Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News/Getty Images via CNN Newsource
They did it again.
They simply cannot help themselves, and despite their incessant name-dropping, it doesn’t seem like God can, either.
These people are seemingly beyond saving.
As a fierce Blue tsunami renovated the entire political landscape of the United States on Election Day, bringing with it a searing repudiation of the Trump regime’s abject barbarism, white Evangelical Christians were the most notable holdouts—again.
For the sixth time in ten years, in numbers far exceeding every other substantial demographic across this nation, they have elected to co-sign cruelty, amen exclusion, and knowingly harm their neighbors.
In nearly unchanged percentages, White Conservatives who claim faith have reiterated their allegiance to a Godless career mobster and rejected the open-hearted namesake of their religious tradition. It’s been a wholesale betrayal of biblical proportions.
Despite every human rights atrocity committed by the Republican Party since their bloated orange messiah of misery began his now ten-year campaign of boundless brutality, insatiable greed, and peerless perversion, they have remained prostrate before him.
Proven sexual violence, documented acts of treason, a litany of war crimes, and an unrelenting, decade-long torrent of lies, vulgarity, and dehumanizing rhetoric were not enough to extricate them from complete cultic adoration.
And speaking as a former pastor and for the tens of millions of people across this nation who genuinely desire to embody Jesus’, it’s been both heartbreaking and blood-boiling.
The good news is that the “nones,” religiously unaffiliated voters, have eclipsed white Evangelicals at the polls, and these are the people who helped elect Christians Talarico and Hamilton, and powered the blue wave that deeply faithful and fiercely anti-religious people are celebrating together.
And this is where we’ve gotten things a bit twisted.
One of the leading storylines in the wake of the election has been the perceived emergence of a new kind of Christianity taking hold in America. Historic wins by openly Christian Democratic candidates in Texas and Kansas have been widely hailed by pundits, the media, and progressive Christians throughout the country as the sudden rise of “the Christian Left,” but that isn’t quite accurate.
Yes, at long last, the Democrats have seemingly realized that they don’t have to cede faith to the Religious Right; that a sizable portion of their base are deeply spiritual people who have felt orphaned by the political poisoning of the Conservative White Church. The political Left has seemingly widened their tent in a way they may have been reticent to in the past.
But the simple truth of the matter is that what we’re seeing right now isn’t the arrival of progressive Christianity; it’s the arrival of… well, Christianity.
I mean, the Jesus kind, the love your neighbor kind, the kind the MAGA movement has jettisoned, the kind that the Evangelical Right has all but eradicated from its buildings, its messaging, and its collective aspirations.
This may seem like an exercise in semantics, but it is a critical distinction and should serve as a pivot point for us as we think and talk about faith in America moving forward.
For decades, White Evangelicals here have perpetrated the greatest religious fraud in modern history; rebranding something that began a couple thousand years ago as a compassionate community of disparate, mutually invested human beings—into a gated, guarded neighborhood of whiteness, straightness, and America First selfishness
For too long we have allowed the Right to self-identify as followers of Jesus, something that has been both heresy and lunacy. This election reminds us again that when it comes to regaining the theological plot they’ve lost, these people cannot be saved.
They are not moved by the suffering around them or infuriated by the barbarism of their political allies in the way the rest of us are, religious and nonreligious alike. They have spent thousands of Sundays in churches drinking from a corrosive cocktail of nationalism, narcissism, and fear that has left them unable to embrace the open-hearted, loving religion people like Talarico and Hamilton successfully campaigned on.
It’s time we named what’s really happening here in America.
It isn’t that the Democratic Party has finally created some novel, politically viable, left-leaning version of Christianity to compete with the Right; it’s that the empathy of Jesus is finally being platformed by Democratic candidates. And in doing so, White Evangelicals are being exposed as having hijacked and sinfully misappropriated an entire faith tradition.
The Christian Left is simply Christianity as Christ modeled it: compassion-centered, justice-focused, table-expanding, peace-seeking. That this all feels new here says everything about the heartless, loveless garbage the Religious Right has spent decades selling us.
It’s certainly been a perfectly goddamned delightful week, hasn’t it?
One by one, the worst shitheads in the world lost their elections. Corruption-factory Ken Paxton. Political tourist Darline Graham. Barrel-bottom slimeball Vivek Ramaswamy. All gone fuckity-bye, replaced by actual, fundamentally decent people.
Pinch us, we must be dreaming, am I right?
But one thing’s been missing, through this entire week. One familiar noise that’s been conspicuously absent from the national discourse. What could it be?
Does anybody really believe that this “Election” was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting “dumps” were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter! President DJT
Wait a minute. Hold on, what in the actual fuck is this half-baked, weak-tea bullshit?
Donny, you’ve had seven whole days to work yourself up into a thermonuclear lather, and this is the pathetic mewling you end up farting out? Come on. This is a stolen election, man — it’s right in your wheelhouse. This is the shit you live for.
Couldn’t you have put more effort into this post? Where’s the all-caps hysteria? Where are the multiple exclamation points? This is so low-energy. ‘Sleepy Dear Leader,’ is that what you want us to call you now? Bro, did you fall asleep in the middle of writing this? Did the Diaper Nurse have to finish it for you, and click ‘send’?
Where are the clownish misspellings? Remember “RIGGED AND STOLLEN” from 2020? Six years later, we’re still pissing ourselves with laughter at that dumbfuckery.
Come on, dude. Give us something to work with here. You didn’t even bother to thank us for our attention.
And why just one post? Why not a dozen, each one that much more hysterical than the last? Come on, bro. This is the best you can do? I’m so fucking disappointed in you, Donny. I expected so much better. We all did.
This is just sad.
Actually, the best part of Donny’s post was the reaction from the rest of the world, which pretty much rose up as one to tell him to shut the fuck up.
