1,348 tomorrows until Donald Trump is gone.

Remind Republicans this shit won’t last forever.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

drags through this ugly pace from day to day,

’til noon, January twenty, twenty-twenty-nine.

We must light the way for this bitch to go

to history’s dustbin. Out, out, orange clown!

The man’s a walking shamble, a poor huckster

who struts and frets beyond his hour onstage,

and should, for America’s sake, shut the hell up.

Mr. Trump is an idiot, just sound and fury,

knowing nothing.

When I feel overwhelmed by the parade of horribles, I check the Presidential Term Countdown Clock to console myself that this will not be forever. Unfortunately, this is not helpful. When I see the number of days remaining—today, 1,348—I am again in anguish. This administration has been in office since January—a few short months!—and yet it may take the rest of my life to undo its harms. Bill Gates recently described President Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID programs, for example, as “the world’s richest man [killing] the world’s poorest children.” And how long, exactly, will it be until America is forgiven that sin?

In this moment, Dear Reader, I am a bit discombobulated. I spent the week determined to stop Eagle Ed Martin’s confirmation as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia by penning an essay titled “Get fucked, Ed Martin: President Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney should be returned to his home dimension.” That effort went to waste because Mr. Trump suddenly pulled the nomination, just one day after expressing confidence and support for his sycophant.

Killing the piece on Mr. Martin has left me irritated and disoriented. I cannot bear to waste time; like many Americans, I already never have enough. It was a tour-de-force of damnation, documenting his history of harassing judges on Facebook, defenses of domestic terrorists and insurrectionists, and his use of legal authority to enforce culture-war grievances in lieu of prosecuting crimes. It described the world of his Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum as a “parallel universe,” and detailed his bizarre vendettas against Wikipedia, DEI policies, and the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as an extended rant on his deliberate refusal to understand idiomatic language and repeated complaints about my permanent ban from Conservapedia.

Now, that piece will sit inert in a filing cabinet. I presume that when it might be relevant to recycle, there will be enough new bullshit that it will be obsolete. A week of research, writing, and revision, lost. Then call me Marcel Proust, because I am going to bitch about the time instead.

I could not even be relieved, because the president immediately gave the role to someone else notorious and awful, Fox News’s Judge Jeanine Pirro—who, credit to The Bulwark for counting, is the 23rd character in this administration to come from the television network.

I do not wish to subject myself to binge-watching old episodes of The [insufferable] Five to dig up oppo on someone whose producers called her a “reckless maniac.” I cannot bear her voice, either—why on Earth does she squawk so loudly? If a Republican other than Christine O’Donnell could be accused of witchcraft, it should be her.

This cognitive rugpull has been one of the most frustrating parts of covering this administration. In late 2024, when disgraced ex-congressman Matt Gaetz was nominated for Attorney General, Mr. Trump expressed confidence in the pick and demanded and threatened Senators to support the man up until the last possible moment. So, I wrote several essays roasting this motherfucker. I called him a Disco Duck and an ephebophilic coke fiend. I rigorously deconstructed this man’s whole ass. And overnight, he was pulled in favor of notoriously corrupt bimbo Pam Bondi, who had previously dropped charges against Mr. Trump’s fraudulent university in exchange for campaign contributions.

Steve Bannon famously called this: “flooding the zone with shit.” I hate to use language or images he is proud of, but the strategy is in play. The pace of events will overwhelm anybody who tries to record them. But even a well-engaged consumer of news products will be unable to stay current unless he devotes his every waking moment—no self-care, chores, or recreation—to keeping an eye on the bastards.

And how could a human be expected to never take a break? But if you try and enjoy something, perhaps download The Elder Scrolls V: Oblivion Remaster or watch Marvel’s The Thunderbolts* in theatres, the world might change for the worse, and not only was studying yesterday’s atrocities rendered outdated and useless but you must scramble again to learn the lore of the new day’s monstrosities. Worse: by failing to remember, you are in service to the fascists, whose victory requires all men of character to forget and grow indolent.

But there are only 600 days before the next House (which I expect to be Democratic) is sworn in to uphold the Constitution. From there, they will conduct oversight and investigations. Perhaps impeachments and censure follow, and some new atrocities are unearthed. And in 2029, trials and convictions begin.

Scott Galloway has recently stressed that Democrats should start proposing bills laying out real penalties for the administration’s various crimes, such as black-bagging legal residents for protected protest, refusing to follow judicial orders, or running the $TRUMP cryptoscam on the eve of the Inauguration. Let rogue ICE agents, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Messrs. Musk and Martin, anybody going outside the bounds of the law, know: if they do not demur from some acts of evil, they could end up working on a chain gang, singing the “Jailhouse Rock,” praying their bunkmates have not read their tweets.

For these people, time is the enemy—its passage endangers them—because they know after enough days, after enough weeks, after enough months, after enough years, what they are doing today will be made public and evaluated in forums they cannot obfuscate. The public will see their works in full, and they can be judged.

