Category: JOJOFROMJERZ

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JoJo’s Got Such A Way With Words, Don’t You Think?

Late last night, Mr. “Russia, Russia, Russia” signed an executive order waiving sanctions against Vladimir Putin, because this perfidious, Putin-fluffing pile of presidential pork fat couldn’t bear the thought of his favorite murderous dictator suffering so much as a financial fucking inconvenience while his military continues slaughtering Ukrainians.

So he waited until Friday night, when Americans were busy recovering from another week of surviving his shitshow, and quietly loosened the financial screws on his Russian Master before scurrying back to his padded kennel to await further instructions.

Because Donald Trump has always been Vladimir Putin’s bitch.

And at this point, how much more fucking obvious does it have to get? We’ve been standing beneath a Russian sewage pipe for the better part of a decade, getting blasted in the face with industrial-grade excrement, and half the country is still squinting at the sky, asking whether anybody else thinks it smells funny.

Motherfucker, you’ve got a turd hanging off your eyebrow.

He’s the gimp from Pulp Fiction, except we’re all trapped in the basement with him, and this gelatinous, genuflecting cuck is sweating Sunny D through a latex onesie two sizes too small, packed in like kielbasa at a Lambeau tailgate, squeaking every time he bends and twirling in his Bedazzled ball gag like it’s prom night at the Moscow Marriott.

Welcome to Kneepad Diplomacy™, where the most powerful nation on Earth is being run into the ground by a Tang-glazed, tongue-lolling tuffet of treachery with a praise kink who’d trade the Statue of Liberty for a firm swat on the rump and a slab of chocolate cake the size of a hubcap.

He had American service members on their hands and knees in Alaska rolling out the welcome mat for his death-dealing, democracy-devouring despot, while that Crisco-cushioned quisling stood ready to have PROPERTY OF VLAD monogrammed on his kneeling pad.

That red carpet was foreplay, because this apricot ass-kisser isn’t even meeting Putin halfway; he’s crawling the entire fucking distance with American foreign policy between his teeth, stopping every few feet to check whether Daddy needs his slippers, another concession, perhaps a sovereign democracy diced into bite-sized pieces and served on a silver tray he licked clean himself, anything for a scratch behind the ears from the Botoxed little bastard holding his leash before retreating beneath the staircase to wait for somebody to tell him he’s been a very good boy.

And the evidence of this groveling, groaning, geopolitical degradation has been piling up for years, from Don Junior, that chinless, coke-eyed princeling of inherited privilege, bragging about Russian money to oligarchs circulating through Trump-branded properties like the guest list for a fucking money-laundering swingers’ convention, while the whole family developed a conveniently catastrophic case of selective Slavic amnesia.

This collared, capitulating little pay pig has spent decades glazing, glorifying, and giving Vladimir Putin the geopolitical equivalent of a complimentary rim job, and now the relationship has progressed to him telling Ukraine to stop hitting the Russian refineries helping bankroll the invasion that’s killing Ukrainian children.

Ukraine paused during a ceasefire Trump announced with the confidence of somebody who’d personally negotiated it with God, except Putin hadn’t agreed to jack shit, Russia kept bombing, and Zelenskyy resumed hitting the refineries, which, who the fuck could blame him? If somebody’s trying to kill your family, you hit them where it hurts.

And this Kremlin-coddling coward called it a disgrace, a real Emily Post moment from somebody scolding an invaded country for the brass-balled, bloody-minded gall of declining to die while Vladimir balances his books and bills the corpses.

But the same orange arsonist who helped send fuel prices soaring with his Iran war now wants to moonwalk out of the smoke clutching a Russian jerrycan like a carnival goldfish and pretend he’s rescuing American families from expensive diesel.

Spare me the steaming tanker truck of horseshit. None of this is about helping Americans here. It’s all about helping Vlad win over there.

And this obsequious, orange-hued oil fluffer is working the arrangement with both teeny-tiny hands wrapped around Vladimir’s Johnson, tongue poking out in concentration like a cake decorator piping the last buttercream rose onto a six-tier wedding cake, begging us to admire his energy policy.

Which makes the latest development in this grotesque geopolitical peep show especially revealing, because while Donnie Two Scoops was failing to persuade Zelenskyy to roll over like a good boy, multiple outlets traced the order to slow Ukraine’s military satellite service to the White House, which was interesting enough before the Telegraph reported that Elon Musk, our great white beluga cast as the dying E.T., had approached Trump with the idea and Trump agreed.

What did that conversation sound like? “Sir, Zelenskyy won’t stop bombing Vladimir’s refineries, but what if we slow down the technology Ukraine uses to stop Russian drones? Maybe a few more exploding apartment buildings will teach him to listen.”

And that’s how Ukrainian interceptors reportedly ended up struggling to chase Russian drones that could continue toward civilian neighborhoods like they’d made a fucking dinner reservation, while the machines trying to STOP them got sentenced to a timeout they never earned.

But after a night of carnage in Kyiv, Elon “Horses for Handjobs” Musk, that pallid, plutocratic pile of unseasoned poultry with a breeding fetish and a bank balance large enough to purchase his own applause, suddenly became terribly concerned about European customers.

European customers.

Jesus Christ. A city is being terrorized, and this profit-panicked purveyor of overpriced electric appliances is worried somebody in Düsseldorf might buy an Audi. What does a Ukrainian mother have to do to get your attention, asshole? Staple a canceled purchase order to her child’s fucking coat?

And did Musk want to punish Ukraine because it knocked out one of his Russian bot farms? Is that why he’s so obsessed with getting rid of Zelenskyy? Imagine spending billions buying yourself an audience only to discover somebody bombed the data center housing your fucking fan club.

But when the world started asking who’d been fucking with Ukraine’s defenses, suddenly nobody wanted credit. Musk pointed at Washington, Trump pointed at anybody but himself, and the two of them became the Spider-Man meme, except both Spider-Men were counterfeit, beer-bellied bastards outside the Times Square Olive Garden, hustling fentanyl to tourists between twenty-dollar photo ops and screaming about whose fucking shift it was.

And that’s when the belligerent bouffant with security clearance announced he didn’t know who’d given the order.

You don’t fucking KNOW?

He’d rather have us believe he’s not running his own administration than admit what agreeing to that slowdown would mean: the United States helping Putin kill Ukrainian women, children, and other civilians trying to survive in their own free country.

Can you imagine Biden giving that answer? Fox would interrupt its own interruption, and Hannity would need a fresh shirt and a priest. This is the “perfect phone call” all the fuck over again. Except worse.

And now His Flatulent Fraudulence insists Starlink is running perfectly normally, always has been, nothing to see here, while Zelenskyy says it STILL isn’t back to normal and Ukrainian tests across the European border show the connection working at speeds that cause it to cut out inside Ukraine.

What the fuck is that? A geographically selective nervous breakdown? Does the satellite recognize the Ukrainian border and develop performance anxiety?

Did these two evil idiots think they could pull the Airplane! routine, unplug the runway lights, plug them back in, and chirp “Just kidding!” while everybody struggles to land?

Oopsie! Did we interfere with your ability to stop explosives heading toward your children? Everybody relax! We plugged the fucking thing back in! Well, most of it. Actually, we never unplugged it. And if somebody did, nobody knows who!

So the United States bombed a school in Iran, and now we’re helping Putin bomb schools in Ukraine.

Is THIS what being “great again” looks like?

There is no “Russia hoax,” just a United States president serving Vladimir Putin’s interests while flag-fellating fuckwits defend him from the evidence of their own goddamn eyes.

And they’re counting on the rest of us being too busy surviving to notice, with your kid needing shoes, the insurance company denying the claim, the car making that noise again, and another national betrayal becoming something you’ll find the strength to think about somewhere between the third transfer and the fifth rendition of instrumental “Careless Whisper.”

They’re manufacturing the chaos and exploiting our exhaustion, because they don’t need our approval if they can make giving a shit one more thing Americans can’t afford.

And while our troops are dying in his illegal, unconstitutional, endless war with Iran, Trump claims he doesn’t “THINK” Russia or China are helping Tehran, despite American intelligence indicating otherwise.

That’s like me deciding I’m not a natural brunette because I prefer being blonde. Somebody tell my fucking roots. They keep rudely submitting evidence to the contrary.

But this cranial custard cup clarifies that even if they ARE helping, “it’s at a very low level.”

IF THEY ARE?!

You’re the commander in chief of the United States of America, you ambulatory mound of presidential pudding, not somebody divining national security intelligence from the sediment in his Diet Coke.

What constitutes an acceptable amount of help killing American troops? Does Putin get complimentary Pentagon coordinates after his third missile shipment, a commemorative challenge coin, and a voucher for two nights at Mar-a-Lago?

Nancy Pelosi said “all roads lead to Putin,” and she wasn’t guessing. She was reading the name engraved on his little leather collar.

And now we’re calling it “peace talks,” because the murderer apparently requires another financial inducement to stop murdering, while the country being invaded is supposed to offer up portions of itself like somebody carving the fucking Thanksgiving turkey.

Imagine marauders break into your house, kill your dog, kidnap your children, and start firing missiles into your kitchen, while Putin’s piss-yellow property manager steps over the wreckage and asks what YOU’RE prepared to concede.

Concede? Motherfucker, I LIVE HERE.

What do you offer? Alternate weekends with the refrigerator? Perhaps the burglars will let you keep the garage if you acknowledge their legitimate security concerns, while this bootlicking sack of sedition measures your living room for Putin’s sectional and explains that insisting the intruders leave makes YOU unreasonable.

It has never been about peace. It’s about giving Putin a piece of another country.

“Our country has to survive,” Zelenskyy says, having to remind the United States of America that his country’s continued existence isn’t an unreasonable fucking request.

Oh, how very far we have fallen.

And the red-white-and-brainless contingent tells us to “cry harder,” while I’d ask where the fuck Republicans in Congress are, but their heads are so far up their own asses they could check their prostates with their eyelashes, which must make reading the Constitution difficult, although I’m reasonably certain these craven, cringing, constitutionally constipated little courtiers would rather bend over the Resolute Desk and chirp “Yes, sir! May I have another?” than risk displeasing the spray-tanned submissive running their party.

Remember when we fought fascism?

We sent our men and boys across an ocean to liberate people living under tyranny, boys writing home about the lives they hoped to resume, reassuring mothers they were terrified they’d never see again, and now a five-time draft-dodging, bone-spurred coward expects us to admire his willingness to accommodate a dictator invading a European democracy.

We once sent Americans to help get other people off their knees. This servile sack of surrender wants us to join him on his, as though the flag that covered their coffins were another piece of fabric he could spread at Putin’s feet.

He can lower himself until his belt buckle scrapes the floor, crane his neck for a crumb of approval from a murderer who regards him as useful equipment, and spend whatever remains of his dignity begging for a biscuit he’s been trained not to reach for.

But he keeps reaching behind him for the rest of us, expecting an entire country to bend until we can no longer look the people we abandoned in the eye.

Fuck that. His submission does not come with OUR consent.

He’s convinced we’re too exhausted to care and too powerless to stop him, that traitorous, treacherous, treasonous, tyrant-teabagging toady, certain the American people will fold while he pawns off the birthright of an entire nation for another approving grunt from the Kremlin butcher.

But this nepo-baby beneficiary of inherited billions, this spectacularly incompetent casino-bankrupting bastard who somehow managed to lose money in a business where the fucking house always wins, is betting against the American people.

And once again, he’s betting wrong.

In the meantime, the question isn’t how far Donald Trump is willing to lower himself for Vladimir Putin.

The question is: How much of America does he think we’re willing to let him take down there with him?

Stay safe out there, stay strong, and stay connected to each other!

Continued radio silence from the bullies I will keep you updated, I promise!

💙 Jo

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Has there ever been, in the history of mankind, or whatever genus of jackbooted Jell-O he technically belongs to, a bigger fucking crybaby than Donald J. “for Genius” Trump?

My God, that puling, peevish, petulant pantload, that sniveling, snot-sucking sultan of self-pity, that heaping pile of clammy deli trimmings that looks like somebody tried to sous-vide a Stretch Armstrong in the cloudy runoff from a can of hot-car Vienna sausages, is so absolutely, mind-bogglingly, embarrassingly pathetic.

Does Fat Satan hold the unofficial world record for competitive pissbabying? Get Guinness on the phone, but don’t tell this diapered dauphin of disappointment there’s a certificate, or we’ll never get the gelatinous little glory whore off the line.

He’s been whining nonstop about the “Noble” Peace Prize while we’re in the middle of a war he started and this preening, pud-pulling prima donna is picking out tile for his bulletproof ballroom, because heaven forbid he have to do his double-fisted jerk-and-twist to “YMCA” on a floor that doesn’t flatter his cankles. 

He’s also trying to sue me again for posting a picture of him with a pedophile, as if I’m the one who should’ve been more careful about who he was standing next to. But I digress.

This pick-me, panhandling pork rind has spent years dry-humping the committee’s leg without learning the name of the fucking prize, because apparently the self-proclaimed stable genius who keeps reminding us that nobody knows the word “dumb” ends with a B can’t distinguish Nobel from Noble.

All that panting, pawing, and varnishing its corduroys with orange chin grease, and he still thinks “no” is a clerical error he can overturn by forcing himself upon whoever and whatever he wants.

And they gave it to a WOMAN? In the putrid, pustulent, pussy-grabbing primordial sludge that passes for his presidential psyche, a woman is something HE gets, not somebody who gets something HE wants.

Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s nine hundred percent of what’s eating this envious little bastard alive.

Obama has one. He doesn’t. He can fill the White House with enough gold to make a Saudi prince request a less ostentatious table, and there will still be that one shiny thing Barack has that he couldn’t buy, browbeat, or bitch his way into being awarded.

Obama, young, lean, ludicrously handsome, wickedly intelligent, devastatingly articulate, with that slow grin, that velvet baritone, that exquisite composure, and a lethal wit he could deliver with one raised eyebrow, sexy enough to make a woman mistake a discussion of monetary policy for foreplay and briefly resent Ben Bernanke for wasting that mouth on the fucking bond market, stood at that 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and filleted him in a tuxedo.

A Black man with all that grace, all that gravitas, all that effortless command of a room this prestige-starved parasite would gargle warm denture water just to impress. In the rancid racial pecking order Donald had inherited right along with the real estate, this man was supposed to be beneath him.

Donald had been peddling the racist birther bullshit that Barack Obama wasn’t even born in the United States, trying to delegitimize the first Black president. And there was Barack, standing behind the presidential seal, making him the fucking punch line for all the world to see.

For a creature of such colossal conceit and cringing insecurity—a vainglorious, vindictive vulgarian—having Obama strip the gilt off his entire goddamn existence must have been fucking annihilating. The genius, the tycoon, the irresistible ladies’ man: he’d spent decades bullying the world into accepting his bullshit as biography, until The Apprentice gave the mythology a boardroom and a broadcast schedule.

This counterfeit Casanova even posed as his own publicist, John Miller, to tell reporters how many women wanted to fuck Donald Trump. He invented another person to corroborate his own bullshit.

And now the actual president was peeling the cellophane off the whole fraudulent creation in front of the Washington press corps, and the man who demanded everybody’s admiration had to endure the public evisceration of the mythology he’d spent his entire life trying to pass off as himself.