Even MAGA’s reaction to Dear Leader’s post was muted. Everyone’s so tired of this shit. MAGA knows the election wasn’t RIGGED. Nor was it STOLLEN. They themselves voted for James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and Annie Andrews and Abdul El-Sayed, and on and on.
No one has time for any of Donny’s clownfuckery right now. We all just want it to end. January 3rd can’t come fast enough.
Oh, but Donny wasn’t finished with us, after his whiny ‘stolen election’ post. He had lots more crazy left in the tank. At around four in the afternoon, he summoned the media for a hastily-thrown-together, unscheduled press conference starring none other than The Wrong Dana White™.
The premise of this slapdash dog-and-pony show? That Donny, irrepressible madcap scamp that he is, was just funning with us, when he claimed to have offered the job of White House Press Secretary to the Wrong Dana.
Dana White: “I don’t tell brothers ‘no’ to anything, I know. I didn’t say no. I literally— everybody— every media outlet was calling me, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful and say anything until he— he— he, uh, said something first, so—”
Donny: “We were having a very bad press day. And I said— I don’t know why— I thought of his name. Been my friend for a long time. I said, ‘you know, I think I’m going to get— DANA WHITE to be my new press secretary, sent it to a group of— of— press. And that was it. I sent it to them. And then, they wrote the story as if I wasn’t kidding. And you were INUNDATED and I was inundated. He was here anyway, with— we thought we would have a little fun, and we brought Dana in. He would be— fantastic.”
I have two words. Bull and shit.
Oh please. That’s not what happened at all. I will go to my final resting place convinced that the actual story played out as I wrote it up the other day. Someone in the White House suggested naming the actual trained media spokesperson Dana White be the new Press Sec, and dumb demented Donny got it wrong and mistakenly offered the job to his crony Dana White, the dude who arranges human cockfights for money.
That’s what happened, I’m sure of it. Donny doesn’t make jokes. He has no sense of humor.
Yesterday’s unscheduled presser was a face-saving operation. The Wrong Dana™ had been in London, and they flew him all the way across the ocean so just he could stand at that podium and pretend to have been joking right along with Donny. An actual joke doesn’t need that much explaining attached to it.
The fact that Donny’s handlers put this much time and effort into denying that Donny was making a serious offer is all the proof you need that Donny was in fact making a serious offer.
And look at all the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press, falling for it and laughing. How fucking embarrassing for everyone involved.
But wait — the crazy lasted all the way into the evening.
What the hell? Did you notice that? As Geerges takes the call, a woman is heard giggling in the background, followed by the grating sound of Dear Leader’s voice.
What the fuck was going on? Were Donny and his diaper nurse tickling each other, going, ‘you call C-SPAN,’‘No, YOU call C-SPAN. TEE HEE HEE’?
Where are the adults? What if it hadn’t been C-SPAN? What if Donny and Natty had been daring each other to phone in the nuclear launch codes? Don’t laugh, you know damned well it could happen.
Donny then proceeds to ramble incoherently for eight entire minutes, his putrefying brain pinballing from immigration, to Piss-Drunk Pete Kegstand, to Venezuela, to Iran, and back and forth and back and forth. Mimi Geerges keeps trying to interject and steer the conversation, and he just barrels right over her. Eventually, Donny exhausts himself, and Geerges manages to get him off the phone.
It’s fucking batshit. What in god’s name is going on? Donny and Natty should not be left alone, unsupervised. Who knows what they’ll get up to next?
“The Secretary has scheduled his own press conference, that they’re going to let him deliver a rebuttal. And to that point, I hope he addresses the eight articles, and doesn’t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion, and do some pull-ups, and, you know, call everybody fat and gay. I may have just given you half his speech, I don't know.”
Look, let’s be clear-eyed. Thomas Massie is not our friend. He’s against most of the things we’re for. The Heritage Foundation gives him a 96% rating.
But he loathes the same people we do — and he’s so fucking good at throwing shade, so let’s just enjoy that.
Reporter: “Have you spoken to Sen. McConnell about this effort?”
Massie: “I have not, but if it were possible to have a conversation with McConnell...”
Oh man. I only wish Mitch McConnell had been alive to hear himself dissed like that.
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.
That’s Michael Corleone’s famous line from The Godfather, in which he explains to Corleone family counselor Tom Hagen that shit’s about to get real, and you don’t have what it takes.
Know who else isn’t a wartime consigliere? Hakeem Fucking Jeffries, the Man Who Would Be Speaker of the House. Jeffries couldn’t wartime-consigliere his way out of a paper bag. I’m not even sure he understands what the actual job entails.
Morning Joe: “Donald Trump said ‘I am your retribution,’ and he got wiped out. How do you now say, ‘hey, let’s not look behind us. We’re going to focus on bringing costs down’?”
Hakeem Jeffries: “The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf.”
Holy shit, that sounds like a carefully-rehearsed line, doesn’t it? Why?
I’ve never understood this pathological compulsion of Democratic leadership to go out the morning after every election and immediately piss all over everyone’s corn flakes. Is it too much to ask, to let us savor a victory for one whole day, before you start shitting all over everything?
Why this need to assure us that there won’t be any getting even? No one’s asking for ‘retribution.’ What we want is justice. We’ve just lived through two years of the greatest lawlessness and corruption from a federal government that this country has ever experienced — big strong corruption with tears in its eyes — and now it’s time for some accountability. That’s not ‘getting even.’
Preznit Fuckwit spent two years treating the US Treasury as his personal cash machine, fattening his wallet at our expense. We the People are struggling to make ends meet, while Dear Leader is somehow now a billionaire. Calling him to account for that is not ‘getting even.’
