED WAR — but sure, let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who. it’s all too nitpicky.

hang on, here’s another Republican elbowing his way to the front of the self-humiliation line.

Margaret Brennan: “the president wants to buy a ten percent stake in Intel. that company says that now, basically, is going to have US taxpayers, as a shareholder, own ten percent. as a conservative, do you think the government should have ownership stakes in private companies?”

New York Rep Mike Lawler: “generally speaking, no … I think what the president is seemingly trying to do is get a return on these tens of billions of dollars that are being invested by US taxpayers into companies like Intel.”

seriously, Mike?

fact check: when the government owns the means of production, that’s literally a little thing we like to call State Socialism.

State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement that advocates state ownership of the means of production.

which is a thing that Mike Lawler is definitely against, when he’s not for it.

“Zohran Mamdani’s push for government-owned grocery stores is straight out of the Marxist playbook, and history shows exactly how this experiment ends. New Yorkers deserve solutions, not socialist fantasies that have failed spectacularly every time they’ve been tried.”

so, socialism baaaaaaad, when Democrats suggest doing it, but goooood when Donny actually does it — and, when asked to square this doublethink, Lawler spews incomprehensible gibberish. basically, Dear Leader gets to do whatever he gets it in his deteriorating mind to do, because reasons.

this is our current nightmarish reality. America’s Mad King does something completely antithetical to decades of strict Republican dogma, and then we get to watch as an entire political party ties itself into knots trying to pretend that oh, absolutely, we’ve always been at war with Oceana.

if Donny farted out an executive order this very afternoon decreeing that everyone had to wear their underwear on their head, Republicans would be all over the Sunday shows with — you guessed it — underwear on their heads.

what a fucking time to be alive. lucky us.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.