And the room laughed. Oh, how they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Obama even put up a mock-up labeled “Trump White House Resort and Casino,” which, considering the People’s House now looks like Saddam Hussein’s third wedding in a Paramus banquet hall, where somebody’s spray-painted the shrimp gold because the groom thought they looked poor, was pretty fucking clairvoyant.

All these years later, Baron von Bitchfit is mentally still at that Correspondents’ Dinner, jaw clenched, corn-niblet fingers curled into fists beneath the table, furiously rehearsing the comeback he wishes he’d delivered before Barack got back from the bathroom. 

Except now his comeback has a motorcade and a military budget.

That humiliation seared itself into whatever spite-saturated substitute for a soul this man possesses and metastasized into Obama-Induced Resentment Syndrome, a chronic, terminal condition. He wants the footage destroyed, the witnesses to swear they were choking on dinner rolls, Barack to confess his lifelong envy of Donald’s magnificent physique, and the Nobel committee to issue a groveling apology for its catastrophic error in judgment. He wants to know why winning the presidency TWICE hasn’t entitled Donnie Diapers to unlimited pudding and official recognition as the most special boy in the universe.

None of that is happening, but Veruca Salt in a pair of black patent-leather Florsheims with three inches of elevator lifts and enough heel polish to waterproof a bass boat isn’t leaving Wonka’s factory without her golden goose, even if she has to threaten the Oompa Loompas with federal indictments.

Sooner or later, that overstuffed bad egg is headed down the garbage chute.

And all the while, he’s so spectacularly constipated with resentment that he actually had Barack’s portrait moved and slapped up that oversized “painting” of himself after the assassination attempt, a Franklin Mint limited-edition “Presidential Martyrdom” collectible that looks like it came with a certificate of authenticity, a complimentary velvet display pouch, and six easy payments of $39.95, batteries not included.

The damn thing doesn’t even fit the wall panel.

Unable to wrestle Obama’s Nobel out of the universe, the Great Orange Gland of Grievance got his greasy meat mittens on somebody else’s. María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, handed him her 2025 medal in January, apparently hoping to secure his support for her bid to lead the country. She surrendered the most prestigious honor of her career to a man who’d sell his own grandmother’s dental implants for a McRib coupon, and what did she get in return? Fuck all. No endorsement, no path to power, not even a lousy refrigerator magnet from the White House gift shop. He pocketed her medal, announced he’d received the honor “indirectly,” and essentially told her, “Thanks, bitch. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

And even THAT wasn’t enough for Beelzeblubber, who wants EIGHT peace prizes, one for each war this medal-mad, megalomaniacal mound of presidential mortadella claims he “ended.”

By that standard, I deserve one for not losing my mind when my daughter turned my kitchen into an artisanal pumpkin muffin sweatshop at MIDNIGHT.

Another for the restraint I demonstrated at a stoplight when some horn-humping jackass in a Dodge Ram was riding so far up my ass he could’ve performed a colonoscopy through the tailpipe, and I only flipped him off THREE TIMES.

And a third for not informing my neighbor that her drunk-ass husband asked me about my sex life while I was handing out Halloween candy, because maintaining peaceful relations between sovereign households while a shitfaced suburban satyr conducts unsolicited research into my vagina over a bowl of fun-size Snickers requires the restraint of a bomb-disposal technician.

Did I summon the Norwegian ambassador to acknowledge my extraordinary contributions to suburban détente? No. I went inside and ate a leftover muffin.

The Tangerine Tantrum Tyrant expects the full Scandinavian production, complete with trumpets, tuxedos, a twenty-one-gun salute, and preferably a notarized statement confirming Barack Obama’s dick is smaller than his.

He’d insist his proctologist submit a five-star review of his asshole for inclusion in the banquet program, then demand to be carried into Oslo on a gilded sedan chair by four Norwegian weightlifters in orthopedic back braces while the string section abandons the overture to fan his swollen, swampy balls with their sheet music, assuming the cellist can hoist that collapsed wedding cake of Man-FUPA without giving himself a fucking hernia.

Even after all that ceremonial ball ventilation, he’d need Daddy to tell him he’s a good boy, which leaves the Nobel committee playing the role of five Norwegians in oatmeal-colored fisherman sweaters who can refuse him without getting fired.

Daddy said no, Donnie. Daddy keeps saying no. You need to stop fucking asking.

Except the Pouting Potentate of Pissbabyvania doesn’t hear no. He hears an invitation to apply pressure, punish, and threaten until whoever’s refusing him submits or breaks. He believes wanting something obligates everyone else to surrender it. Countries. Institutions. Women. Consent is an administrative inconvenience. He told us on the Access Hollywood tape: “I don’t even wait.”

He. Doesn’t. Wait.

Grab ’em by the Peace Prize.

He thinks the Nobel committee owes him a medal for taking his boot off a throat he put it on. With Iran, he’s demanding the medal before he’s even lifted the fucking boot—counting it among the wars he supposedly settled while still talking about how he’s going to settle or win it, as though starting a fire and eventually getting bored with watching it burn qualifies as an advanced degree in fire prevention.

That’s the arsonist who torches the Sizzler, calls 911, and plants his ass on the fire hose demanding a hero’s parade because he rescued the five-gallon bucket of ranch dressing. The firefighters are trying to save the building, the salad bar has reached temperatures ordinarily associated with Mercury, and this kerosene-cologned catastrophe is demanding the fire chief thank him personally before asking whether the cameras caught his good side.

Ending a war you started doesn’t make you a peacemaker. And “winning” a war you started sure as shit doesn’t make you one either.

Take that definition to Minab, where a U.S. strike hit a girls’ school and killed 175 children, and explain to the parents who buried them why the man presiding over the war deserves a gala and a commemorative photograph with the king of Norway.

Their daughters are dead, and this self-absorbed sack of presidential suet expects the world to console him because nobody gave him a necklace.

As if the dead children weren’t enough, Mussolini Alfredo is preparing to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, who uses a wheelchair. American soldiers, a condemned man, a worldwide audience, and a government convinced that military justice has been missing a production crew.

Gandhi never even got the fucking medal, but this bloodthirsty butter sculpture expects one while his people work out the camera angles for a public fucking execution.

Giving this malevolent, marauding madman a Nobel Peace Prize is like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a James Beard Award for sourcing locally, Ted Bundy a Volunteer of the Year plaque for helping lovely young women carry things to his car, and Joe Exotic the Carole Baskin Award for Excellence in Conflict Resolution.

And since we’re handing out honors to men whose résumés read like evidence inventories, find this spray-tanned supplicant a consolation prize before he works himself into a presidential prolapse. Rummage through the recycling, find a Fancy Feast lid, punch two holes in it, and thread a ribbon through the bastard. Check the edges, because I refuse to spend three weeks hearing that the president received a Purple Heart for being lightly inconvenienced by a can of Gravy Lovers Ocean Whitefish & Tuna.

Hang it around his neck, tell him it’s an upgrade on his FIFA Peace Prize, pat him on the head, and give him a chocolate chip cookie. Throw in a juice box and a participation certificate with a gold foil sticker that says WORLD’S BEST DONALD.

None of it fucking matters, because I’m never gonna be a natural blonde married to Ewan McGregor, he’s never gonna be a six-foot-three, 213-pound, high-IQ genius, and there isn’t enough gold in Fort Knox to bribe, bully, blackmail, or bludgeon somebody into hanging something around his sweaty neck-fold cheese that will ever make him a man of peace.

He’s not a war-ender. He’s not a humanitarian. He’s not some magnanimous, merciful, olive-branch-wielding statesman. He’s a sadistic, self-sucking, spectacularly spiteful son of a bitch who doesn’t give a solitary shit about peace unless there’s a piece of something in it for him.

Barack Obama is never going to apologize for embarrassing him.

That room full of people is never going to stop laughing at him.

And the Nobel committee is never giving that fat, ugly fuck a prize.

UPDATE: What I feared would happen when I finally told my story about the Trumps coming after me happened: another letter, six pages of threats citing my tweets and the very Substack essay I wrote about them threatening me, because now they’re threatening me for telling you they’re threatening me.

It’s straight up harassment, and I’d be lying to all of you if I said it didn’t scare the shit out of me, or that I haven’t spent a good chunk of the last two days crying, but I will be goddamned if I let them scare me into silence. 

I’m fairly sure this is going to result in a lawsuit, but I guess we’ll wait and see, because I’m not going to stop.

In the meantime, thank you, all of you, for your incredible, unwavering support—it’s the only way I’m getting through this.

I love you guys! Stay safe, stay strong, and stay connected to each other!

💙 Jo

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When you elect clowns, you really, really, really should expect a circus.

And that’s exactly what was on display at Jack Smith’s Senate hearing in what we still, with an increasingly heroic commitment to irony, call the world’s greatest deliberative body: the United States Senate.

What a dumpster-fire shitshow.

What a nine-layer dip of pathetic, performative, preening, principle-free, prostate-polishing political self-debasement.

Four hours of gutless congressional cosplay from a collection of quivering, kowtowing, credibility-castrated courtiers competing to see who could crawl the farthest up Donald Trump’s ass and come back out wearing his prostate as a party hat.

Former special counsel Jack Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee, square-jawed and steady, staring down a firing squad of partisan fuckery after years of threats, investigations, intimidation, vilification and demands for his prosecution.

And he didn’t flinch.

Smith has spent decades as a public servant and prosecutor, and he walked straight into a room packed with people desperate to discredit him, raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and stood behind his work while they hurled handfuls of rhetorical feces in his direction.

Facing him?

A senatorial skid mark. A bought-off, backbone-bereft, brownnosing bootlicker brigade and a panoply of pusillanimous, puckered, peacocking political lickspittles, craven courtiers and MAGA meat-riders conducting themselves with all the dignity of a bachelor party being escorted out of Medieval Times because one of them tried to reverse-cowgirl the jousting horse.

Senator Foghorn Liehorn Kennedy spent his time pecking away at Jack Smith about his WIFE. Her political views. Her opinions about Trump. Her opinions about the Obamas. Smith repeatedly told him he wasn’t there to discuss his family, but Kennedy kept gnawing on it, turning a Senate Judiciary hearing into the world’s shittiest couples-therapy intake form before asking a former federal prosecutor, with a completely straight face, whether he believed in the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy.

In the United States Senate.

This Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar, who perpetually talks like he left his dentures soaking in a jelly jar, cinched up his little aw-shucks verbal overalls, cranked the cornpone dial until the knob came off and started chewing his consonants into oatmeal like he’d moseyed in from the Louisiana swamp with a crawdad in his pocket and constitutional jurisprudence written on the back of a Piggly Wiggly receipt.

Give me a fucking break.

Kennedy has a law degree from the University of Virginia and studied at Oxford, but point a television camera at him and suddenly he’s three syllables away from telling us his meemaw always said you can’t prosecute a possum during crawfish season.

It’s not folksiness.

It’s intellectual drag.

And somehow, some fucking how, it got even more ridiculous when Ted “I Cream My Pants for the Guy Who Called My Wife Ugly” Cruz compared Jack Smith to Javert from Les Misérables, because nothing says grave Senate oversight quite like a set of sentient jowl merkins testing the outer limits of his scientifically punchable face while shoehorning French musical theater into congressional testimony.

Cruz fled freezing Texas for Cancún and initially explained that trip by saying his daughters wanted to go, and this is a senator whose reputation among his colleagues once inspired Lindsey Graham to joke that if somebody killed Cruz on the Senate floor, nobody there would convict them.

Bipartisanship lives!

But Cruz wasn’t even the most mortifying ambulatory sack of Senate stationery in the room.

By the time Eric Schmitt got rolling, and I’ll be honest, I had no idea this guy was even in the United States Senate until he cannonballed into this hearing, I was watching him make a serious run at the title of Most Willfully Ignorant Idiot in Congress.

And Tommy Tuberville exists.

If these people retained even a vestigial capacity for shame, Schmitt would’ve left the hearing disguised as a ficus and spent the remainder of his term communicating with Missouri exclusively through burner phones, because he tried to accuse Jack Smith of lying under oath over where he’d been on a particular day and came armed with documents, a prosecutorial erection and a giant visual aid that was supposed to blow the lid off Watergate II.

There was just one teensy problem with Senator Matlock’s big Perry Mason reveal: he had confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Schmitt saw “Hawk,” slammed the emergency brake on his frontal lobe and decided the remaining syllables were decorative, leaving him in the wrong city, in the wrong state, at the wrong game, telling the wrong fucking story with the confidence of a detective who’d just found the Lindbergh baby in his glove compartment.

You could watch the realization crawl across the dais in real time, that exquisitely nauseating moment when everyone in the car knows they’ve gone over the cliff except the driver, who is still explaining the excellent brakes, and Katie Britt’s jaw dropped so spectacularly that her face may have become the meme of the century before Schmitt had finished stepping on his own dick.

Her expression said, Eric, what in the Kentucky-fried fuck have you done?

Republicans have become the stepping-on-rakes party. They step on a rake, get walloped in the face, stagger backward onto another rake, take another handle directly to the taint, fall forward onto the first rake again and then, while concussed and bleeding from the forehead, convene a congressional hearing called Who Put All These Rakes Here? The Weaponization of Lawn Care Against Conservatives.

And Eric Schmitt is out there barefoot in the fucking garden.

Amy Klobuchar eventually had to walk a United States senator through the conceptual distinction between professional basketball in Georgia and a university team from Iowa while his enormous accusation loomed behind him looking like a Denny’s placemat for people ordering the Grand Slam with a side of senatorial brain damage.

And we fucking paid for it.

Schmitt had the mistake enlarged and mounted. A computer was involved. Staffers presumably touched this thing. Fonts were selected. Dimensions were discussed. Somebody sent a file to a printer, somebody approved it, somebody hauled that magnificent monument to refusing to Google a goddamn thing into the hearing room, and at no point in this relay race of intellectual malpractice did anyone stop and say, “Hey, Eric, are we sure these are the same fucking birds?”

It’s one thing to shit your pants.

It’s another thing entirely to have them professionally printed.

Kennedy is rummaging around in children’s folklore, Cruz is staging an off-Broadway production inside his own skull, Schmitt just lost a cage match with two bird mascots, and sitting right there among them is Josh Hawley, a congressional Go-Gurt tube stuffed stem to stern with enough hypocrisy to stock the entire Republican caucus.

He saluted the January 6 crowd with that infamous fist outside the Capitol, only to have surveillance cameras later catch him hauling ass through the corridors after the building was breached like somebody had fired a starter pistol directly into his sphincter. This wasn’t a brisk evacuation. This was prairie flight, a Missouri gazelle discovering consequences at full gallop, knees writing checks his ideology had absolutely no intention of cashing.

Now this chest-puffing congressional hall monitor, who kisses his wife with all the erotic urgency of somebody checking a CPR dummy for residual body heat, is sitting safely behind a microphone calling Jack Smith’s work political “from day one” and demanding that he be disbarred.

And Hawley wants to puff himself up about Mar-a-Lago too? The FBI searched the place on August 8, 2022. Jack Smith wasn’t appointed special counsel until November 18, more than three months later, when Garland handed him investigations that were already underway.