Holding Piss-Drunk Pete Kegstand accountable for clownfucking us into an unwinnable war that destroyed our military readiness and set the world’s economy teetering on the edge of a crash, that’s not ‘getting even.’
Holding everyone at Homeland Security accountable for masked ICE thugs disappearing innocent people into Salvadoran slave labor gulags, or leaving them shot to death on the street, that’s not ‘getting even.’
It’s getting fucking justice, and it’s high time we had a little around here.
How did Hakeem Jeffries allow himself to get manipulated by that useless pantload Morning Joe into disavowing justice?
Could it be because he’s shit at his job?
You know who else isn’t a wartime consigliere? Chuck Fucking Schumer. He’s been proving it every day through his impotent lack of action. Schumer’s a great guy to have around if there’s absolutely nothing at stake.Need someone to speak at the dedication of a new post office?Chuck’s your man. Need someone to make sure all the procedural i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in some piece of shrimp boat legislation? Here comes Chuck!
Do you need someone to fight fascism? Chuck’s your— wait, where the fuck did Chuck go? He was here a minute ago.
He’s probably busy writing a strongly-worded letter.
Fortunately, we do have Democrats who aren’t so tone deaf, and do know how to say — and do — the right things.
In case you somehow missed it in yesterday’s post, let me just leave this right here.
LAWYER UP.
That’s Rep. Robert Garcia, the Democrat who is now the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee. He posted that Tuesday night, after winning his own reelection.
Know who Rep. Garcia replaces as Oversight Chair? This rake-stepping fuckwit, Comer Fudd.
Is that an upgrade, or what? Imagine going from clownish side-show hearings involving Hunter Biden’s freakishly-oversized trouser trout, to actual investigations into how companies that Donny’s felonious failsons are invested in ended up getting billions of dollars in government defense contracts. You want to talk about an actual crime family? Boy, have I ever got one for you.
Here’s another Democrat who’s ready to fight: New Mexico’s Melanie Stansbury. She’s looking so forward to the next Congress’s Oversight hearings that she’s already posted a highlight reel from the current Congress’s.
Here’s what Rep. Stansbury has to say about her video.
ARE YOU ALL READY FOR THIS???! 💙🔥 Because we are JUST GETTING STARTED!
Do you know who else are ready to fight the current Republican regime? Republicans, that’s who.
Many Republican lawmakers and allies alarmed by Tuesday’s wipeout are moving swiftly to pin blame for the election results on Hegseth, arguing behind the scenes that he played a chief role in convincing Trump to attack Iran with no exit strategy — and no plan for managing the inevitable political fallout.
They’re not wrong about how we got bogged down in the Middle East. Piss-Drunk Pete absolutely snookered his demented boss, and filled his ears with fairy-tale nonsense about how he could bomb the shit out of Iran and be won and done in a couple of hours, with plenty of time left over for Pete to get soused down at the local bar.
‘Drinnnkssss are on me, I just whupped Iran’s assssssss.’
How did that work out for you, Pete? How did that work out for any of us?'
Sucks to be you right now, Pete. They’re shoving you into a peach.
House Republicans are expected to vote to directly repudiate the defense secretary in a matter of days. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the famously anti-Trump GOP lawmaker, told CNN he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns next week — and multiple GOP sources said they expect it to pass.
Leave it to Republicans to show us how it’s done. They’re not even waiting until the next Congress to stick their knives into their targets. They’re doing it next week.
Maybe Hakeem Jeffries might wan to take lessons from Thomas Massie.
And now we must interrupt this post for an important message from Daughter Katie.
I’m sure you love taking requests, so: you should use your platform to encourage people to call their new representatives and yell at them to demand they not put Jeffries and Schumer back in charge.
Folks, Ms Spouse and I raised our daughter right, didn’t we? In fact, Katie is absolutely correct. We should all be calling our Reps and Senators (or their replacements) right now, and demanding leadership that will work to please us, and not Morning Joe.
All those phone numbers and shit can be found at the House and Senate web sites.
Key Senate progressive Chris Van Hollen said Wednesday that Democrats should demand a “bold agenda” targeting entrenched corporate interests in Washington before agreeing to back Chuck Schumer or any other aspiring Senate majority leader.
It’s our job to push — or drag — them across the finish line.
“Somebody came in, in the break there, and brought me a quote that we got from the president from the White House tonight, in response to the results, and I just threw it away. HA HA HA HA HA! That felt good, too. Guess what? It doesn’t matter. What do you think? Who has to care?”
Ah, that glorious moment when you realize that Dear Leader doesn’t matter.
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.
Holly shit, stop the presses. Look who just woke up from their decade-long slumber, to work out on their very own what the rest of us sussed out years ago.
Are you ready for this? You’d better sit down, because this is a real shocker. It turns out — according to none other than The New York Times — that Preznit Fuckwit might be a little bit cuckoo for cocoa-puffs.
Remember when the Times didn’t used to tell us shit we already knew, long after we already knew it?
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, Captains Obvious? Water is wet, maybe?
Now, I see your hands up, and I know what you’re dying to ask: ‘Hey, Uncle Jeff — why has the Times waited until all the way to the very end of the election cycle to drop this news on us? Couldn’t we have used it months — or years — ago?’
Well, apparently the Times had to stop do a science first, before they could figure it the fuck out. They also had to do a math.
He is cruder than he used to be, using nearly 15 swear words per 10,000 words compared with 14 two years ago and six a decade ago, a change consistent with age-related disinhibition.
The review, relying on an A.I.-assisted metric, found that he makes rambling or confusing digressions in his rallies and speeches two and a half times as often in his second term as in the 2016 campaign, although roughly the same as in 2024.
Got that? The Times couldn’t blow the whistle on Dear Leader until they had rock-solid proof, gathered over a period of time — and they couldn’t do it without a janky, six-fingered plagiarism robot to do them a solid, and help do all those fancy-ass calculations.