We are under an onslaught of this administration’s activities, which must be weathered until Democrats retake power; by then, we must be prepared to prevail and punish. Their obligation is to delay those days, or defeat them in advance, destroy any evidence, create a volume of bullshit that we forget some crimes before their accounting. They may try to stop elections, or preemptively smear the people most likely to let light see their black and deep desires. In two years, they hope, when they get a subpoena, nobody will know what the hell is going on.

The consequences for them are serious. An ICE agent today who puts on a mask—like fucking Batman—and takes a college student off the street, puts her in the back of a van and detention for six weeks—that guy risks going to jail himself, or at least going into a court, Congress, or The Hague, balls in hand, to testify.

People ask me who I expect to be the 2028 Democratic nominee—a question I hate, because that hero may have yet to prove themselves. I have started to wonder if Democrats may want to nominate someone more martial, with a strong enough stomach to make their great project the De-Ba’athification of America.

Cory Booker—who ordinarily is of exactly presidential temperament—seems a bit too cuddly, more oriented towards reconciliation than reckoning or reconstruction. This, I think, was the crude blunder of both the Obama and Biden administrations, who began their respective presidencies announcing they would be “look[ing] forward as opposed to looking backwards” and “end[ing] this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal… [by] open[ing] our souls instead of hardening our hearts.” At any rate, there would be more justification for declaring during the Inauguration that—even with our souls open and hearts soft—those who would use the American government to oppress its people will face a jury.

By giving Republicans grace and forgiveness for their obvious disrespect of human rights—their boots stomping across the human face—we are sparing the rod America’s vile sons and daughters require to keep them from posing with smiles in front of shirtless men packed shoulder to shoulder in a megaprison. We are allowing them to continue their project of making the nation one of history’s worst and cruelest.

It is only in time that they will be caught and made to confess. To evade this accountability—which could maximally involve incarceration to the end of their lives—Republicans seek to make the intervening days long and exhausting, so when we are on the other side, we are too fatigued to pursue justice, opt instead to embrace our unrepentant countrymen, hope those who cheered for authoritarians and insurrectionists will put away their dark sides and live among us as meek Christians.

We have tried this too often, and they have not given us credit for this charitable spirit. No. Democrats must steel themselves to a future where they must disband ICE and prosecute its agents and other MAGA enforcers, not just some gaslit cultists and rioters.

And it seems to me that if they know the future contains accountability for actions to which they cannot bear to be held accountable, a Republican who does not intend to change course will then have to stop the future. I imagine Mr. Trump’s servants would prefer to put Senator Chris Van Hollen into the El Salvadoran CECOT prison before they would allow Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to testify to his experience. That should scare elected Democrats. They cannot approach Republicans with a soft touch—they must screw their courage to the sticking place—because Republicans know they are stepped in blood and cannot go back. If conservative leaders are aware they have no prospects except total victory or total defeat, they will not be restrained by ethics or principles to avoid consequences.

In this way, we can also characterize them as fugitives—men on the run, who ought to be treated as armed and dangerous, who might rather die than go behind bars. Am I suggesting “bad boy” Stephen Miller would hole himself up with a gun and a hostage when the police come for him? I would not put anything past him.

Viewing time this way clarifies what will be possible and underscores the stakes. Perhaps it matters profoundly that we document each day’s horrors. What we cannot stop, we can record; what we can record, we can remember; and what we can remember, we can weaponize—not petty resentments (though they have some value, too!)—but justified outrage against the people committing these evils.

Republicans already operate this way. They sit down in front of Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, and Jesse Watters daily for their two minutes hate. During their commute, Mark Levin runs them through a litany of manufactured furies. They might not be coherent, but they have a whole stack of fucking problems.

We should emulate that a little bit. Instead of fighting each battle each day, we should begin each battle with a series of reminders about the previous day’s battles. Write it down. Send an email to yourself. Title it: “Things to be mad about.” And then search it in six months whenever you need to be mad. Because, as Milan Kundera says, “[t]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

It does not escape me that my urgent and punitive vibe matches my enemy’s. This is not inadvertent, but the product of long reflection. Their project will not stop unless it is stopped. And by its end, there will be no Democrats left to defend anything. The nation will be for MAGA, and MAGA only. We could not have neutral prosecutors or opposition (or even just accurate) media, and schools and universities might be teaching only the history as depicted in Conservapedia. The final products of this Republican agenda are blood and more blood, uncountable losses, and a government purged of anyone who believes in governance.

To paraphrase another bard: Time goes by slowly—for those who wait. We should not hesitate to announce plans for swift, nasty payback. Only those who run will have all the fun, though, to be honest, it will not be fun. Every day of Mr. Trump’s presidency, it seems, there is new suffering, and we will not be able to give any person back the weeks or months or longer they spent in detention for thought crimes, nor will we be able to bring any children back to life who died as a consequence of USAID or NIH cuts. Businesses destroyed by the disastrous tariff policy will not be reborn. America will never be made whole, but we can at least plan to be free of monsters.