So if we’re assigning Smith retroactive responsibility for everything that happened before he got the job, Hawley might as well demand to know why he didn’t stop the Hindenburg, subpoena him over Pearl Harbor and ask whether he has an alibi for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

And Jesus Christ, if Josh Hawley isn’t the whole fucking scam squeezed into a necktie: pounding the table about punishing Jack Smith after America watched him evacuate the Capitol at a speed previously associated with stolen catalytic converters.

Josh Hawley and the rest of the senators who were inside that building don’t need a history lesson about January 6. They heard that history smashing through the fucking doors. The roar outside breached the walls and came screaming down the hallways, glass breaking, alarms shrieking, bodies slamming against barricades, Capitol Police running toward the violence while lawmakers were being yanked away from it, human beings putting flesh and bone between elected officials and a mob as the building filled with shouting, smoke, chemical spray, shattered glass, blood and panic.

Those cops protected them.

But talk about any of that and suddenly these assholes develop the attention span of a Labrador in a tennis-ball factory. Wives. Broadway. Childhood mythology. Avian forensics. Phone records. Conspiracy confetti. Anything to keep the conversation pinballing around the room in a frantic little production of look-over-here kabuki theater instead of landing on the thing they cannot fucking explain away.

Jack Smith forced the hearing back onto the people who held the line that day: “It is inconceivable to me how you can pardon people who assault law enforcement officers and then vilify the officers who are trying to uphold the rule of law.”

They know he’s right.

They know because those were THEIR asses being hustled away while other people stayed behind to get crushed, struck, sprayed and dragged into the melee. They know exactly who stood between them and that mob.

Somewhere between running for their lives and crawling back to Donald Trump, terror became fealty, and now the same people who needed protection from his mob are attacking the prosecutor who tried to hold anyone accountable for putting them in danger.

Cowardice feels insufficient. Cravenness needs a protein shake. Spinelessness is standing in the corner begging not to be associated with whatever this is, so we may actually have to exhume the old vocabulary.

Skitterbrooks. Cringelings. Couchers. Fazarts. Fearties. Dunghills. Pudding-hearts.

Centuries of English-speaking people looked upon quivering, supplicant, boneless little specimens and kept inventing new words for them, and the United States Senate has assembled the fucking box set.

This is something wetter, smaller and more servile, a gelatinous, genuflecting, groveling kind of self-erasure from sniveling sycophants who have fed their vertebrae into a Vitamix and poured the resulting slurry directly into Donald Trump’s water bowl.

This isn’t disagreement. It isn’t partisanship.

It’s self-abasement.

They survived the fire and volunteered to carry gasoline for the person who started it.

So spare me the flag pins, the solemn baritone speeches about patriotism and every sanctimonious syllable about the Constitution from people willing to turn constitutional oversight into a publicly financed clown car because consequences might inconvenience their melon-hued meal ticket.

Patriotism isn’t a lapel accessory. Public service isn’t seasonal decor. And the Constitution isn’t the cocktail napkin underneath Donald Trump’s Diet Coke.

All the flag-fucking pageantry in the world can’t hide the choice they made. They chose ambition over country, obedience over truth and Donald Trump over whatever microscopic remnant of principle hadn’t already leaked out through their shoes.

History isn’t going to give a shit about their oversized props, their rehearsed indignation or whatever diversionary horseshit they managed to cram into five minutes of camera time.

It’s going to remember what they were when it counted.

Their fecklessness.

Their moral surrender.

Their complicity.

It will remember that they knew what happened, knew who was responsible, knew who kept them alive and still enlisted themselves as enablers in the machinery of our collective demise.

When their country demanded truth, they manufactured distraction.

When the moment demanded a spine, they produced an easel.

And when American democracy needed them to stand the fuck up, they got down on their knees.

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The entire world is laughing at us, and can anybody honestly blame them?

Donald Trump—that hell-spawned, hemorrhoidal, half-witted Heat Miser—gave a “speech” at the UN, although it was really more of a SCREED, and it was every bit the shitshow anybody with a semi-firing synapse could’ve guessed it would be.

He opened by feverishly fellating himself and lying his ass off about the state of the dumpster fire HE’s responsible for—then paused for applause that never came.

Couldn’t get a pity clap from people professionally trained to tolerate bullshit.

The whole planet had to watch him riffing like the day drunk at the corner of the bar in a strip-mall Applebee’s at two in the afternoon, spraying spittle, spite, and spinach dip across the specials menu.

Except nobody could cut him off, and he was threatening a country instead of the assistant manager.

He even found time to pick a fight with an adjective, announcing that we were renaming artificial intelligence “superintelligence” because “artificial” made it sound fake.

Motherfucker, what do you think ARTIFICIAL MEANS?

Your face is the color of a Cheez-It. Let’s not get precious about authenticity.

And don’t worry about reining it in, folks. We just need to change the name. The brakes don’t work, but Donald’s picked out a vanity plate.

What’s the worst that could happen? Somebody uses AI to cook up an extinction-level bioweapon? A little oopsie with the species?

We could wander straight into “Shall we play a game?” territory, but this cantankerous Creamsicle with the intellectual curiosity of a urinal cake was busy fixing the LABEL.

It’s a branding problem, folks. Little PR. Like renaming gonorrhea Super Mario Party.

Your dick’s still on fire, but congratulations, you can now win Rainbow Road.

“Artificial” offended his sensibilities, but annihilating Iran—a country of ninety million people—rolled right off his tongue.

“Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly…?”

“Do I drive them into hell…?”

At the United fucking Nations.

He was talking about ninety million people like he was getting an estimate from Terminix.

Imagine if an Iranian president stood up there. Imagine if Ahmadinejad had come to the UN General Assembly and said: “Do I annihilate the Jewish state, and do it quickly? Do I drive Israel into hell?”

Imagine the Western response, the global response, the media outcry.

Republicans would’ve been on every channel demanding we bomb Iran before the translator finished the sentence. You know it. I know it. They would’ve understood every word, every implication, every reason a parent might pull their kid a little closer after hearing it.

But when Donald says it, we’re the assholes for being horrified. We’re overreacting. We don’t understand his humor. Well, explain the joke. Explain the funny part to somebody trying to raise a child in the country he just threatened to erase.

But I’m supposed to swallow that because we’ve already swallowed so much, to let yesterday’s disgrace make today’s easier to stomach. It doesn’t. It breaks something in me to love this country and watch him teach the world to fear what we’re becoming.

The president of the United States went to the United Nations and threatened genocide against a member state in front of the world.

Our country’s name is attached to that threat. Iranian children have to live under it.

This is where we’re at.

And from threatening people who have no say in how their country is run, he went straight to slobbering over somebody who keeps his own people that way. Out came the red carpet for Xi Jinping, the honor guard, American B-1 bombers overhead—our military providing the thunder while Donald provided the heavy breathing.

Look at that photograph. Xi barely changes expression. Trump looks like somebody just zipped his balls into a golf bag.

What the hell was that all about, by the way? I’ve seen some interesting chatter online.

And all that American pomp was for a guy whose people can’t vote him out, whose party has the courts by the throat, and whose government can drag its critics off to prison and torture them.

Donald looks at that and wonders why his presidency came with so much goddamn adult supervision.

When China scrapped presidential term limits in 2018, he said, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

That’s covetous, crotch-quivering, crown-craving envy. He heard “president for life” and needed somebody to slide a menu over his lap. No voters to fire him, no judges telling him no, no obligation to ever pack up his shit and leave.

And we’re supposed to laugh like the guy who tried to overturn an election is kidding about wanting to stop having them.

He even had an excuse when asked about accusations that Chinese companies supplied Iran with satellite imagery before a strike that killed three American troops: “They basically do what we do.”

What the literal fuck?

Three Americans dead, and he sounded like somebody took his parking space at Costco. He had an entire speech’s worth of praise for himself and one shrug for the people who risked their lives under his orders.

And none of it got in the way of the welcome. While our service members fight an illegal, unconstitutional war with no exit strategy in sight, their crepey, concealer-caked, candy-corn-colored Commander-in-Chief is practically pulling a hamstring trying to kiss Xi’s ass.

Where the fuck are the Reagan Republicans? Where is their outrage?

These cowards of convenience have spent years prostrating themselves before this prick, surrendering one principle after another until their patriotism could fit on a lapel and everything else was for sale. He can humiliate America and lick the loafers of despots, and they’ll still insist the real threat is an imaginary transgender child on an imaginary softball team.

They can sniff out communism in a school lunch, these flag-fondling, freedom-fetishizing frauds, but put an actual communist leader beside Donald and watch them swallow their tongues.

A kid gets a free sandwich and it’s the Bolshevik Revolution. Xi got bombers and we’re supposed to appreciate the diplomacy.

We roll out the red carpet for Putin and Xi while we shit on our closest allies daily. The American government under Trump and his cultist Republican Party is a disgrace.

He’s turning our country’s identity inside out—who we believe we are, who the rest of the world sees when they look at us—and taking with him the things we still wanted to believe about ourselves.

And yes, there’s a long, ugly argument that we were already the bad guys, but standing at the United Nations and announcing that he can unilaterally wipe another country off the planet leaves a hell of a lot less room to argue otherwise, especially with an entire Republican Party at his feet, surrendering everything they once swore made us different and leaving the rest of us searching for our country in the things they’re willing to throw away.

Look, I know we’re numb to a lot of this shit. Believe me, I get it. My Instagram algorithm is slow cooker recipes, workout videos, and doomsday prepping at this point. Here’s a chicken marinade. Here’s a glute exercise. Here’s how long drinking water keeps in a bathtub.

I’m trying to make dinner and determine whether civilization has a return policy.

And whether I’m laughing at him or trying not to panic, he’s still up there “representing” our country. Our name. Our reputation. Our national identity.

Future generations are going to watch this footage and wonder if we were all fucking high.

Because a plurality of the dumbest dumbfucks who ever dumbed watched the first term of this shitshow, forgot what a disaster it was, blinded themselves with irrational hatred of other people, and put the motherfucker back in that office AGAIN.

But on behalf of the sane Americans who didn’t vote for this shit and are tethered to the inside of this endless tantrum, please believe me when I tell you:

He does not speak for us.

We are embarrassed. We are angry. We are sick. We are scared.

And we are determined to make this shit right.

Because he does NOT speak for us.

He never has, and he never fucking will.

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I’ve seen some stupid shit in my life.

I watched an absolutely shitfaced grown-ass man sprint down a cobblestone street with both hands jammed in his pockets, entrusting his entire dental future to the footwork of a man who couldn’t have successfully operated a juice box. And I watched him go down mouth-first, having selected his fucking incisors as his preferred landing gear, and at least two teeth skittered into the gutter like loose Chiclets while his hands remained safely tucked away. 

Thank God. Wouldn’t want to hurt a finger.

I watched a car full of teenagers flip off a state trooper because they’d mistaken the median between the local and express roadways for an international fucking border. Just a sedan stuffed with middle fingers and fully unearned confidence, cruising through the sovereign republic of Suck My Dick. And I watched that median end about four-fifths of a mile later. A tragically short republic.

(Okay, that was me.)

I watched a woman get so homesick for the house she grew up in that she roasted a marshmallow on a metal fork over her New York City stove, then put that fork directly into her fucking mouth. An adult. With voting rights. I heard the sizzle. Four little grill marks on her lip like she’d tried to French-kiss a panini press.

(OK, that one was me too, but you take my point.)

I’ve seen some (and done some) dumb shit.

But I have never seen anything as fucking dumb as this.

Because Donald Trump — that bunker-brained, bronzer-basted, bullshit-buttressed baron of bad taste, that swollen sultan of stucco, that fat Satan in a forty-inch fucking tie — is now saying he wants to put SNIPERS on his preposterous, pitiful, piteous, piss-poor, please-love-me participation trophy. 👇

Apparently the evil genius plan, temporarily not involving sharks with laser beams, though it’s early yet, is to recycle the exact same bullshit he used on the ballroom he wasn’t allowed to build to “make the case” for the arch he isn’t allowed to build.

You know. That two-hundred-and-fifty-foot, taxpayer-tapping, tomb-adjacent tribute to his own tremendous self.

That gargantuan, gold-leafed, grief-trampling gateway to a cemetery. A hundred million dollars of our money, fifteen million of it already shoveled out the door by the National Endowment for the fucking Humanities, to bolt a slab of granite to himself at the front gates of Arlington National Cemetery.

And he can’t help himself, because a hunk of rock is the only erection this man has ever gotten to stay upright past the thirty-second mark, and the entire planet already knows it.

But “please clap for my concrete cock” is a tough sell, so now his architectural schmeckle insecurity needs a military escort.

And he can’t even respect us enough to come up with a halfway decent lie. Just plops this down in front of us like a cat presenting a dead mouse and waits for somebody to tell him he’s a good boy:

“At the strong request of the United States Military.”

Oh, absolutely. The military begged.

And I’m a natural fucking blonde virgin who doesn’t drink and once fainted because somebody said “darn” at a christening.

Are we supposed to believe the Pentagon came to him, unprompted, hats in hand, medals trembling against their big military nipples, to request permission to stuff his taxpayer-funded stone stiffy full of drones, gunmen and live rounds?

“Please, sir. We’ve exhausted every other option. The security of the republic depends on making your decorative doorway shoot people.”

And he “agreed”. Bless his selfless little bone spurs. Imagine the courage it took to sit there and let a room full of four-stars explain that the thing he’d been whining for since last spring was actually his solemn duty to the nation.

You can practically hear the generals choking back tears.

“Our men can’t spend another Christmas without somewhere to store their tactical narcissist. Morale is collapsing. Sergeant Johnson hasn’t seen a gilded cornice in eight months.”

Next thing you know, the Joint Chiefs are standing around a conference table pushing little models of tanks across a map while one of them points at Washington with a pool cue:

“Gentlemen, we’ve identified the vulnerability. Not enough fucking arches.”

And by the way, just as an aside, who was it that ranked these “59 top cities and Capitals”?

Which fifty-nine, Donald? Where’s the fucking list? You can’t remember what country you bombed, but you’ve got municipal pageant results down to the runner-up?

Did number sixty get eliminated in the swimsuit competition? Did Brussels drop a baton and mouth “fuck” in front of the judges? Did Copenhagen show up without a headshot and have to borrow Oslo’s tit tape?

Was Vienna standing there in a borrowed ball gown, thirty seconds to explain what world peace means to her while Paris smiled through the Vaseline on her teeth and quietly called her a whore?

But I do need to know how we missed the semifinals of So You Think You Can Arch.

And look, I’m sorry Paris sent you an unsolicited arch pic, but we shouldn’t all have to live inside your heavily armed architectural schlong-measuring contest.

His cult of course, will swallow the sniper story whole, the way they swallow everything. Unfortunately for Donald, the rest of us need a little more convincing than the kind of men who buy the extended warranty on a fucking rotisserie chicken.

And he fucking knows it.

He knows nobody wants this. He knows the polling. He knows exactly how it plays to stick a hundred-million-dollar gluttonous, grasping, grabby, gimme-gimme grope for attention in the driveway of the cemetery where the actual heroes are buried, and he does not give a single fuck.