Yeah, I know — these are the same shit-kazoos who declared Joe Biden mentally incompetent after one time that he forgot someone’s name.
Joe gets unceremoniously tossed on the shit-pile of sayonara, while Donny is obviously a Very Special Boy Who Deserves Every Reasonable Doubt Before Judgement Is Cast.™
“He gave up all of— yeah, it was free. WE DON’T CARE if it was free. We don’t care. It’s free. They say, WE WANT TO KNOWWW why did he give a ball room? No, no, you don’t understand me. It’s a gift. To the [slurred] Unided Stades offa Meriga. WE DON’T CARE. We don’t care.[unintelligible].”
What in the hell was that?
Preznit Fuckwit was supposed to be making his final argument for why voters should select Republicans. The final argument he actually made instead was why he should be carted off by the men with the butterfly nets.
Let me translate that last clip for you. What Donny was gibbering about was his beloved Epstein Dance Hall, and why it shouldn’t bother you that his cronies all chipped in to buy him some fugly piece of shit where the historic East Wing used to be. Which, by the way, is a lie — taxpayers are on the hook for at least $307 million dollars for that eyesore.
Donny gets a dance hall, and We the People get fuck-all — while gas in America reaches an all-time second-term high, one day before the midterms.
By the way, who is paying $3.46 for a gallon of regular? Here in the Hudson Valley it’s more $4.19.
Fox News bobblehead: “What’s your final message to voters to get them out?”
Donny: “Poverty numbers are the single best. Meaning, they’re the best. Poverty’s a bad thing, but poverty is poverty.”
Oh, thank you for that explanation of poverty — the best poverty ever. Big strong poverty, with tears in its eyes, going, ‘sir! Thank you, sir! How do you did it? How do you make us the best poverty ever? Sir!’
Don’t you love Donny hand-waving poverty away, the poverty he created? ‘Poverty is poverty, whatcha gonna do?’ Thanks for explaining that.
What kind of tone-deaf dumbfuckery is that, tumbling out of the rancid anus-mouth of some flim-flam man who’s grown rich off of grifting the rubes who worship him?
Yes, I know what Dear Leader is trying to say, about poverty, but he’s not saying it — because he’s fucked in the head — and presidents aren’t supposed to be fucked in the head.
But fucked in the head he is, and it shouldn’t have taken the New York Times ten years to figure out that he’s fucked in the head.
And still, the Times sugar-coats it.
Mr. Trump, who last year became the oldest person ever inaugurated as president and turned 80 in June, has demonstrated physical stamina as he barnstorms the country in advance of midterm elections.
And that, by the way, was Joe Biden’s real crime. He looked and sounded old— while Donny has gotten an endless serious of free passes, because he can still shit out nonsense while speaking in a mostly-loud voice.
I’ll bet the Times wants a cookie, as a reward for finally committing an almost-journalism.
Sorry, no. You don’t get a cookie. You spent ten years sanewashing the incoherent ravings of a maniac.
Our press is supposed to warn us while shit is actually happening, and not wander in at the very end and go ‘hey, that was kind of fucked up, wasn’t it?
No cookie. Do better.
Everything totally fucking sucks right now, but at least we can point and laugh at Comer Fudd’s newly-dyed hair.
Seriously, what the fuck? When last we saw James Comer, the rake-steppingest fuckwit in Congress, he was a dignified natural gray.
Of course, Comer Fudd’s hair was the only thing dignified about him, as he ginned up hearing after hearing in which he clownfucked himself into one embarrassing situation after another, all the while trying to prove that he was finally going to catch that wascally wabbit, Bugs Biden.
Comer Fudd never was able to pin one crime on Bugs Biden, but at least he didn’t look like some mid-life-crisis used-care-salesman while attempting to do so.
Oh well, let’s be philosophical about it. Who really cares what the hair color is, when it’s the face that’s getting smacked by an endless series of rakes?
Ah, there’s the Comer Fudd we all know and love.
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.
Do you remember waking up the morning after the 2024 election?
That’s if you had managed to sleep at all.
I didn’t exactly fall asleep that night. I basically just shut down.
That’s my stress response, and terror is only one of the many, many things that set it off. Anything I can’t control, can’t contain, can’t explain, anything that rears up bigger than me and beyond my reach can leave me wanting nothing more than to close my eyes, even when I’m not tired.
For me, election night wasn’t about screaming. It was about the silent torment, like being seatbelted in your car and sinking into the abyss of a lake with your hands useless in your lap, the dashboard still lit, the radio still playing, the black water climbing the windows with all the patience in the world.
At some point, I couldn’t take in another thing. Physically, mentally, emotionally, there was nothing left in me to take it in with. I cried until even that became impossible, then lay there hollow and numb, past the point of taking anything in. I wasn’t tired. I was done.
The next morning I came back in pieces, the light coming through an unfamiliar hotel window, the pillowcase creased to my cheek, the mascara streaked down my face. And for those few merciful seconds before I remembered, I was just a woman in a bed, and nothing hurt yet.
And then I remembered.
It hit like a fucking avalanche.
Grief. Sorrow. Shock. Rage.
And a sickness so deep it had a taste, like cold pennies and bile.
All of it thundering down the mountain at once, burying me alive under the covers before my feet ever found the floor.
When I finally stood, my body kept falling, that missed-stair lurch in the dark that never quite lets you land.
There was a before the 2024 election, and there was an after. There was living, and then there was surviving.
Because accepting it meant questioning everything all over again, only worse this time, because now it was clear that basic decency meant nothing to so many people I thought I trusted, thought I cared about, thought I respected, thought I knew.
I honestly didn’t believe he could win in 2016, and when he did, it gutted me. But I could at least try to reason with myself that some of them, in between enjoying the racism, the xenophobia, the transphobia, the Islamophobia, believed he was the guy from The Apprentice.
