Category: JOJOFROMJERZ

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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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