Because under the kabuki foundation and the fifteen-step comb-over, he knows the brutal truth.

He didn’t serve. Even his fucking feet needed nepotism. Other people’s kids got orders to report; Little Lord Fauntlefraud got bone spurs from a podiatrist who happened to rent his office from Fred Trump. A medical emergency conveniently located inside his daddy’s rental portfolio.

And now he wants to loom over the ones who actually went, his big beautiful bullshit visible from the graves of people whose parents couldn’t get them out of a war by calling the guy downstairs.

What the fuck are we commemorating? The Battle of Somebody Else’s Problem?

He wants history to remember his name.

He built nothing. He fixed nothing. He saved nobody.

The only permanent record with his name on it is a criminal one.

So now the vainglorious, vein-mapped, varicose Vesuvius of vanity waddles around the District in his little elevator shoes spraying himself on everything that isn’t nailed down, a wheezing Nebuchadnezzar in a girdle, a god complex with a golf cart, hiking a leg on the Mall and hosing down every marble surface in the capital like a diabetic tomcat working his way through a room full of curtains.

Because he can feel what’s coming the second he’s cold. Not that we forget him. That we get the fuck to work with a bucket and a wire brush and scrub his name off every goddamn thing he pissed it onto.

Which is why he’s bolting military equipment to his vanity projects like a man handcuffing himself to the furniture during an eviction.

He slapped “national security” on the ballroom nobody needed and thinks that means we bought the bullshit. Now he’s dragging the same sweaty sales pitch across the Potomac: if you won’t pay to admire him, he’ll tell you it’s “dangerous not to.”

Yes, there’s real security work going in underground over there. That’s the fig leaf, and it’s about four sizes too small. The courts already pulled the two apart: the buried infrastructure is one thing, the ninety thousand square feet of aboveground party barn squatting on top of it is another.

But apparently Ramses the Rotund discovered the greatest loophole in American government: want something gaudy, gilded, gargantuan and completely fucking unnecessary? Reclassify your personal wish list as a strategic defense imperative.

The Pentagon requires my chandeliers! CENTCOM specifically requested the marble! NORAD cannot possibly defend the continental United States without a cocktail terrace and sixteen fucking bidets!

He hears “defense spending” and lights up like a fucking pinball machine, because the only thing this man has ever defended in his life is that papery, piss-baby, porcelain-thin, perpetually punctured pride of his.

The entire federal budget repurposed as a blast door for one motherfucker’s feelings.

This isn’t the Department of Defense. It’s the Department of Don’t Care What You Dipshits Think, Daddy’s Doing It Anyway, Directorate of Just Look at the Fucking Size of It.

At this rate that Mar-a-Lago Medici is probably wandering through the White House right now pointing at shit he wants like a toddler loose in Costco.

“I want the ball pit from the McDonald’s PlayPlace.”

National security.

“Fill it with Adderall, loose Sudafed and my cocaine retainers.”

Counterterrorism.

“I need a 40-foot marble statue of myself. Shirtless. Riding a bald eagle. Give me the abs of a Romanian gymnast. Golf club in one hand, chocolate cake in the other. Bigger hands. I want to be able to finger Lake America. Give the bird my mug shot face and point my snausage crotch at Canada. They’ll know why.”

Cyber Command asked for it.

And this doesn’t end here. Every memorial, every monument, every building in the citadel of our democracy is next in line to get this secondhand, scratch-and-dent, spray-tanned strongman’s name spackled across the front of it.

Next up: the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts and Precision-Guided Munitions.

“Please silence your phones, locate your nearest emergency exit and secure the fucking perimeter.”

The coat-check lady has Q clearance.

The Rockettes have been replaced by the 82nd Airborne and wardrobe is issuing Kevlar tutus.

Grandma unwraps one petrified disc of black licorice during Swan Lake and six sharpshooters acquire her position.

Act Two has been delayed because somebody parked a Reaper behind the fucking scrim.

And why stop there?

Hollow out the Resolute Desk and fill it with grenades.

Dress an Abrams tank up as the Easter Bunny.

Stick an aircraft carrier in the Reflecting Pool and hide it behind the peeling paint.

Gold-plate the nuclear football and have Vanna White present it every time somebody enters the Situation Room.

At least commit to the bit, asshole.

Anywhere else on Earth, a room of exhausted people spends eleven months arguing over which mountain, which desert, how many miles from the nearest road.

This fucking idiot walked into that meeting and said:

“I’m thinking a giant, ornate, golden arch and a ballroom.”

Nothing screams classified military installation like a colossal, conspicuous, camera-ready Corinthian cock ring visible from fucking space.

It’s stealth technology for people who think Liberace was being too subtle.

Covert operations by way of Caesars Palace.

A Wish-dot-com Versailles with a sniper’s nest in the attic and a Saddam-grade gold finish on the fucking doorknobs.

This isn’t national security.

It’s militarized megalomania.

A garish, gold-plated, gun-packed, government-funded glory hole for one man’s bottomless, blistering, building-sized need to turn the nation’s capital into his personal presidential peacock parade.

And THAT is the scam underneath all the stucco.

He wanted the ballroom.

He wanted the arch.

And now, what an astonishing coincidence, the United States military desperately “needs” both.

Every decorative boner His Royal Smallness dreams up magically develops a tactical purpose the minute somebody asks why the fuck we need it.

And this sure as shit, is NOT something we need.

Actual governments run by adults spend obscene amounts of money making sensitive military facilities boring, buried, hardened, hidden and difficult to identify. Secret tunnels. Blast doors. Decoys. Restricted schematics. Classified coordinates. Entire systems designed around one extraordinarily complicated military principle:

DON’T TELL EVERYBODY WHERE THE FUCKING WEAPONS ARE.

Meanwhile this man, who lies the way the rest of us breathe and has the impulse control of a cracked-out cockatoo, wants to raise a 250-foot gilded bullseye in the middle of Washington, announce what he plans to stash inside it, identify where the shooters will be positioned, brag about the caliber, and presumably put the finishing touch on American operational security: a fucking bedazzled sign reading “SECRET WEAPONS THIS WAY” while a Liberty Tax guy dressed as Uncle Sam spins an arrow on the sidewalk and Kid Rock works the valet stand.

It’s all just so exhaustingly fucking stupid, isn’t it?

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Good news, guys! Donald Trump’s gonna give us five thousand dollars of our own money! What a magnanimous motherfucker. I haven’t seen generosity like this since the ATM gave me back my own fucking paycheck.

He just needs to find the money, get permission to spend the money, and have us reelect the people who could give him permission to spend the money right fucking now. Before they’ll help us pay our bills, we have to guarantee we’ll keep paying theirs.

So we have to give them the jobs they already have before they’ll do the jobs we’re already paying them to do. Try that at work. “I’ll finish stocking the yogurt when somebody guarantees my fucking pension, Brenda.”

And if they borrow it, we get to pay interest on our own fucking present. He gets his name on the check. We get our names on the debt. Somehow I’m financing Christmas and this son of a bitch gets to be Santa.

Congratulations! You’ve been preapproved to finance your own fucking bribe.

Welcome to the Publishers Clearing House of fucking Representatives.

He’s calling it the “Trump dividend.” Five grand if Republicans keep the House and Senate. The House and Senate they ALREADY FUCKING HAVE.

So why the fuck can’t they get moving on it NOW? Aren’t they in power NOW? They’ve got the White House, the House, and the Senate. What additional lever of fucking power are they waiting for? Do we need to run down to Home Depot and pick them up another fucking lever?

I’m sorry, did I miss the Schoolhouse Rock episode where the little singing bill sits on the Capitol steps refusing to budge until we guarantee his bosses another two years of government dental?

Do the smooth-brained, truck-nutted troglodytes have to elect them harder? Tattoo their names across their chests? Rename the cat Mike Johnson and the dog Donald Trump? Spend the next twelve years standing in the backyard in their bathrobes hollering, “Donald! Get your nose out of Mike’s asshole!”

Did they get the fucking trial version of Congress? What else do you need, you cash-catfishing, country-club cocktease? Does Mike Johnson need somebody to sign his folder?

And the five grand wasn’t the only pledge at this fucking direct-deposit tent revival. He promised them a check, they promised him their remaining cerebral function, and only ONE of those transactions required immediate payment.

This pompadoured potentate had them raise their right hands and pledge to HIM, “the greatest president in the history of the United States.” He even worked “cheat like hell like they do” into the voting pledge, because he couldn’t get through his own fucking loyalty oath without accusing Democrats of cheating.

And they call this rugged individualism. It’s a fucking cult, a star-spangled self-abasement seminar for these obsequious, oath-bleating, orange-idolizing ovines waiting for their dividend-dangling, deference-demanding Daddy to tell them what to say.

Baa, baa, bootlicker, have you any fucking shame?

Nobody ever asked me to swear a pledge of allegiance to Joe Biden, for fuck’s sake. Then again, I didn’t tattoo his face on my ass and turn a routine colonoscopy into a fucking presidential meet-and-greet.

Which brings me back to the five grand, because the electric company doesn’t accept a fucking oath of fealty. You can turn your entire ass into Mount Rushmore, but until the money clears, you’re still sitting in the damn dark.

Anybody can promise shit they never have to deliver. Hell, vote for me and I’ll give you a puppy, a unicorn, a hand job and a velvet painting of a sad clown with a goddamn poodle.

Don’t ask how. That’s second-term shit.

He said the economy’s doing “so well” that we’re ALL getting a payout. If it’s doing that fucking well, cough it up today, asshole. Why does my share of this magnificent prosperity have an election attached?

And how the fuck isn’t this socialism?

By THEIR definition. The one these flag-fondling, fiscal-purity fetishists drag out whenever somebody without a private jet needs help paying for a fucking root canal. One free school lunch and suddenly the cafeteria ladies are storming the Winter Palace with a tater-tot trebuchet.

Some exhausted woman needs help buying groceries and these holier-than-thou hemorrhoids want her employment history, her blood type, and a notarized explanation for the name-brand mustard. God forbid the indigent enjoy a condiment. You’ll eat your federally scrutinized sandwich dry, Deborah. This is America.

But put Trump’s name on the handout and the bootstraps brigade comes barreling down the aisle in paroxysms of panhandling. The Ayn Rand book club has turned into Supermarket Sweep, and Earl’s about to dislocate a shoulder getting to the fucking bonus ham.

What happened to personal responsibility, you sanctimonious, selective-socialism, subsidy-suckling sons of bitches? Did Karl Marx become a job creator when he learned to sign a check with a Sharpie? Does Das Kapital come in Realtree camouflage now?

Now look at you, standing under a DON’T TREAD ON ME flag, refreshing your banking app with the evangelical fervor of a man expecting Jesus to arrive by direct deposit.

“The government must never give people money.” Unless of course, the money can help Republicans keep getting government money for telling us the government must never give people money.

And these are the motherfuckers who call themselves the party of fiscal responsibility. The balanced-budget, belt-tightening, bean-counting bullshit brigade. They’d make Oliver Twist submit his fucking porridge request in triplicate.

Meanwhile, by August, nearly thirty percent of our entire outstanding national debt had accumulated during Donald Trump’s time in office. Roughly eleven-point-six TRILLION fucking dollars across his first term and this unfinished second one.

They’d convene a congressional inquisition over a poor woman’s premium paper towels while their bankruptcy-baptized fucking messiah treats a trillion dollars like he’s breaking a twenty.

But please, tell us more about the grandchildren. They’re always so concerned about leaving debt to the grandchildren. Until Grandpa needs another electoral ego massage, at which point apparently little Brayden can get a second fucking job.

The party of fiscal responsibility, my ass. These pauper-policing, plutocrat-petting deficit disciples are backing a promise with a trillion-dollar price tag to improve the customer reviews on their own shitty fucking performance.

And hold the fuck on. Weren’t we already getting five large from DOGE?

Elon, that chainsaw-brandishing, chest-thumping technofeudal twat and professional sperm spreader, tore through Washington while Trump floated sharing the savings. We got the chainsaw. We got the cuts. We did not get the fucking check.

I’ve received more actual cash from the washing machine.

The two-grand tariff rebates haven’t arrived either, which Stormy Daniels could’ve warned you is kind of his thing.

When The New York Times asked about it, this bronzer-brained, bloviating blowhard said, “I did do that? When did I do that?” Then he said the money would come later in the year.

Now the Geriatric Grift-of-the-Month Club is promising the sequel.

Wonderful. Another five thousand dollars I can’t spend. I’m almost not buying a fucking boat. I’ll name it Insufficient Funds and christen it with the champagne I didn’t order and can’t afford.

But don’t worry, because JD Vance, that oleaginous ottoman enthusiast, says tariffs could cover this trillion-dollar campaign coupon. The same import taxes we’re refunding by the fucking billions.

Even the Kohl’s cashier working through an edible understands a fucking return.

You can’t keep spending the receipt after you’ve given the money back. And even the tariffs we keep don’t magically become Donald Trump’s personal checking account. This hush-money Houdini wants to play sugar daddy with OUR credit card.

“Daddy bought you groceries!”

Daddy, that’s my fucking Discover card. You can’t pilfer my purse, buy me a pound of pastrami, and expect me to start calling you Big Poppa.

And why the fuck are we letting him near the purse in the first place? This Fozzie Bear with a four-foot tie bankrupted casinos.

Just fucking think about that. Think how hard you have to try to suck to bankrupt a casino. People walked in specifically to lose money, and he still managed to beat them to it.

Now this fiduciary fuckwit is promising five grand without an approved payment or a delivery date. At least the fucking Tooth Fairy tells you when to check the pillow. Nobody makes a six-year-old wait for his molar money until Pennsylvania demonstrates sufficient fealty.

But I’m supposed to sit here and clap like a trained seal because this slippery, spray-tanned, self-dealing, solipsistic snake-oil salesman has discovered that people who need money would enjoy receiving some?

Yes, Donald. I fucking KNOW people need money. We all need money. We need even more of it since your tantrum tariffs made the shit we were already struggling to afford more fucking expensive. You don’t get to slap a surcharge on surviving and then expect me to genuflect because you’ve waved a checkbook in the general direction of my overdraft.

I’d fucking love five thousand dollars. I’d love to replace my brakes without briefly considering whether Fred Flintstone had the right fucking idea. But I can be broke without volunteering to be bamboozled. Needing help with the bills doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to let this predatory, pomade-plastered prick use my financial anxiety to finish paying off his political mortgage.

And he’s counting on us needing that money badly enough to vote like it’s already in the fucking bank.

He doesn’t need to pay you before November.

He just needs you to believe him when he says he will.

But how fucking stupid do you have to be to fall for this shit?

Remember The Boy Who Cried Wolf? The intended audience still occasionally shits its pants, and even THEY grasp that you stop believing the fucking liar.

You shidiots finished it and demanded an investigation into who was funding the sheep.

He’s buying your loyalty on layaway, and you’re making the fucking payments.

And if you’re dumb enough, gullible enough, enough of a pudding-brained, promise-gobbling patsy to believe he’s going to deliver on this latest dangled fucking carrot after more than a dozen promises just like it that he suddenly doesn’t even fucking remember making, then you deserve to get fucking fleeced.