I needed to believe we could chalk some of it up to the unknown, to what we hadn’t yet seen, because that left me somewhere to put my faith in people. By 2024, they couldn’t say they didn’t know anymore. There were no question marks, no what-ifs, no variables left to explain away. The worst-case scenarios they’d called me hysterical for imagining had names and dates and body counts. He’d shown us exactly who he was, what he was willing to do, who he was willing to hurt. And I couldn’t believe that people who’d watched all of it would send us back for more.
We knew every rancid inch of him. He golfed through a pandemic while refrigerated trucks idled behind our hospitals, shrugged at the dying, and went on talking about himself.
And when this country rejected him, that treasonous, tantrum-throwing tyrant called a mob to our Capitol to take what we had refused to give him. They erected a gallows and screamed for Mike Pence to hang because he wouldn’t throw out our votes. They crushed police officers in doorways, beat them bloody with flagpoles, drove them backward through shattered glass while the seat of our government became a hunting ground. And their Nero sat in his dining room watching it all unfold, watching our Capitol under siege, watching heroic police officers defend the citadel of our democracy against people carrying his name.
He let them fight for their lives while he fought to keep what wasn’t his.
Our votes. Our government. Everything generations of Americans had marched for, bled for, been beaten and buried for, brought to the edge of annihilation because this petulant, power-drunk, grievance-gorged parasite couldn’t tolerate the humiliation of losing.
They knew all of that in 2024.
They knew a jury had found him liable for sexually abusing a woman. They couldn’t hide behind “locker room talk” anymore. They knew about the fraud. The thirty-four felony convictions. The threats, the scapegoating, the promises of retribution. This remorseless, rapacious, rancor-ridden man, whose appetite for humiliation is inexhaustible so long as somebody else is made to kneel, had laid his malice out before the country and invited people to imagine what he could do with fewer restraints.
And millions wanted him precisely because he would give their resentments the force of government and let them call the devastation justice.
That was one of the most incomprehensible, eviscerating parts of all of this: we looked at the suffering he was offering and saw a warning. For them, it was the promise.
And so they chose him again.
And these were people in our lives. Family. Friends. Colleagues. People we made small talk with at the grocery store, stood beside at soccer games, carpooled with, broke bread with, waved to across the street. People who seemed decent. How do you go back to those ordinary exchanges knowing what they were willing to let happen to somebody else? You think you know people. You think you know what’s in their hearts. And then you have to live among them with the knowledge that you didn’t. God, how lonely that felt. How lonely it still feels.
And this time, we knew who was waiting to crawl into his lap: the sycophants, stooges, and sadists who would only be bellows for that fetid fascist flame.
Everything we’d held onto, hope and safety and democracy and justice and human kindness, felt severed at once, like the strings of a marionette cut above its head, the body folding before it could understand why nothing would hold. I needed something to reach for. Some way to stop them, to do something. And everyone I talked to, once they could stop crying or throwing up long enough to speak, kept coming back to the midterms.
We have to get to the midterms. We can get to the midterms. It’s only two years away.
The election we’re standing on the edge of now was barely a pinprick then, one needle-hole in the blackout curtain at the farthest seam of the horizon, so faint I couldn’t tell whether it was something to steer by or something my eyes had invented because they could not bear the dark.
Between us and that light lay two years of minefield, and we knew we’d have to cross it. We didn’t know whose footsteps would stop behind us, or how far we’d keep walking before we dared to turn around.
Only two years. They pressed those words into my hand like a coat-check ticket in a building burning to the ground. It might as well have been a million years when I was struggling to get through the next hour.
Two years didn’t get any shorter just because we needed them to. Some days we spent everything we had getting to nightfall, and that light hadn’t budged. We’d wake with our jaws clenched and yesterday still lodged beneath our breastbones, and there would be another whole day between us and relief.
So we walked, we crawled, we clawed our way through the interminable days, minute by minute when that was all we could manage, holding each other up and borrowing courage from whoever had any left.
And along the way, the absences began to accumulate. On kitchen counters sat lunches packed by parents who never came home; by the doors, small shoes waited for people who weren’t coming back to tie them. There were human beings kidnapped off the street and carted off to countries they had never set foot in, and people shot on their way to work in front of their children.
Dread has woken up before we have every morning since November 6, 2024. We open our eyes waiting to read the next new horror, the next new obscenity, the next new cruelty we couldn’t have imagined the day before. We’ve been carrying it to bed like wet wool, its sodden weight settling against our ribs, the chill seeping deeper as we sleep. We wake beneath it, aching for one unburdened breath before the world asks us to carry anything else.
I’ve known trauma since before I could spell it, and I tried for years to navigate what I was enduring alone. As a young mother surviving abuse, I learned to keep my pain so quiet that I could smile through school drop-off, cheer at the baseball game, and take notes at the class mom meeting while something inside me was coming apart. I kept functioning. I kept hiding it. And I ended up on the verge of suicide.
There are versions of me I still can’t think about without wanting to reach back through the years and gather them into my arms. I’ve learned over and over again that the way through is with other people, through community, through kinship, through connection, through letting someone hear what you’ve spent so long trying to survive in silence.
That’s what all of you offer me and each other. I’ve seen you show up when you can barely hold yourselves together, find words at two in the morning for someone who has run out of them. I’ve been buoyed and comforted by your bravery. Too many of you have sat with a stranger’s grief while still raw from your own losses for me to believe that cruelty is the deepest truth about this country.
This is why they want us divided, at each other’s throats, each of us sealed inside our own small terror. They know we cannot be defeated when we stand together.
The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.
