Blatshit

Color me shocked. Yesterday, Chancellor Underpants declared that his DOGE project will likely end up like his Boring Tunnel company: a lot of time and effort spent digging holes into places that did not need them, accomplishing little in the process. After promising that DOGE would cut “at least” $2t from the federal budget, Musk now says that “we’ve got a good shot at getting $1t.” He’s cut his promise in half before even officially beginning the job. Of course, this is the same man who, in 2011, promised to have people on Mars in ten years.

No need to look it up: that didn’t happen.

Everybody understands that politicians make campaign promises. Usually, however, they wait until they’ve entered office before breaking them. Not so with the Second Coming, which has already backpedaled on three of its most important pledges: to reduce government spending by $2t, to end the war in Ukraine before assuming office, and lowering the cost of groceries, which Trump said during the campaign would be very easy but a few weeks ago said would be “very hard.”

I know MAGA doesn’t read this newsletter, but maybe you’ve got some MAGA folks in your life. I’d be curious - do they feel played yet?

The question is rhetorical because I already know the answer. No, they don’t. Because they never cared about the stuff they pretended to care about, as I wrote here. The agenda they actually care about is well-underway. What is that agenda? C’mon, friend, you need not ask. The agenda is cruelty.

Whopper Jr. with “supporters” in Greenland.

Already, the Peace President is waggling his limp saber over the entire North American continent. He’s going to invade Mexico! He’s going to wage economic war with Canada! He’s not “very happy” with Denmark! (To clarify, he’s not happy with Denmark because Greenland isn’t for sale? That’s correct.) The Panama Canal must be retaken! He’s combined bull and bat shit into a brand-new rhetorical concoction. I’m going to call it “blatshit,” and define it as “dangerous nonsense.”

The blatshit is everywhere you care to look. This week, of course, it involved blaming California Democrats for the wildfires decimating Los Angeles. We also heard plenty of it during Trump’s “press conference” at Mar-a-Lame-o, in which he insulted Jimmy Carter and threatened to upend Biden’s new coastal protections.

The biggest pile of the stuff, however, landed in Greenland, where Burger King’s eldest son, Whopper Jr., was dispatched to drum up support for his bizarre idea that Greenland become an American colony “for national security reasons.” Trump Jr. made the most of his sightseeing trip, hiring the local unhoused population to pretend to be Trump supporters in exchange for a free dinner and a baseball cap. If you haven’t read that story, no, I’m not making it up.

Again, though, the cruelty agenda remains on track. The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump’s personal Nosferatu, Stephen Miller “[has] spent months trying to identify a disease that will help them build their case for closing the border.” It’s a project he’s been working on for years, with stories about his efforts to pin whatever diseases he can on immigrants dating back to at least 2020. The racist trope about immigrants spreading disease has been a long-held canard in the War for Whiteness. It has always been a lie. It will always be a lie. But, as we’ve seen, lies were the coin of the realm during the first go-round and will remain so in the Second Coming.

If lies be food, MAGA will ne’er starve.

Meanwhile, we laid truth to rest yesterday in the form of Jimmy Carter. I don’t mean to suggest that Carter was a perfect man. None is. Only that he devoted himself to the single truth of all faith: that we treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. It’s a simple premise and a good one because it recognizes that we are not nearly as separate as we pretend, and that goodness is its own reward.

Carter was a public servant in the truest sense. He served the public. It’s what Kamala Harris promised to do in her campaign. The American people rejected the premise, probably because they’ve grown so accustomed to the self-serving and narcissistic at the helm that the thought of somebody sitting behind the Resolute Desk with the them in mind seemed like so much hokum. Was Carter a throwback to another time or an outlier? Probably a little of both. Au revoir, monsieur producteur d’archides. Au revoir.

Today, the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn. The lies that fuel them continue to burn as well. Rex Hupke, my USA Today columnist pal, wrote:

The cherry on the “you’re not helping” sundae came when unhinged nutball Alex Jones posted on X Wednesday: “Los Angeles Fires Are Part Of A Larger Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare & Deindustrialize The United States Before Triggering Total Collapse.” To which Musk, who helped get Trump elected and is now slated to play a significant role in shaping our federal government, responded: “True.”

No, it’s not true. What falls out of Alex Jones’s face is never true because Alex Jones is a crazy person. He’s also bankrupt, which isn’t relevant to the story, but which bears repeating if only to remind people that, very occasionally, actions still have consequences. At least for some of the people, some of the time.

There will be many essays such as this in the years to come, I imagine, pieces in which simply recounting the day’s events would have seemed unbelievable to any American reading of them even fifteen years ago. Sadly, a recitation of the news of the day now reads like lies, and the lies are read as truth. Which was MAGA’s project from the very beginning. And they have succeeded beyond anybody’s imaginings. It is, frankly, blatshit.