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Bourbon-brined, grievance-gargling, pomade-plastered Pentagon pick-me prick Pete Hegseth is destroying our fucking military.

He’s ripping experienced leadership out by the roots, draining lifetimes of military knowledge through the floorboards, poisoning promotions and turning what was once the world’s most formidable fighting force into a loyalty-soaked revenge arcade for political sycophants.

Every one of us is less safe, less secure, more exposed and more vulnerable because this spectacularly unqualified little fuckwit has been allowed to take a blowtorch to the load-bearing beams while everybody who could stop him stands around admiring the fucking sparks.

This should be the biggest scandal on the news, but Hegseth is running feral while the obese, orange, ossifying, orthopedically elevated octogenarian obscenity of a so-called Commander-in-Chief, a sagging sack of appetites and adipose with the moral architecture of a tapeworm and the cognitive sparkle of a concussed turnip, wanders off to fondle ballrooms, granite walkways, helipads and whatever other architectural dick-extension flutters through his marble-addled frontal lobe while American service members fight and die in his endless, illegal, unconstitutional war with Iran.

All of that contempt, neglect and appetite for more is sitting there in plain sight on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which limped into port in Thailand this week looking like a hundred-thousand-ton fucking ghost.

And it made me sick to my stomach.

For weeks we’ve heard about exhausted sailors and Marines, mental-health crises, terrified families telling anyone who’d listen their loved ones were breaking, only to have Hegseth basically accuse those families of lying.

Donald Trump, the five-time draft-dodging military dilettante whose closest relationship to sacrifice is insulting the people who make it, heard the Lincoln had endured the longest consecutive stretch at sea without a real port call for a modern carrier and said it was “not nearly long enough.”

Bitch, you take a golf cart to the buffet line.

And this wasn’t the ordinary oxidation and wear of some garden-variety deployment. Iran hammered the Navy’s main logistics hub in Bahrain at the beginning of Trump’s war, stretching supply lines thousands of miles and helping turn the mundane maintenance, cleaning, resupply and human relief of a normal port call into another casualty of Darth Dorito’s geopolitical dick-swinging.

So the Lincoln kept going.

Month after month of strain, separation, heat and seawater until she finally came in looking like something had been taken out of her.

I know ships rust. Saltwater is a ravenous, remorseless bastard that chews paint and punishes steel.

But Jesus Christ.

Look at her.

Battered. Depleted. Scarred. Pushed past reason and still expected to perform.

That is draft-dodging Donald Trump and day-drunk Pete Hegseth’s military in one fucking image.

I’ve always loved warships. Years ago, when Leo was little, we hit the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel coming home from the Outer Banks as enormous Navy vessels headed toward Norfolk, and I was practically bouncing in my seat grabbing my phone and checking hull numbers as they passed, collecting them in my head like baseball cards because I wanted to know every fucking one of them.

These massive gray leviathans sliding through dark water with that impossible marriage of menace and majesty, carrying sailors, history and enough American firepower to rearrange somebody’s entire coastline.

I felt like a little kid.

I was in awe.

I still am.

And that memory was still sitting there in my head when I saw the Lincoln come into Thailand, weather-whipped, corrosion-streaked and almost spectral, her crew saying they wanted home, American power looking wounded while the soft-handed assholes responsible congratulated themselves on toughness.

And inside all that battered steel were thousands of sailors and Marines who looked like somebody had been strip-mining them too.

Because Trump and Hegseth are depredators, rapacious consumers who use, push, bleed, hollow out and keep demanding more from anything unfortunate enough to fall within their reach until the shine is gone, the marrow is sucked dry and somebody else is left carrying the damage.

They mistake resilience for permission, endurance for an invitation and sacrifice for an endlessly renewable resource they’re entitled to keep fucking consuming.

Sailors. Marines. Soldiers. Airmen. Stretched thin, ground down, overruled and treated like human inventory with no expiration date by political leaders who think patriotism means swallowing whatever punishment gets shoveled down from above, snapping a salute and waiting politely for another scoop.

And the bastard holding the shovel has been waiting years for his turn.

Hegseth came into this job hauling a fetid duffel bag stuffed with old resentments, bruised ego, perceived betrayals and unprocessed humiliation from an institution he spent years sneering at as weak and woke, and Trump handed this damaged little DUI hire the Pentagon and enough power to start converting private wounds into promotions, purges and national defense policy.

He isn’t reforming the military.

He’s getting even with it.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll finally walked after watching senior leadership get hacked apart, promotions pawed through and the Army’s upper command turned into some fucked-up combination of ideological casting call, personal burn book and Survivor: Pentagon, except the immunity idol is apparently blind obedience to the booze-breathed peacock upstairs.

Driscoll went to Trump to tell him how fucking bad it had gotten.

Trump, who has been considerably busier building shrines to himself and pissing his name across Washington like some incontinent pharaoh armed with a Dymo label maker, was reportedly surprised.

Of course he fucking was.

He doesn’t pay attention because he doesn’t give a shit. Are they killing the people he wants killed? Do the explosions make him look tough? Can he slap his name on a ship after scraping somebody else’s off first?

That’s about the outer limit of this lacquered little Caesar’s geopolitical imagination.

China knew. Russia knew. Iran knew. Every foreign intelligence service with electricity and two functioning eyeballs knew America was bleeding senior military experience while Donald Trump played Louis XIV of Palm Beach and his gin-drenched GI Joe took a Sawzall to the Army.

Hegseth inherited ten active-duty four-star Army generals.

He’s down to five.

Half the constellation of stars over the Army’s senior command has blinked out while its Secretary leaves, its permanent Chief of Staff seat sits empty and the Vice Chief does double duty as drones, AI and electronic warfare rewrite combat underneath their boots.

Pete Hegseth has taken out more American generals than Iranian ones.

C.Q. Brown, only the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired. Lisa Franchetti, first woman to lead the Navy, fired. Linda Fagan, first woman to lead an armed-service branch, fired. Randy George, Purple Heart recipient and forty-two-year Army veteran, pushed out, while Hegseth claws through the upper ranks with Leatherface-level personnel instincts and the wounded vanity of a prom king who discovered somebody else got elected class president.

And this sexist, bigoted fucknugget told us what he wanted: generals and admirals involved in “DEI woke shit” had to go.

In Hegseth’s rancid culture-war lexicon, “DEI” is a linguistic trapdoor beneath any woman or person of color these meritocracy-molesting motherfuckers would rather believe was handed a career than concede might simply be more accomplished than they are.

He’s been reaching his sticky little ideological fingers into promotion lists already vetted by people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing, and the result is a senior military landscape being bleached of women and Black officers while Kegbreath congratulates himself on restoring “merit.”

There isn’t a single active-duty female four-star general or admiral left.

And this asshole reportedly thought Driscoll wasn’t sufficiently deferential.

Deferential.

To Pete fucking Hegseth.

A smug, self-sanctifying little martinet with the magnificent certitude of a guy who read three Sun Tzu quotes under wolf photos on Instagram and has spent ever since wondering why nobody’s asked him to take Constantinople.

My dad spent fifty years at the Department of Defense designing weapons systems on an Army base here in Jersey, and some of my sweetest childhood memories are tangled up in that place. Summer was the officers’ club pool, chlorine stiffening our hair, Coppertone slick on our skin, while Dad was inside those buildings doing work Kim and I were far too little to understand.

We got one dollar to split fries from the 19th Hole, one grease-translucent paper basket, ketchup packets ripped open with wet teeth and two Malooly girls attempting bilateral potato diplomacy without plunging the family into armed conflict. Camp David had Begin, Sadat and Carter. We had one suspiciously enormous crinkle-cut and no neutral observer. Henry Kissinger could’ve shuttle-diplomacied his ass between us all afternoon and eventually told Dad, “Sir, buy another basket.”

God, I love that memory.

My dad gave that place nearly his entire working life, and I miss him every single day.

But I’m glad he didn’t have to see this shit.

I’m glad he didn’t have to see what became of his beloved Department of Defense.

There are Republicans in Congress who know exactly what this motherfucker is.

They know he’s unfit. They know he’s reckless. They know he’s hollowing out the military in real time, and they’re still standing there with their hands jammed into their pockets pretending somebody misplaced the emergency brake.

Maybe one of them will eventually locate a vertebra.

I also might wake up tomorrow a natural blonde with a metabolism from 1997 and discover somebody accidentally paid off my mortgage.

So I’m not holding my fucking breath.

When we take Congress back, this cannot end with Hegseth packing up his protein powder, pocket squares and Patton fantasies and slithering back onto cable television to explain how the woke generals betrayed him.

I want investigations.

The fishing boats. Minab. The double tap. The military lawyers. The warnings. The orders. The people who objected and the assholes who overruled them.

I want every bloody decision dragged out by the ankles, dumped onto a congressional table and dissected until we know who did what, who authorized what and whose blood is attached to which fucking signature.

I want war-crimes investigations.

I want war-crimes trials.

Period.

I do not give one solitary shit what letter is next to your name when you vote.

If you have eyes in your head and a functioning fucking pulse, you can see what Pete Hegseth is doing.

He has to go.

And getting his ass thrown out of the Pentagon does not erase what he did inside it.

He should be shackled to this record for the rest of his life, to the leaders he purged, the military he politicized, the families he dismissed and the warnings he ignored, because somebody handed a bitter, damaged, catastrophically unqualified cable-news cosplay commando the most formidable fighting force humanity has ever assembled, and he used it as a chew toy for his ego, a scratching post for his resentments and a fucking sledgehammer for his revenge.

Pete Hegseth wanted to remake the American military in his own image.

Look at the Lincoln.

Look at the Army.

He fucking did.

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JoJo Has Such A Way With Words

In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball with the permanently pursed expression of a man who genuinely enjoys the smell of his own farts, who has spent decades steeping in stale dissent and the accumulated fumes of his own self-regard, stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important shit happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

He actually complained that “all America could really talk about” was how sad people were that we lost Dolly, ticked through some of the extraordinary displays of love appearing around the world, the Empire State Building glowing pink, the Santa Monica Ferris wheel covered in hearts, tributes stretching from London to Las Vegas, and then arrived at the Sphere and announced that it had “added a nipple.”

And that was basically it.

No tenderness. No affection. No meaningful acknowledgment of what she gave the world, what she created, what she meant to millions of people or why they might be gutted that she was gone.

Just this dry, drive-by little cheap shot tossed at a woman three days after she died, and then on to the next joke.

Fucking hilarious, Bill.

Really.

And I know exactly what some people are going to say.

Jesus Christ, Jo, don’t be so dramatic. Dolly made jokes about her tits all the time.

She sure did.

Dolly joked about her boobs, her body, her hair, her clothes, her face, her makeup and practically every visible inch of herself that some tedious man had already scrutinized, underestimated or decided was available for public inspection, because she had that magnificent ability to grab whatever cheap shit somebody intended to use against her, bedazzle the bastard, turn it inside out and make the joke hers before the other person even realized she’d stolen the weapon out of their hand.

And I guarantee you Dolly wouldn’t have cared what Bill Maher said about her on his stupid show.

She was a better person than I am by a factor of a thousand, to say the very least. She probably would’ve laughed, waved one perfectly manicured hand and gone on with her day.

I, on the other hand, am a petty, vindictive bitch who relishes any opportunity to eviscerate a sexist little hobbit with a superiority complex, so here we are.

Because it pissed me off.

And I know I’m not the only one.

The thing is, if a different comedian had made the exact same joke, I might’ve laughed.

This isn’t about the boob joke.

It’s about the fucking asshole telling it.

Context matters. History matters. And he did not materialize on that stage Friday night freshly hatched from some politically incorrect chrysalis, shiny and innocent and unburdened by decades of his own bullshit about women.

He has spent a career pawing through women’s bodies, beauty, brains, boundaries, bedrooms, breakups, beliefs and basic autonomy with the proprietary disgust of a man who thinks female existence is a defective appliance he alone has been burdened with troubleshooting, turning every woman who displeases, defies or simply declines to flatter him into another recurring exhibit in his personal Museum of Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About Everything Always.

So no, I’m not clutching my pearls because somebody joked about Dolly Parton’s fun bags.

I don’t even own fucking pearls.

I’m saying that when this particular man, dragging this particular history behind him, looks at the death of this particular woman, surveys this immense eruption of grief and gratitude, complains that she’s getting too much attention and then points at her chest, the punchline arrives with a long, greasy receipt attached.

Because Dolly was warmth and wit, humor and heart, bawdy and tender and glamorous as hell, deeply rooted in her faith, ferociously ambitious and astonishingly generous, with this uncanny gift for making people feel welcome in her presence instead of inspected by it.

The whole fucking world stopped when she died.

It stopped in pink light and porch flowers and church pews and beauty shops and bars and kitchens and parked cars where people gripped steering wheels and cried into sleeves because Dolly had been there for so long, in our kitchens and cars and childhoods, in our mothers’ record collections and our grandmothers’ living rooms, on movie screens and radios and in books arriving in little kids’ mailboxes, that somewhere along the way we stopped imagining a world in which she wouldn’t be here.

Stories poured out about mothers and grandmothers, childhoods and first dances, long drives and hospital rooms and terrible years made softer because somewhere in the middle of all that shit there was Dolly, all bouffant, brilliance, bedazzled benevolence, and boobs, cracking filthy jokes one minute and putting books into children’s hands the next, writing songs people would carry for the rest of their lives, giving away fortunes, showing up after disasters and remaining unmistakably, gloriously herself through every bit of it.

I’m still not over her passing, and I don’t honestly expect I ever will be.

Losing her felt like somebody removed one of the load-bearing beams of human tenderness, something so constant that millions of us had forgotten how much weight she was carrying until she was gone.

That grief crossed generations, politics, religions and cultures because people weren’t mourning a résumé.

They were mourning Dolly.

And watching that ocean of affection scratched something raw in two sexist birds from the same rotten feather pile.

Donald Trump tried to jam his grubby little snausage fingers into her story by posting a fake AI image of himself walking arm-in-arm with her at the White House after she died, manufacturing a moment that never happened with a woman who spent her entire career being extraordinarily careful not to let politicians claim her for themselves.

Think about how fucking grotesque that is.

Even in death, he couldn’t leave a woman’s image, boundaries or legacy alone. He had to insert himself into the frame, manufacture an intimacy she never publicly gave him and paste his own face into her history after she was no longer here to tell him to get the fuck out of it.

The man has plenty of authentic photographs and archival footage of himself hanging around Jeffrey Epstein.

But Dolly?

He needed AI.

One grasping, glory-guzzling egomaniac tried to counterfeit closeness to her.

The other tried to cheapen the mourning.

Same fucking sickness: a beloved woman dies and two swollen male egos immediately start clawing at what she left behind, desperate to wedge themselves into a story that was never about them.

And the irony of Maher complaining that everybody was devoting too much attention to Dolly while IMPORTANT THINGS were happening could choke a python.

He was delivering a monologue on a television comedy program.

This wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupting a briefing on troop movements because somebody wanted to discuss Dollywood. Nobody burst into the Situation Room waving a sequined butterfly and screaming that the Empire State Building had gone pink. He was standing under studio lights being paid an enormous amount of money to make jokes about current events while scolding ordinary Americans for caring too much about the death of one of the most iconic and beloved entertainers this country has ever produced.