And no, this election won’t fix everything. It won’t bring back the people we’ve lost or heal everything that’s been broken. We can’t rebuild as though none of this happened. We’re changed, and we’ve learned to turn toward people we once would’ve passed without knowing we needed them. We didn’t ask for these times, but we will be judged by how we met them.
When Wednesday comes, we get back to work. We have the work of a generation before us. I want our children to inherit more than our injuries. I want them to have ordinary days that would feel like miracles to us right now.
And no matter what Trump and his cabal of felon-fellating oligarchs, kleptocratic griftocrats, and aspiring authoritarians do, no matter what they try in the days to come, we stick together.
But those craven, conniving, Constitution-shredding bootlickerati in Congress have fed his power, funded his campaigns of persecution, and thrown themselves between him and the consequences. They voted for this. Now we’re going after their seats.
This is our final stand for the soul of our nation, and I’m not spending what’s left of today laying flowers on a future we still have time to fight for.
Yes, we’re exhausted, down to the marrow, in the places sleep stopped reaching two years ago. We’ve spent those years surviving, just surviving, and I want us to live. To draw a breath that isn’t preparation for the next blow. We’ve shown up every day anyway, we’re showing up now anyway, and we’re never going to stop.
And that chance we could barely imagine reaching, the one people kept telling us to hold on for?
It’s here.
It’s FINALLY HERE.
It’s fucking tomorrow.
There will be a before tomorrow and an after, just as there was in 2024. I remember opening my eyes that morning and having to live with what other people had chosen for us.
Tomorrow, we get to choose.
Ignore the polls. Polls don’t vote. We vote. If you haven’t voted, make your plan and follow through. If you have, reach somebody who hasn’t. Make the call, offer the ride, get them there.
Too real to steal. Too big to rig.
We turned our clocks back yesterday, but I’ll be goddamned if we let these fascists drag our country backward another inch. Tomorrow, we spring forward into action.
esterday evening, out of the clear blue and without warning, the White House abruptly announced that all of Dear Leader’s upcoming weekend rallies had been canceled — fuckity-bye, hit the bricks, sayonara — thereby depriving his remaining cultists the opportunity to sit uncomfortably on a folding chair in a thimble-sized gymnasium, and listen to Donny ramble incoherently for two entire hours about how he successfully pointed at the drawing of the camel, all while being drowned out by an endless series of hecklers.
Reporter Jacob Bogage: “So you not going to Kansas has nothing to do with you being sick of traveling?”
Donny: “Oh, you’re sick to ask that question. You are sick. Who are you with?”
Bogage: “I’m with Reuters, sir.”
Donny: “You are a sick guy. Reuters is terrible. Can you imagine? Look at this guy. He’s way out of shape. Look at how bent— he comes [makes accordion hands] he comes to me. ‘Sir, you’re not gonna go to Kansas.’ I’m not going to Kansan because he’s doing very well. We’re gonna do a tele-rally’ … but he says, ‘you’re not going to Kansas, sir, are you feeling well?’ You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.”
Shut the fuck up, Piggy.
Wow, Dear Leader sure gets cranky when he’s got a full load in his diaper — and he didn’t even hear the question correctly. Did you catch that? The reporter asks Donny if he’s ‘sick of traveling,’ and Donny goes ballistic because all he hears is ‘are you sick?’ And he automatically explodes into some infantile rant about ‘I’m not sick, you’re sick’ — because he’s got the emotional maturity of a four-year-old.
Maybe Donny needs to get his ears checked.
Is this a piece of your brain, Donny?
Dear Leader can’t hack it any more. He’s too old and tired and demented to be flying across the country every single goddamned day. Plus, he’s fed up. He loves the crowds — only this time around, there aren’t any crowds. All that remains are the die-hard, brain-deadest cultists — and there aren’t even enough of them left to fill the pint-sized high school gyms his flunkies are booking him into. How long before Donny has to open for a puppet show?
Donny didn’t sign up for this. He doesn’t want to stand there and listen to some communist heckler scream at him about shoving his beloved Epstein Dance Hall up his fat ass, or call him ‘Butterscotch Shitler.’ Fuck that shit, and fuck it hard. He’d rather be at his golf motel, canoodling with his diaper nurse.
‘Oh Natty, you’re the only one who understands me.’
Eww. I think I just threw up in my own mouth a little.
So now, if you’re a cultist and you need your Donny fix this weekend, you’re going to have to zoom in to some ‘tele-rally,’ and watch Dear Leader sitting behind the Resolute Desk, drooling all over himself as he gradually loses consciousness. It’ll be just like a real rally, except you won’t be able to smell the farts.
Meanwhile, let’s go live to Republican National Headquarters for the GOP’s reaction to Donny having canceled his remaining rallies.
Seriously, the GOP is fucking celebrating right now — only they won’t say so out loud. Let’s let CNN’s Kaitlan Collins explain (beginning at 3:25 in the clip below).
“Sources say, though, that some Republican officials are relieved by the president’s decision to cancel those final two rallies. One top Republican official told my colleague Jeff Zeleny, quote, ‘thank God. He hasn’t moved the needle anywhere.’ And a second official, saying, quote, ‘everyone has seen the president who wants to see him.’”
Boo fucking hoo, Republicans. Maybe it was a mistake to hitch your wagons to an increasingly-befuddled fascist who, thanks to an increasing fog of dementia and untreated tertiary syphilis, no longer has any idea which end is up.
Reporter: “Have you heard that Lt. General Sylvia leaked classified information at the Pentagon?”
Donny: “One what?”
Reporter: “I said, Lt. General Sylvia leaked classified information at the Pentagon.”
Donny: “She’s got problems. She’s gonna have big problems. She did. We’re very much looking for leakers, and uh— she’s gonna have big problems.”
Oy my god, Dear Leader isn’t just deaf, he’s ignorant. Check out, from his Wikipedia page, this photo of Lt. General Brett Sylvia — who just happens to be a dude.