The intellectual ouroboros here is fucking magnificent.

A snake eating its own asshole while explaining that everybody else has lost perspective.

I used to watch him a lot. Many, many years ago, I watched his show constantly because I thought he was sharp and willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

Now I can’t stand the sound of his fucking voice.

That resin-reeking, booster-bitching podcast pustule has the ineffable aura of a man who has been sitting on the same steakhouse barstool since 1997, slowly pickling himself in Maker’s Mark, stale aftershave and the sour backwash of his own bullshit while explaining to a succession of increasingly alarmed cocktail waitresses that women used to have a sense of humor.

He’s a human oil slick of smugness, scotch breath and unsolicited opinions, a pocket-sized, pontificating prick with the puckered little face of a man who’s been sucking Warheads through a cocktail straw since breakfast, carrying himself with all the swaggering, sneering self-importance of Lord Farquaad while radiating the unmistakable energy of somebody standing furious beneath the little wooden hand that says YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE THIS RIDE.

He has calcified into the ageing, pretentious pub bore he would’ve mocked thirty years ago, mistaking irritation for intelligence, contempt for sophistication and chronic obnoxiousness for some rarefied capacity to perceive truths unavailable to the rest of us slobbering civilians.

And spare me the mythology that all this sanctimonious shit makes him some fearless fucking truth-teller.

George Carlin was.

Richard Pryor was.

Joan Rivers could verbally skin somebody, salt the hide and have the poor bastard laughing while she did it.

They were adored.

Being incisive doesn’t require being insufferable. Saying something shitty that makes everybody groan doesn’t automatically turn you into Lenny Bruce because you leaned backward afterward and looked pleased with yourself.

Sometimes a prick is just a prick.

Dolly will outlive all of this.

Her songs will still be playing. Her movies will still be watched. Children will still open books because of something she started long before they were born. Families will still tell stories about her generosity, her one-liners, her ridiculous hair, the places she showed up, the people she helped and the particular way she made kindness look less like sainthood and more like common fucking sense.

Fifty years from now, people will still know Dolly Parton.

Bill Maher will be a grainy thumbnail somebody scrolls past while trying to remember why the fuck anybody ever cared what he thought.

He has spent his life acting like the smartest man in every room and still gets aggrieved whenever the spotlight lands somewhere he can’t slither underneath it.

So finally, New Rule:

Trying to diminish Dolly Parton doesn’t make you daring, dangerous or defiantly unconventional. Taking a cheap shot at a legend three days after she dies because the scale of everyone else’s grief annoys you isn’t intellectual courage. It’s just cheap, sour little cruelty dressed up in the moth-eaten costume of rebellion.

It makes you look like a bitter, brittle, boozy, blowhard little loser, marinated in misogyny, embalmed in ego and pissed off that a woman whose kindness, talent, humor and humanity dwarfed yours by several fucking zip codes received the kind of love you could spend another hundred years chasing and never catch.

Dolly Parton will be loved long after all of us are gone.

You weren’t too intellectually superior to grasp that.

You weren’t too edgy to understand why the whole world stopped for her.

You were just pissed off because you’re a small, spiteful, smug, sexist, solipsistic, sententious pseudointellectual little excuse for a man, and you know goddamn well the world will not pause, let alone stop, for one single solitary second when it comes to you.

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When I was a kid, my big brother Nick, who I’ve missed every single day since we lost him suddenly in 2020, wore a gold chain with an Italian horn charm and told everybody he was Italian.

Nick was not Italian.

At all.

He wasn’t a little Italian. He wasn’t Italian-adjacent. He wasn’t Italian sprinkled, Italian infused or produced in a facility that also processed Italians. As far as I know, he had never even rubbed up against an Italian hard enough to leave trace amounts of DNA on him, although this was my big brother Nick, so honestly, anything was possible.

He was half Lebanese and half Irish.

That’s it.

To be fair to Nick, he could pull it off. He had these big, thick, bushy eyebrows, a full shock of black hair and a face that could absolutely pass for Italian, because it turns out when you mix Celtic with Arabic, every once in a while the genetic slot machine spits out a guy who looks like he has cousins in Bensonhurst.

But Nick WANTED to be Italian because Italian was fucking cool. Rocky Balboa was Italian. Tony Manero was Italian. The Italian guys had the gold chains, the Cadillacs, the hair, the unbuttoned shirts and the whole fucking operation.

This was the early eighties, when a Members Only jacket zipped to exactly the right altitude and enough Drakkar Noir to violate local air-quality standards could make a teenage boy feel like he had important business at Satriale’s, and no matter how many times Nick practiced that De Niro stare in the mirror, our family tree remained stubbornly, inconveniently Lebanese and Irish.

So Nick did what any determined adolescent would do when confronted with the immovable obstacle of his own DNA.

He ignored the fuck out of it.

And because I was a kid and he was my big brother, I genuinely wondered whether there was some secret Italian annex to the family tree nobody had bothered to explain to me. Nick was older. Nick knew shit. Nick could drive. Maybe there was a branch from Naples wedged between Beirut and County Cork.

There wasn’t.

Nick was just full of shit.

And God, I miss him.

But Nick accidentally taught me something extremely useful all those years ago.

You can say something over and over and over again. You can dress it up. Accessorize it. Embroider it on a fucking pillow. Have it notarized, laminated and announced by a marching band.

It still doesn’t make it fucking true.

I’ve been dyeing my naturally brunette hair since I was eighteen years old. I can buy every bottle of blonde hair dye at CVS, bleach myself until I’m visible from the fucking International Space Station and demand everybody call me Goldilocks.

Upgrade to paid

I am still not a natural fucking blonde.

Elizabeth Taylor could have walked down the aisle at her eighth wedding in a white dress, carrying lilies and wearing a veil long enough to cover Rhode Island.

It would not have made her a fucking virgin.

Joe the Plumber can slap a sign on the side of his van tomorrow morning that says COLONOSCOPIES $99, put on a white coat, snap on a pair of latex gloves and start introducing himself as Dr. Joe, Board-Certified Ass Specialist.

He is still a fucking plumber, and for the love of God, keep your pants on.

Because wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Calling something by a different name doesn’t make it become whatever the fuck you decided to call it.

And having the president of the United States throw a tantrum and scrawl a new fucking name across an international body of water that was called Lake Ontario before this country even existed does not make it Lake America.

It makes him an asshole with a Sharpie.

But, inexplicably, cartoonishly, beyond fucking parody, here we are, because grievance-glutted, geography-groping, gold-plated gooch stain Donald Trump has decided that being pissed at our closest ally now requires dragging one of the Great Lakes into his latest small-dicked little power trip and ordering the federal government to participate in his hissy fit.

Lake Ontario has managed to exist in my life with remarkable fucking unobtrusiveness. I cannot remember the last time before this week I said its name out loud.

Daily? No.

Weekly? Fuck no.

Monthly? Please.

Yearly? I honestly don’t know.

It’s been sitting up there minding its wet Canadian-American business while I have gone about mine, and we were doing just fine.

Now it has been unwillingly conscripted into the geopolitical equivalent of a jilted ex-girlfriend entering hour seventy-two of a breakup, mascara dried into black skid marks beneath her eyes, one acrylic nail gone, hair glued to the strawberry lip gloss on her cheek, a Virginia Slim drooping from the corner of her mouth, his old T-shirt hanging to her knees, no pants, room-temperature pink screw-top wine wedged between her thighs, surrounded by shredded Walgreens photos, a cracked iPhone, his toothbrush snapped in half, one hoop earring she can’t find the mate to and a damp Kleenex adhered to her calf while she changes his contact name to LYING SMALL-IN-THE-PANTS FUCKFACE IMPOTENT CUNT, blocks him, unblocks him, deletes his number, retrieves it from Recently Deleted and checks every eleventy minutes to see whether he has somehow had a change of heart and wants her back.

He has not.

He’s ghosted her completely and at this point is probably accordion-folded into the back of a fucking Citroën the size of a toaster in the middle of a full-blown NATO gangbang with Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Pedro Sánchez while she’s still on the bedroom floor with one tit hanging out of his old T-shirt, refreshing Find My Friends and firing off a succession of slurry voice memos.

FINE. I CUT YOUR FACE OUT OF THE NIAGARA FALLS PICTURES.

I RENAMED THE LAKE WE SHARED.

I WANT MY VCR BACK.

I NEVER EVEN LIKED YOUR MOTHER.

I’M DOING AMAZING.

CALL ME.

This is what currently passes for “diplomacy,” except our rancid little breakup banshee has nuclear codes.

And can you fucking imagine traveling back to 1996 and telling Republicans that within thirty years they’d be red-faced, vein-throbbing, foam-flecked and bellowing CRY HARDER, LIBTARDS because the reality-TV game-show host they put in the Oval Office TWICE had managed to find more warmth for North Korea than Canada and was punishing our closest northern ally by rage-renaming Lake fucking Ontario?

Bob Dole would’ve stared at you like you’d shit in his briefcase.

Pat Buchanan would’ve assumed the Soviets had won.

Rush Limbaugh would’ve checked the label on his painkillers to make sure he hadn’t swallowed the whole bottle before breakfast (again).

And somehow the stupid keeps finding new basement levels.

Because Lake America sounds less like one of the world’s great freshwater bodies than something conceived during a methamphetamine brainstorm behind a shuttered Kmart by the washed-up kid who played “Boy #2” on a 1984 sitcom and now owns three storage units full of stolen copper wire.

It sounds like somebody bought every slide, tube and medieval spinal-injury apparatus Action Park was legally required to dismantle, reassembled the whole tetanus trap somewhere in the Oklahoma Panhandle and started charging five dollars admission, cash only, waiver mandatory.

It sounds like a Foghat cover band playing the Thursday-night grand opening of a daiquiri barn/transmission shop in Slidell, Louisiana, while a guy named Duane sells loose Marlboros beside the Porta-Potty.

It sounds like an educational initiative launched in conjunction with Be Best.

Lake America.

Upgrade to paid

Jesus fucking Christ.

It sounds like something your insurance refuses to cover.

And the red-white-and-bald-eagle ethnonationalist genius caucus polishing its collective knob over the supposedly pristine Americanness of America might enjoy learning that Amerigo Vespucci was Italian, and the German cartographer who put “America” on his 1507 map was working in what is now France.

So this whole freedom-fapping patriotic bukkake is being performed by a flotilla of forehead-forward, cortex-deficient, cerebrally undercapitalized, chromosome-challenged, patriotism-pickled fuckwits defending a European christening honoring an Italian while acting like Canada just took a dump on Betsy Ross.

Fucking magnificent.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files still haven’t been released in full, and Trump’s name is all over material that has come out. People are getting financially flayed at grocery stores and gas pumps. Food is being recalled. Measles is spreading. Critical weapons reserves have been chewed down frighteningly low. And we are six months into an illegal, unconstitutional motherfucking endless war in Iran.

Those are the fucking stakes.

Not some ancient shared expanse of freshwater most of us hadn’t thought about since Christ knows when.

And no, I am not giving Donald Trump credit for some diabolical master plan. He is not Machiavelli. He is impulse in an adult diaper. Appetite without brakes. Ego without a governor. A peckish, perpetually pissed-off emotional hemophiliac with the self-command of a cocaine-addled retainer salesman at a three-day dental convention in Reno.

This isn’t genius.

It’s muscle memory.

Trump has spent his entire public existence marinating in spectacle: tabloids, feuds, bullshit boasts, fake grandeur, ratings, cameras, conflict, attention at any fucking cost. When the audience starts looking elsewhere, make some fresh preposterous declaration and drag every eyeball back toward him.

And somehow the jingoistic, jizz-brained, flag-fondling freedom fetishists are acting like this is OWNING THE LIBS instead of what it actually is: a loud little paperwork stunt the rest of the planet is free to ignore.

That is the whole fucking achievement.

He ordered his own government to play along while Canada keeps calling it Lake Ontario and Trump stomps around on this side of the border like a sunburned, snack-deprived, sippy-cup-slinging toddler who just found out the other kid gets to keep the blue shovel.

He can issue orders.

He can change federal maps.

He can tell every bootlicking, bobbleheaded, brain-dead beneficiary of his bullshit to call it whatever he wants.

Ottawa is not losing sleep.

Nobody is trembling.

Nobody in Paris is clutching their pearls because Donald J. Trump conquered a Microsoft Word document.

And there is something he will never understand because everything inside him is built around possession, permanence and putting his mark on whatever surface happens to be nearest.

You can build a fucking arch. It doesn’t make you Caesar.

You can tear down the East Wing. It doesn’t make the White House yours.

You can slap your name onto the Kennedy Center. It doesn’t make Kennedy disappear.

You can stand beneath a chandelier, shellac yourself in gold and announce a resplendent new epoch of unsurpassed national glory with all the bombast of a bankrupt casino owner unveiling a marble bidet.

It still doesn’t make this a fucking golden age.

We still know what we’re looking at.

And when you’re gone, and that day will be here sooner rather than later, every cheap little territorial scar you carved into this country will be scrubbed, scoured, chiseled, sandblasted and power-washed the fuck off.

The signs will come down.

The plaques will be replaced.

The maps will be corrected.

The names will be restored.

And aside from whatever antibiotic-resistant STD they eventually name after your sorry ass, you will be forgotten.

So enjoy the attention while it lasts, you bloated, blustering, bargain-bin Bonaparte, you spray-tanned shitheel, you grandiose gargoyle, you pustular prince of performative patriotism presiding over another irrelevant little atlas aneurysm.

Because the world is not watching in awe.

It is watching you make an ass of yourself in increasingly larger font.

What the fuck else is new?

And to our friends in Canada: elbows up.

A plurality of the dumbest dumbfucks who ever dumbed inflicted this fucking reality on all of us.

But we will get through it… together. 🇨🇦

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Bloated, blubbery, burger-basted, belt-buried, button-buckling, Big-Mac-breathing, bronzer-baked bag of bullshit Donald Trump has spent DECADES making fun of other people for being fat.

Rosie O’Donnell?

“Big fat ass.”

Alicia Machado?

“Miss Piggy.”

Beauty contestants?

Weighed, shamed, humiliated.

JB Pritzker?

“Big fat slob.”

This from a man who has spent the better part of his adult life treating McDonald’s like a fucking primary care provider.

The Hamburglar-in-Chief has been publicly inspecting, grading, ranking, insulting and humiliating other people’s bodies for as long as most of us can remember, dispensing unsolicited judgments on women’s faces, asses, aging and size with all the breathtaking confidence of a man who apparently believes every reflective surface he encounters is legally required to sign an NDA.

But before I go one fucking inch further, I need to make this clear.

I do not give one solitary shit what anybody weighs.

Fat is not a character defect.

Cruelty is.

Hypocrisy is.

And when it comes to this sloppy, saggy, sloth-like, slovenly sack of soft orange aspic and self-righteous shit, every accusation is a confession.

And again, I’m not fat-shaming anybody. Hell, I weighed 238 pounds after my daughter was born, and MAGA shidiots still mock my body a hundred fucking times a day.

I have spent most of my life in some kind of argument with my own body.

Too much. Too big. Too soft. Never good enough.

There were years when I was anorexic, years when I had reduced my entire worth to the disappearing number on a scale and convinced myself that hunger was virtue, that shrinking was winning, that if I could just make myself smaller and smaller, maybe I would finally become acceptable enough to deserve love, safety, approval, peace.

That is what this shit can do to you.

It can make you stand in front of a mirror and slowly erase yourself with your own hands, inch by inch, meal by meal, pound by pound, while some diseased little voice in your head keeps telling you that disappearing is the same thing as becoming beautiful.

And the thing that finally cracked through all of that was my dad.

My dad, who was not a crier.

My dad, standing in front of me with tears running down his face, begging me to eat because he was watching his daughter slowly kill herself.

I remember that moment with horrible clarity because I had never seen my father look at me like that before.

And suddenly I could see myself through his eyes.

Not as a waistline.

Not as a number.

As his daughter.

As somebody he loved.

As somebody he was terrified of losing.

There is something almost unbearable about realizing that the thing you thought was making you better was breaking the heart of the person who loved you most.

So no, I do not believe thinness is goodness or fatness is failure. A number on a scale cannot tell you whether somebody is beautiful, disciplined, worthy, lovable or decent. I know how poisonous that equation becomes once it gets inside your head and starts speaking to you in your own voice.

Bodies change because lives happen to them. We have babies. We grieve. Hormones go haywire. We get older. We survive things that leave evidence behind.

None of that subtracts one fucking ounce from somebody’s humanity.

So I am not mocking Jabba the Gut because he gained weight.

I’m mocking a lifelong bully who has spent decades using other people’s bodies as fucking target practice, then suddenly expects grace, delicacy and discretion when the same standard comes knocking on his own fucking door.

But Jo, we know the Earl of Extra Value Meals is a great big fat person. Why are you writing about this now, you may be asking.

Well, that’s because according to a recent piece in the Washington Post, our ponderous, paunch-packed, pants-straining POTUS has gotten FATTER.

Not a little heavier.

Not retaining water.

Not experiencing an unfortunate convergence of camera angle, sodium and an aggressively pleated pair of trousers.

FATTER.

According to his May medical report, Girth Vader weighed 238 pounds, fourteen pounds more than the year before and twenty-three pounds more than the figure reported at his Georgia booking.

Now.

Let us discuss that Georgia number for one delicious fucking second.

The Count of Monte Cholesterol was booked at the Fulton County jail in 2023 and somehow emerged listed at six-foot-three, 215 pounds.

Two hundred and fifteen.

Sure.

And I’m Zendaya.

That number had all the forensic rigor of a carnival guess-your-weight booth run by Rudy Giuliani after three warm martinis.

And the booking information was self-reported.

SELF-REPORTED.

Donald Trump.

We are supposed to believe a man who lies about crowd sizes, election results, golf scores, his wealth, the weather and probably the number of McNuggets left in the box suddenly becomes George fucking Washington when somebody asks what he weighs?

Please.

If the form had asked penis length, he’d have written, “Thirteen inches. Many people are saying fourteen.”

Bench press?

“Six hundred pounds. Strongest president maybe ever.”

Body fat?

“Negative three percent. Doctors crying.”

So yes, 238 is twenty-three pounds above the 215 reported in Georgia, but comparing an actual medical measurement to Donald Trump’s self-description is like comparing NOAA data to a fisherman who says the bass was the size of a Buick.

And even using his claimed height of six-foot-three, 238 puts him about a pound and a half from the BMI threshold for obesity.

One point six pounds.

That is not a margin.

That is a condiment.

That is a Filet-O-Fish and an enthusiastic application of tartar sauce.

The man who has spent decades calling women pigs is now approximately ONE McDONALD’S VALUE MEAL away from having to list Grimace as his emergency contact.

Doctors reportedly want him to lose weight, improve his diet and exercise, which presents something of a logistical challenge when your relationship with physical exertion consists largely of lowering yourself into a golf cart, being chauffeured several hundred feet, climbing back out, taking a few swings and then, somehow, with the statistical regularity of sunrise, WINNING another tournament at your own fucking club.

What a goddamn coincidence, huh?

Donald Trump winning golf championships Donald Trump organized at golf courses Donald Trump owns is Crazy Eddie conducting his own inventory audit.

It is Jeffrey Dahmer giving himself a James Beard Award for locally sourced ingredients.

It is the Duggar family presenting itself with a fucking plaque for excellence in safeguarding children.

Call me cynical, but I’m beginning to think the tournament oversight committee may be Donald Trump wearing a different fucking hat.

And the diet?

Good fucking luck.

Big Macs. Filet-O-Fishes. Fries. Diet Coke. Ketchup. Enough processed beige food to make his digestive tract eligible for Superfund designation.

And HE has thoughts about everybody else’s body.

Have you SEEN this motherfucker lately?

He is a walking geological survey of soft tissue, an ambulatory landslide of paunch fold, wattles and grievance, everything settling downward in slow motion beneath a shellac of bronzer until his entire upper body looks less assembled than poured.

There are layers.

There are places where flesh simply disappears behind other flesh and presumably continues somewhere beneath the surface like an underground river system nobody has successfully mapped.

His face descends toward that magnificent NECK FUPA, where the whole arrangement suddenly gets strangled into the collar of his dress shirt like somebody filled an industrial sausage casing with warm custard, twisted the top three times and secured it with a fucking button.

His chin has descendants.

His gunt has advance personnel.

His stomach does not so much hang as occupy.

It has frontage.

It has easements.

It has probably acquired mineral rights.

The suit itself is now less clothing than an engineering challenge, acres of dark polyester pulled over shifting terrain while every button sits there under impossible pressure performing the textile equivalent of holding back the fucking Hoover Dam with a thumbtack.

And somewhere underneath all of that, there is allegedly still a belt.

I choose to believe this because hope matters.

But at this point that poor son of a bitch is a spelunker trapped beneath an orange landslide, tapping desperate Morse-code messages toward the surface while rescue crews consult geological maps, lower microphones into exploratory shafts and tell his family they heard something around lunchtime but can no longer establish contact.

And THIS is the guy calling other people fat.

Donald Trump.

A man built like an Oompa Loompa had a baby with Hodor, stuffed it with fryer grease and warm mayonnaise, wrapped it in a contractor bag full of wet bath towels and let Steve Bannon raise it in Stephen Miller’s basement.

A bulbous, belly-billowing, butt-bolstered heap of beige buffet wreckage for whom there is no longer any meaningful border between ass and abdomen. Those territories have completed reunification, abolished customs and begun issuing a common currency.

And whatever the FUCK that bulky mystery apparatus is protruding from the general vicinity of his ample ass beneath his jacket only makes the silhouette more bewildering. I don’t know whether it’s medical equipment, some kind of brace, communications gear, structural reinforcement, or the emergency flotation device required by maritime law once a human stern reaches that displacement, and I am not going to pretend I do.

His side profile has gone full M.C. Escher: things bulge where physics says they should retreat, fabric disappears into one crevice and turns up three zip codes south, and his shirt enters the waistband at one longitude while God alone knows where the fuck it comes back out.

And somehow perched above this entire slowly settling mass is that lacquered apricot comb-over, floating there with the structural credibility of fiberglass insulation stapled to a cantaloupe.

Yet this motherfucker has spent the better part of HALF A CENTURY looking at OTHER PEOPLE and finding fault.

The monumental, cathedral-sized fucking nerve.

A man shaped like somebody tried to smuggle a beanbag chair into Le Cirque by putting cuff links on it, walking around America with the aesthetic standards of Anna fucking Wintour.

And my FAVORITE part?

Trump recently brought up William Howard Taft, famously our heaviest president, and said he has to be careful because he could surpass Taft if he “allowed it to happen.”

ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN?

Donald.

The gravy boat has left the harbor.

Ronald McDonald is checking your pulse.

William Howard Taft’s ghost is standing barefoot on a celestial bathroom scale screaming, “COME GET YOUR BOY.”

As though forty years of cheeseburgers have been submitting zoning applications.

As though adipose tissue requires an executive order.

As though the fries are stacked outside the Oval Office saying, “Mr. President, we just need your signature on the thigh.”

The rules are always for somebody else.

The judgment is always for somebody else.

The humiliation is always for somebody else.

He can insult women’s bodies, but mentioning his is cruel.

He can ridicule somebody’s size, but noticing his is unfair.

He can spend his entire adult life treating physical appearance as evidence of human worth, then demand an entirely different moral framework the instant the bathroom scale starts producing opposition research.

No.

Fuck that.

Eat whatever the fuck you want. Wash it down with Diet Coke. Commute from golf cart to golf cart. Stuff yourself into a suit with enough excess fabric to cover a regulation tennis court.

Fine.

Live your life.

Nobody should give a shit.

But maybe don’t spend DECADES calling women pigs.

Maybe don’t call other people fat slobs.

Maybe don’t publicly humiliate beauty contestants over their bodies.

Maybe don’t tell somebody with a “serious weight problem” to go home and exercise when your own cardiovascular regimen appears to consist of lifting a cheeseburger to your mouth and stabbing the elevator button.

Because eventually the scale comes for everybody.

And after a lifetime of pointing those tiny little snausage fingers at everybody else, sneering at women’s bodies, humiliating beauty queens and behaving like God personally appointed him the fucking Commissioner of Acceptable Waist Circumference, the mirror has finally returned his call.

So I have just one question for the corpulent, creased, cholesterol-coddled, cream-filled colossus of congealed cheeseburger grease currently forcing every seam in American menswear to reconsider its career choices:

WHO’S THE PIGGY NOW?

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And Jesus Wept

They’re slaughtering wild horses.

Of fucking course they are.

Because this endlessly evil regime cannot leave beauty alone. It cannot encounter anything wild, vulnerable, ancient, communal, unowned or gloriously beyond its control without reaching for a blade, a bulldozer, a budget cut, a branding iron, a buyer.

Wild horses, these sovereign, almost mythical beings of the American West, born under enormous skies and built for distance and instinct and survival, moving through wind-scoured ridges, shadowed cuts in the land, high meadows silvered with frost and strange red-rock country glowing rust and copper beneath the sun.

Mothers keep their young close, stallions pivot toward danger, whole herds gather and break into motion at once, hooves pounding hard earth, manes whipping, nostrils flaring, dust blooming gold behind them, breath clouding in the cold, the sound of them rolling across the open ground like thunder you can feel in your ribs, all that sinew and speed and wild intelligence moving together until for a few seconds the land doesn’t look occupied by them so much as alive because of them.

They are magnificent.

And this fascist wrecking crew looked at all that living splendor and found a way to turn it into inventory.

Sixty-eight of those wild mustangs, just one group among thousands sold off by the government, were chased down by helicopters, torn from the desert country their bodies understood, confined for years in an Idaho feedlot while the government claimed to be searching for “loving homes,” and then, this March, sold to an Ohio livestock trader for twenty-five dollars apiece.

Twenty-five dollars for a living being that survived drought, hunger, injury, scorching summers, frozen ground and every pitiless test nature could throw at it, only to encounter the one predator capable of inventing a purchase order.

Us.

They were packed into cavernous haulers and carried 1,800 miles east, away from the vast ground they knew, until two double-decker cattle trucks arrived around midnight, ramps clanging open beneath hard artificial light, frightened bodies crowding together while hoofbeats boomed through steel and darkness closed around them.

The buyer won’t say where they went. They never surfaced at public auction. Other federally sold mustangs have turned up bound for Canadian killing floors, where horses can be exported alive, butchered and sold as meat abroad.

The cruelty almost disappears inside the vocabulary. That’s the whole grotesque fucking trick. Years of captivity become “care.” A midnight disappearance becomes “placement.” A terrified horse becomes a transaction, and somewhere far enough down the chain for everybody responsible to avert their eyes, death waits with a price attached.

So spare me the antiseptic official bullshit about “placement,” “disposition” and “transfer,” those anesthetized little words buffed smooth until nobody can hear the panic or picture a horse bracing against the walls around it.

Wild horses are being funneled into a death pipeline.

And it is so perfectly, hideously Trump.

There is a predatory pathology underneath all of this that feels sickeningly familiar. Grab the woman. Grab the land. Grab the horse. Take what you want because you want it, because you can, because consent and stewardship and restraint are merely inconveniences standing between appetite and acquisition. The same man who bragged about grabbing women presides over a government that treats the country itself like something to be seized by the fistful.

Everything goes into the grinder: forest, shoreline, canyon, prairie, wildlife, human being. Anything precious eventually collides with some grasping, gouging, gluttonous bastard clutching a calculator and asking what it is worth once stripped, sold, excavated, exploited, pulverized or dead, because this fascist criminal enterprise sees trees and thinks timber, ridgelines and thinks minerals, public acreage and thinks private profit, suffering and thinks savings, and a wild horse and thinks twenty-five dollars.

The legal shell game is revolting. A federally protected mustang gets posted on an adoption website. No takers after three one-week listings? The government can designate that horse “unadoptable” and sell it. Same heartbeat. Same watchful eyes. Same warm breath. A different box gets checked, federal safeguards evaporate, and something that belonged to the American landscape becomes ordinary livestock on paper.

That is how wildness gets laundered through paperwork until the blood becomes somebody else’s technical responsibility.

I’ve loved horses since I was a little girl. I grew up on a rural road in New Jersey, and nearby were horses neglected so badly they eventually slipped into a strange wild existence of their own, wandering and grazing, keeping close to one another, disappearing and returning according to rhythms entirely their own.

Sometimes they chose me.

I’d bring carrots and celery and stand there with my little hand stretched flat, waiting through that quiet appraisal, ears swiveling toward sounds beyond my range, one heavy hoof shifting against the dirt before that enormous head finally lowered, warm breath spilling across my fingers, velvet muzzle brushing my palm, the carrot disappearing with that clean, satisfying crack between teeth.

There was something in them I felt before I knew how to name it, some deep, quiet presence behind those enormous searching eyes that made me feel as though I wasn’t simply looking at a horse but being regarded by another soul.

I remember the smell of grass and earth and sun on their hides, the extraordinary intimacy of standing beside all that strength and realizing it had chosen softness with me.

Horses taught me early that power didn’t have to wound, and trust from something you could never overpower was never yours to take.

It was theirs to give.

I thought that was magic.

I still do.

Maybe that is why horses reached me so early and stayed with me for so long. I grew up learning that the person who was supposed to make me feel safest could also be the person who hurt me, and that kind of betrayal rearranges a child’s understanding of love before she is old enough to understand what has happened.

But the horses were different.

They were the first creatures I remember experiencing as powerful without being frightening, enormous without being threatening, capable of hurting me and choosing not to.

They did not demand anything from me. They did not punish tenderness or turn trust into a weapon. They simply stood there, warm and watchful, and when one lowered its great head toward my little hand and accepted what I offered, I felt safe in the presence of strength.

I did not know then how much that mattered.

So this one got through. Straight through whatever emotional armor I’ve been trying to grow just to survive the news, because Jesus Christ, can we just make it stop?

Can we please just make it STOP?

Every morning another obscenity, another assault, another piece of wonder shoved face-first into the machinery, another stomach-dropping moment wondering which refuge, which species, which family, which child, which institution, which fragment of America we have to throw our bodies across now because some sadistic little apparatchik decided it could be sacrificed.