Surely, Donny can’t be this seriously misinformed, can he?
Spoiler alert: yes he can be this misinformed. Remember, Donny’s daily intel briefing has been boiled to down to a single page of bullet points and burlesque photos from the 1940s.
That’s the only thing that will hold Donny’s attention. So of course he hasn’t a fucking clue who Lt. General Brett Sylvia is. All he hears is the name ‘Sylvia’ and away he goes, blithering about the retribution he’s going to inflict on some imaginary woman who doesn’t exist.
I’m so old, I remember when Job Biden would occasionally stumble over someone’s name, and would have to correct himself. The press would have a field day, and start filling editorial pages with piece after piece about how Sleepy Joe was too old and icky and smelly do to his job, and how he needs to step down, right now, for the good of the country.
Now we have an actual cognitively-collapsed president concocting fairy tales about strange generals, lying in ponds, distributing leaks — and not one worthless scribbler of the corporate-controlled press can be bothered to say one word about it.
It’s so embarrassing to have a President of the United States who is an uninformed fool who has no fucking clue what’s going on inside his own government, and just makes shit up on the spot, based on what’s he’s misheard.
But tell me once again how it was Joe Biden who was the real problem. That’s such an awesome story.
Fox News bobblehead: “Tom, why are you here this morning?”
Tom: “Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to get involved and go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I’ll ever get, so that’s why I’m here.”
Bobblehead: “Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?”
Tom: “That’s right. There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man.”
Bobblehead: “Maybe this is not a Trump supporter [walks away dejectedly].”
And right there, that’s your problem for Fox news — and for all the wingnut media right now. When there are too few cultists in the crowd, it’s way too easy for any mischief-maker to walk up to the dude holding the microphone, and go ‘interview me next.’
Masterful job, bro. Norway will be in touch to let you know when you can pick up your Nobel Trolling Prize.
[Oh, and that scream you just heard, that was me — because this is where I was in writing this post when I got the notification on my phone about Donny going ahead with the canceled rallies. I was this fucking close, man.]
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.
Before we get to the mozzarella-stick militia having a paroxysm of patriotic pearl-clutching because a two-term, scandal-free, infuriatingly handsome, effortlessly eloquent, smooth-as-fuck former president had the temerity to make a joke about their gilded, grievance-engorged fellatiarch’s taste in décor, a little palate cleanser.
Last night, democracy went two-for-two on the road. In Serbia, a student-led movement defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s political camp in parliamentary elections. The strongman actually acknowledged losing.
Imagine that. A fascist who can count.
In Brazil, Lula, soon to be eighty-one, came from behind and beat Flávio Bolsonaro, the junior varsity heir to the family fascism franchise, by more than four million votes. Naturally, Flávio, whom Trump’s kleptocratic regime has been trying to help into power, is refusing to concede and demanding the election be annulled.
Sound like a familiar pity-party tantrum to anybody else?
Let him howl. Every one of these defeats is a big fucking deal for democracy, for freedom worldwide, for everybody watching authoritarian assholes treat entire countries like something their sons should inherit along with billion-dollar defense contracts.
Apparently American exceptionalism means other countries get to watch their fascists lose while we get to watch ours build Versailles out of fucking gold contact paper. All I want is to wake up in a country where the good guys won, Junior’s crying into his coke pile, and his yam-dyed daddy is in a prison cell downwind of a goddamn McDonald’s, smelling fries he can’t have and listening to the steady, maddening whup… whup… WHUP of six hundred wind turbines keeping his fucking door locked.
Israel gets its chance tomorrow. Please, universe, let Netanyahu be the next genocidal goon to fall.
We get ours next Tuesday. Vote out the unctuous little congressional cock-polishers who’ve mistaken legislative oversight for keeping an eye on whether His Royal Thighness needs another pillow. Give him a House that issues subpoenas instead of compliments and a Senate that can locate its own testicles without asking his permission. I want these bastards watching election returns with their lawyers on one line and a charter pilot on the other.
But right now? I’m here to laugh at MAGA.
This one goes out to you, you tallow-brained, Trump-tumescent troglodytes, you suppositories of racial resentment, you sycophantic sphincter spelunkers who crawled up a con man’s ass and declared yourselves the master race.
I know you’re having a hard time lately, and I would like very much to make it worse. Because your guy is out there looking like a foreskin somebody inflated with a leaf blower, steeped in hot-dog water, and topped with the hair recovered from a motel Jacuzzi filter.
He’s short-circuiting, making strangulated, subverbal noises no speechwriter has ever had to punctuate, like a caveman on helium somebody slapped on the back while he was trying to whistle and drink chocolate milk at the same time. What the fuck do you even put in the transcript? A consonant? A wet footprint? Somebody get an anthropologist and a splash guard.
Meanwhile, we’ve got Barack Obama, that tall drink of Yes We Can, followed by Pete Buttigieg, Jon Ossoff, Abdul El-Sayed—a procession of gorgeous, literate men who don’t need both hands on the furniture to hold on to a thought.
Put Ossoff in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and I’ll canvass a county I can’t pronounce. Pete and Jon? A dream ticket I could get behind. Or in front of. However they want me. I have questions about their positions, and very few concern the filibuster.
But I digress.
And there you are, MAGA, having spent ten years insisting Trump is the consummate alpha male, watching Obama remind you—with one joke—that you’ve pledged your life, your paycheck, and your last shred of dignity to a scrotal-reconstruction lawsuit in a red tie.
So, here goes…
Dear Ma and Pa MAGA,
You absolute fucking idiots.
You tariff-tenderized, Toby-Keith-tatted tailgate theologians of the Tuscan chicken flatbread. Have a seat. Loosen the elastic on them Sunday-best sweatpants.