They ravage and raze, poison and pillage, strip and sell, gut and grind, and before one atrocity has settled into your bones another is crawling across the chyron.

It’s bleak and relentless and exhausting.

And I hate them.

I hate these people.

I hate what they’re doing to this country, to living things, to every decent instinct we’re supposed to cultivate in one another instead of crushing it beneath cruelty and greed.

And I don’t want to feel this way.

I don’t want to discover at noon that my jaw has been clenched since breakfast. I don’t want to look down and realize my hands have curled into fists. I don’t want that sick acceleration in my chest when another alert hits my phone, that split second when I’m almost afraid to open it because there is a decent chance I’m about to learn somebody is dead, a family has been blown apart, an animal has been brutalized, some irreplaceable piece of America has been carved open, and somebody in authority is already preparing the bloodless explanation for why none of us should care.

I don’t want hatred living this close to my heart. I don’t want these people colonizing my nervous system, taking something soft and human in me and keeping it perpetually braced for impact.

And I hate them for that too.

And DO NOT tell me this is about money.

Don’t fucking dare.

The numbers are obscene. The government can spend more than $3,000 capturing a mustang, sell that same horse for twenty-five dollars, and leave somebody farther down the chain able to make as much as $750 from its body. In 2025 alone, the government unloaded 3,700 horses and called the resulting $56 million reduction in future costs a savings.

Spend thousands wrenching them from the land. Sell them for almost nothing. Shed the responsibility. Call it efficiency.

And Project 2025 looked at these extraordinary beings and decided the real problem was the cost of keeping them alive, recommending that Congress allow the government to “dispose humanely” of excess wild horses and burros.

Dispose.

A cold little word for making a living thing disappear.

Too expensive.

They said the HORSES were too expensive.

Meanwhile Coupon-Code Caligula can conjure a UFC spectacle onto the White House lawn, turn Washington into an IndyCar track, tear apart the East Wing for a gargantuan ballroom, commission a multimillion-dollar granite helipad, inspect the work, dislike it, and have part of the thing ripped back apart and DONE AGAIN.

There is always money for marble and motors, spectacle and self-worship, hospitality suites and presidential pageantry, always another corporation with fortunes tied to federal power eager to underwrite some gleaming shrine to Donald Trump’s diseased appetite for himself.

But keeping a horse alive?

NOW comes austerity.

Now, beneath an open Western sky beside beings whose only offense is costing money to keep breathing, this malignant little kleptocracy suddenly discovers fiscal restraint.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Can’t they leave one thing alone?

Can’t they leave one goddamn pure, beautiful fucking thing alone?

Leave the high country where first light spills slowly over stone, wetlands waking beneath pale ribbons of mist, badlands burning copper and crimson as evening comes down, great unfenced plains where wind can run for miles without striking a wall. Leave the places where stars crowd the heavens until the sky feels bottomless, where silence has weight and dawn arrives across untouched ground in long washes of gold, where the horizon still belongs to itself.

Leave the horses.

Because these aren’t isolated little acts of ugliness anymore. They’re scars. Physical scars gouged into the land, institutional scars carved through agencies and safeguards and public trust, moral scars etched into all of us from waking up day after day and watching people entrusted with this country dispose of it piece by piece because to them everything is transactional, everything is consumable, everything has a price and nothing has inherent worth once it has ceased to serve the only thing they truly revere: themselves.

They are cutting pieces out of America, hacking into the wild places and public places and fragile places, tearing through things we inherited from people who understood that preservation was a promise made forward, an obligation to people they would never meet. They are leaving wounds that won’t close when that motherfucker is finally gone one way or the other, damage that won’t disappear with a new president or a new Congress or the ceremonial scrape of his name off whatever he managed to glue it to on the way out.

Our children and their children will inherit these injuries. It may take decades to restore what can be restored, generations to regrow what can be regrown, and there are lives being extinguished right now that no election, apology, appropriation, investigation or act of contrition will ever bring back.

Human beings are dying. Animals are dying. Children around the world are dying, and we are living through it in real time, absorbing one fresh horror before the last has found somewhere to settle, carrying this accumulation of grief and rage and helplessness inside our bodies while the people inflicting it move briskly along to the next atrocity.

And my heart is absolutely breaking for these horses, for beings whose whole lives were made of open country and changing seasons, hidden water and hard ground, summer heat shimmering above stone, the herd gathered close after sundown and mornings arriving pale across an unobstructed horizon, until human greed reached across all that distance and dragged them into a world of fences, forms, freight and confinement.

They knew freedom.

We gave them fear.

And we have to remember that. We have to remember all of it, what they bulldozed and butchered, what they poisoned and despoiled, what they sold and scarred and sacrificed, the people they hurt, the families they devastated, the places they wounded and the creatures that had no vote, no lobbyist, no lawyer, no way to defend themselves from the people who were supposed to protect them.

Not the bleached, sanitized version that will someday be compressed into a chapter called “the Trump years.” Not a collection of dates and executive orders and election results scrubbed clean of what it actually felt like to live through this.

Remember waking up afraid to look at your phone. Remember the clenched jaw and balled fists and pounding heart. Remember what it felt like to watch cruelty become governance, callousness become currency, destruction become routine, empathy treated like some embarrassing weakness that serious people had finally evolved beyond.

Because forgetting would be one final cruelty inflicted on everything and everyone they harmed.

Some of these scars will fade. Some will take generations. Some never will.

We cannot get these horses back.

We cannot resurrect the dead, unbreak the terrified child, reassemble every shattered family, coax every ancient living thing back from ruin or return every frightened animal to the life it knew before somebody decided its existence cost too much.

But we can remember exactly what it looked like when cruelty was given power, exactly what it sounded like, exactly what it cost, and carry that memory forward like a promise to the people who come after us that no matter how much time passes, no matter how carefully somebody tries to sand down the edges of this history, we will tell them what happened here.

We will tell them what was done.

We will tell them what was lost.

And we will tell them why we must never, ever fucking let it happen again.

But there is some good news:

So proud of my governor.

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Strong Women

I did not realize how badly I needed Rosie O’Donnell back on my television until she guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel and reminded me that one of the greatest weapons against a thin-skinned, tantrum-throwing, tyrant-cosplaying asshole like Donald Trump is to LAUGH RIGHT IN HIS FUCKING FACE.

Because Rosie O’Donnell is fucking FEARLESS, and Donald Trump absolutely cannot stand a woman he cannot frighten, flatten, flatter into submission, or otherwise force to genuflect before the wobbling orange wedding cake of his own self-importance.

He has been attacking this woman for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS, and that bloated, blubbery, butter-basted, blockheaded little bitch still hasn’t figured out that she is not afraid of him. He insults her. Threatens her. Obsesses over her. Drags her name out whenever the ancient grievance carousel inside his spectacularly stupid, sawdust-stuffed, synapse-starved skull starts wheezing around again, spewing the same petty, puerile, pissy little complaints he has been nursing since George W. Bush was president and people still had dedicated drawers for MapQuest directions.

And thanks to a plurality of smooth-brained, mouth-breathing, troglodytic, self-sabotaging shidiots, Donald Trump ascended to the presidency of the United States TWICE and still couldn’t evict Rosie O’Donnell from the rent-controlled duplex she apparently occupies inside his frontal lobe.

And Rosie just keeps fucking laughing.

Which made it absolutely DELICIOUS when she looked directly into the camera during her opening monologue, referred to him not as President Trump, not even as Donald Trump, but as “Mango Mussolini,” gave this teeny cheerful wave and said:

“Hi. I know you’re watching.”

I almost fucking DIED.

Five words. One wave. A goddamn assassination by finger wiggle.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t even give the bastard his NAME. She just smiled into that lens with the exquisite serenity of a woman who knows EXACTLY where Donald Trump’s emotional prostate is located and gently pressed.

Hi, Mango Mussolini!

Because YOU KNOW HE WAS WATCHING.

You know that ambulatory sack of ego and edema was parked somewhere in front of a television, marinating in a bubbling vat of narcissistic injury, his tissue-paper ego disintegrating because the woman he has spent two decades trying to intimidate was CHEERFULLY WAVING AT HIM.

And the chef’s kiss is that she did it from JIMMY KIMMEL’S set, another person Trump has repeatedly tried to bully into submission who simply will not cow to him.

It was a gorgeous little layer cake of fuck-yous: Jimmy’s show, Rosie on his set, Trump hate-watching from wherever the hell he was, and she stared directly through the camera to let him know SHE KNEW.

Because ridicule is Donald Trump’s kryptonite.

This ruinously insecure, criticism-allergic crybaby can spend all day cosplaying Caesar and have his emotional ecosystem collapse because somebody made a joke about his hair. For a man pathologically obsessed with dominance, Donald Trump radiates the sexual confidence of a guy who spends forty-five minutes adjusting the lighting before presenting a Vienna sausage and asking, “Be honest, does this look huge from over there?”

And we’re supposed to regard THIS asshole as a terrifying authoritarian?

This pampered, powder-faced fraud who looks like he fell asleep face-first in a bowl of spaghetti, staggered upright, got shoved into wardrobe and was sent onstage at the Shawnee Playhouse for a summer-stock production of Il Duce: The Temu Years?

The guy lacquered in peach-toned stucco, teetering around in high heels, cinched into a corset, crowned with a wind-tortured thatch installation, and wrapped in a suit containing enough excess fabric to tarp a fucking pontoon boat?

That’s the terrifying tyrant?

That distended satsuma in orthopedic elevators?

That marmalade manatee with a necktie?

That preening, pouting, pancake-pasted parcel of presidential pique?

PLEASE.

The whole goddamn thing is a SHOW.

The flags. The gold. The scowling photographs. The military spectacle. The dictator poses. The chest-puffing, chin-jutting, cocktail-wiener-swinging stagecraft of supremacy, right down to that bizarre double-fisted jerk-and-twist “dance,” the only choreography the braces around his legs now seem to allow, pumping both fists beside his hips like Hando Calrissian simultaneously jerking off two imaginary MMA fighters.

It is pomp wrapped around pathology, a gaudy, gilded, gold-plated papier-mâché colostomy bag with the emotional load-bearing capacity of a motherfucking meringue.

He’s the end-cap-clearance, factory-reject, off-brand imitation Wizard of Oz toy your coupon-clipping granny found at a garage sale after somebody had already blowtorched the face and redrawn the features with a fucking Magic Marker, now frantically yanking levers behind a polyester curtain, coughing out machine smoke and booming threats through a busted amplifier while praying nobody wanders backstage and discovers that the Great and Powerful Whatever-the-Hell is actually an aggrieved carnival appliance salesman in a discount statesman costume having a nervous breakdown.

And Rosie is Toto.

She trots right over and YANKS.

There he is.

No legend. No majesty. No magnificent masculine mystique. Just a brittle, blustering, bouffant-bearing blowhard whose psychological stability can be knocked sideways by a monologue joke.

POINT AND FUCKING LAUGH.

And watching Rosie do exactly that was cathartic for me for reasons that reached much further back than Donald Trump, because long before that malignant mandarin-colored motherfucker became the human push notification none of us can swipe away, she meant comfort to me.

Being home sick when I was younger meant blankets, daytime television and The Rosie O’Donnell Show, this gloriously goofy explosion of Koosh balls, Broadway songs, giveaways, celebrity crushes and completely unembarrassed enthusiasm pouring through the television. She loved things LOUDLY. She would practically levitate when somebody she adored walked onto that set, and there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about watching a grown woman refuse to ration her happiness for fear of looking uncool.

When you were sick and miserable on the couch, she felt like company.

There was safety in that show, a little daytime sanctuary connected in my memory to a kinder stretch of life when television could simply entertain you instead of informing you that democracy had just been stuffed into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental before breakfast.

So seeing THAT woman all these years later hit me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. The world changed. She changed. I changed. But there she was, still carrying that enormous capacity for delight, except now it belonged to a woman who has spent two decades being targeted by a vengeance-addled, vanity-engorged bully and still refuses to give that son of a bitch one drop of the fear he keeps trying to squeeze out of her.

I fucking LOVE that.

Maybe because I understand the mechanism.

I had plenty of bullies growing up, and children can be exquisitely efficient little sadists when they discover something that gets a reaction. They find the sore spot, jam a finger into it and WATCH YOUR FACE. Their cruelty isn’t complete until they see the flinch.

So I learned to sabotage the whole damn setup.

If somebody was going to make fun of me, I could let everybody laugh AT me, or I could grab the joke before it landed, improve the motherfucker and make everybody laugh WITH me.

So I became funnier than the little asshole coming for me.

You found something embarrassing about me? Congratulations, cupcake. Give me thirty seconds and I’ll make it funnier than you ever could.

And it worked like a charm, because the instant everyone starts laughing WITH the person you intended to humiliate, you’ve lost control of the room. Your weapon has been confiscated, your cruelty grenade turns out to be a party popper, and now people are looking at YOU.

Bullies hate that.

So do despots, dictators, demagogues, dime-store Duces and every puffed-up, power-drunk prick who depends upon everyone treating him like an eight-foot marble monument instead of a mortal asshole with gastrointestinal problems.

Bullies need your humiliation. Despots need your deference. Dictators need their mythology.

Humor is a goddamn crowbar jammed underneath all three.

Ridicule doesn’t make dangerous people harmless. These people are dangerous because they possess actual authority.

But we do not have to lend them OUR awe.

We don’t have to become unpaid extras in their shitty little tyranny pageant. We don’t have to gasp when the smoke machine starts or applaud the costume, and we sure as hell don’t have to help some vain, voluble, volume-discount despot inflate himself into some towering object of reverence when he keeps landing somewhere between county-fair hypnotist and divorced casino magician whose tiger got repossessed.

For a man so ravenous for submission, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time pleading with the universe to reassure him that he is bigger, tougher, richer, taller, harder, smarter, hotter, more feared, more virile, more magnificent than every other swinging mammal on Earth, while lumbering around with an ass that appears to have entered the room several seconds before the rest of him and may require its own tugboat escort.

The flags get more gigantic. The gilt gets more garish. The threats get more theatrical. The trousers descend farther toward the floor as though hems themselves have entered witness protection. Every inch of the performance screams BEHOLD MY POWER while the performer looks like a bloated birthday clown who got into a fistfight with a spray-tan booth, lost, and then demanded everyone call him Daddy.

That is the fucking charade.

And mockery is how you puncture it.

Strip away the props. Expose the fraud. Make the emperor stand there in his fucking Spanx, stretched to structural failure around that swollen, sloshing sack of octogenarian suet.

Then LAUGH.

Laugh loudly. Laugh publicly. Laugh without permission.

Mock him. Puncture the pomposity. Remind the world that underneath all the presidential pageantry, authoritarian affectation, belligerent bluster and tough-guy theater is someone who cannot fucking bear the sound of people laughing at him.

Because the emperor needs you admiring the robes.

The counterfeit wizard needs you watching the smoke.

The bully needs to know he hurt you.

Don’t give them a fucking thing.

Keep laughing. Keep pointing. Keep humiliating these pompous pricks until every last inch of manufactured menace collapses into the pathetic punchline it always was.

And Rosie?

Keep.

Fucking.

Waving.

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