That room looks like a Las Vegas funeral parlor offering a graveside lap dance with the purchase of a premium casket. Any second, a man in a crushed-velvet tux is gonna emerge from behind a gold column to explain that the Platinum Bereavement Experience includes bottle service and a grieving hostess named Sinnamon.
With an S.
Quick sidebar, because I may actually know her. In college, I found out I was working as a stripper. News to me: my only experience with a pole was waiting at the bus stop. My seventeen-year-old stepsister had stolen my identity and was dancing under my name. Her stage name? Sinnamon. With an S. An entire career in adult entertainment without seeing a dollar, which makes me the most MAGA thing in this essay.
Anyhoo.
The Trumpian Oval Office looks like a Fabergé egg that caught gonorrhea in the back room of a strip mall nail salon, with an antique coin purse made out of eyelid skin in the middle conducting a decorating consultation entirely through the phrase “MORE FUCKING GOLD.”
This man would gold-leaf his own colon if the gastroenterologist agreed to call it the Hall of Mirrors.
Obama mocked THAT, and you, the affronted aristocracy of the appetizer sampler, decided he’d insulted the place where Real Americans™ eat.
And look, I LOVE the Cheesecake Factory. I’ll commit a succession of butter-baptized dietary atrocities beneath those inexplicably Egyptian columns until the booth requires a coroner, then leave cradling a doggy bag whose translucent grease stains provide a complete medical history.
I also love Disney World. Doesn’t mean I want a fucking churro cart beside the nuclear football.
Nobody came for your booth, Cletus. Your step-grandson’s prison-release party was never under attack.
Donald Trump has joked to supporters that $5,000 would get them one hamburger and a small dessert at Mar-a-Lago, but yes, please, PLEASE go on about how Barack Obama is losing the everyman over a fucking restaurant joke.
Trump posts a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. MAGA laughs its ass off.
Trump mocks Rob Reiner after he and his wife are murdered. MAGA laughs its ass off.
Trump says of Robert Mueller, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” MAGA laughs its ass off.
Obama compares all that gold to a Cheesecake Factory run by Saddam Hussein?
HOW DARE YOU. YOU HATE ORDINARY AMERICANS. YOU’RE EVIL INCARNATE. LEAVE OUR FUCKING CHEESECAKE ALONE.
But insult the gold leaf and you lachrymose little lickspittles react like he wiped his dick on your birthday slice of Ultimate Red Velvet Cake Cheesecake.
You’ll defend the honor of a dessert menu with your last wheezing breath while the preening, parasitic prick you elected celebrates oil profits and you’re wondering whether you can afford the gas to get there.
Even your marmalade-smeared, money-grubbing, morally bankrupt messiah knew how obscene that would sound. He anticipated the criticism before announcing: “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it — we’re making a freaking fortune.”
We.
Oh, he’s in the “we,” all right. His personal oil and gas holdings are now estimated at $22.5 million to $81.6 million, up from $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of 2025. Those values include additional purchases, not just gains. Your petroleum-plumped peckerpotentate is practically rubbing his nipples with the quarterly statement while you price denture adhesive by the ounce and wonder whether the Second Amendment entitles you to shoot a pork chop small enough to gum.
Sweetheart, you heard “we” and thought somebody added you to the joint checking account. He meant himself and the people whose boats have smaller boats. You’re helping finance a second staircase on something that fucking floats.
But you deferential, dickriding dipshits would hold the flashlight while he siphoned your gasoline into his yacht through a monogrammed garden hose, then coast home on fumes explaining that Obama thinks he’s too good for you.
Perhaps the class enemy was the gentleman with your gasoline in his mouth, Earl.
The tariffs were supposed to make you rich. Your peace candidate dragged us into a war with Iran. Now you’re wearing a shirt with two bald eagles having bannerific intercourse over the Constitution, pleading with a blinking card reader to recognize that you voted for prosperity while the machine requests something your entire political philosophy was supposed to render unnecessary: sufficient fucking funds.
But admitting you got played would require an exhumation of every sanctimonious sermon you delivered across a Thanksgiving table, every time you called a relative brainwashed, every gun-toting Jesus meme you dispatched from the University of Your Own Ass.
Your niece’s pronouns did not raise your grocery bill. The blue-haired barista never had jurisdiction over the Strait of Hormuz. And you’d rather excavate your own prostate with a shrimp fork than give your liberal daughter the satisfaction of hearing she was right.
The well-paid MAGA mouthpieces know it. The second these oleaginous little oligarch groupies spot the first flicker of quasi-comprehension crossing your face, they smother it with a fresh star-spangled panic.
Look over here, sugar tits. The uppity Black man has impugned the architectural integrity of your sacred feeding grounds.
Back on the outrage teat you go. Somebody darker to resent, an immigrant to blame, anyone you can shove beneath you before you have to look at who’s standing on your fucking neck.
Lyndon Johnson understood the arrangement:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
So sure, investigate the cheesecake remark. Impound the dessert trolley. Haul a frightened busboy before Jim Jordan and demand to know when the tiramisu became radicalized. Your fossil-fueled Marie Antoinette in a spray tan and a pontoon boat tarp is purring “let them eat cheesecake,” and you’re demanding an apology from the man who insulted his gilding.
I don’t give a single deep-fried, flag-bedazzled fuck about your manufactured outrage. You’re praying to the patron saint of declined debit cards, and the only emergency you’ve identified is a Black man who called the gold tacky.
Your million-dollar-an-hour, malignantly moronic mountebank knows you’re getting screwed. He could wipe caviar off his chin with your fucking foreclosure notice and you’d still swear he was just a regular guy trying to keep a roof over your head.
He’s hosting dinners for his billionaire buddies where you’d have to sell both kidneys just to afford the free bread.
But sure. Obama is the one treating you like you’re fucking stupid.
