Los Angeles is still smoldering—as of this writing, CAL Fire lists the Palisades fire as 97 percent contained and the Eaton at 99. So, some flames remain. I can relate. This week, my brain has run hot, feels like dying, like Hell, and now I am tired and irritable.
Observing this White House feels like a demonic affliction. I watched Robert F. Kennedy’s confirmation hearing last night and simultaneously spent today with the Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Pattel (or as I like to call him “Kush Pattel,” because that fool has GOT to be smoking something) confirmations on separate monitors. An airplane crashed into a Blackhawk over DC Airport (because only transplants and assholes call it Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport). People are fishing bodies from the Potomac. President Donald Trump has been in office for less than two weeks, and he has already spent all of my nerves.
Christians must be thrilled to have a president who, when he sees American children drowned, declares with no evidence that this must be the fault of the developmentally disabled. (To his credit, he at least began with a moment of silence, the barest minimum.)
I had planned not to politicize this disaster because the chronic understaffing at the Federal Aviation Administration is not a partisan issue, it is one solvable with recruitment and training. But this evil motherfucker decided to comfort grieving families by saying DEI crashed the airplane. I have friends who were convinced this was an Onion headline, that even the GOP would not be so shameless. By now, we should have learned that America will be disappointed when it places faith in the decency of the GOP.
In the cursed, humid December 2015, former Florida government Jeb Bush called Mr. Trump the “chaos candidate.” To the extent he was elected to amplify disorder, inhumanity, and unhappiness in Washington, Mr. Trump has satisfied that prediction. I hope his servants and enablers come to their senses before he ruins the country irreparably.
In former White House counsel and Watergate conspirator John Dean’s book Conservatives Without Conscience (but he repeats himself), Mr. Dean quoted former Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as having said:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them....”
Well, that terrible damn problem is now. Republicans have become so religious in their devotion that they are competing to see who can pay the most obsequious fealty—shades of King Lear, already?—such that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) has introduced legislation to add him to Mt. Rushmore. (To be clear, I do support Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)’s proposal to place my President Joe Biden’s face on the mountain.)
Worse, the cultish fervor has so overflowed that SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI CEO Elon Musk, whose Usenet alias was Marquis De Sade, and former talk radio host Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose cousin called him a predator, have also become subjects of worship. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy was praised for his physique and wisdom by Republicans who are not typically admirers of the male form nor do they generally trust drug addicts, Kennedys, trial lawyers, environmentalists, polygamists, or socialists. Mr. Kennedy claimed the first thing he did each morning for 20 years was “get on [his] knees and pray to God” that he could stop the chronic disease epidemic (and make a little money doing so), insinuated that he had some unique vision or ability to do so, and if you ignore the random made-up shit he could not remember saying on podcasts, was never wrong.
Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has such free rein in the government that he has installed actual teenagers in supervisory positions at the Office of Personnel Management. Having convinced credulous Republicans and the Anti-Defamation League his Nazi salute at an Inauguration rally was easily understood as a gesture meaning “my heart goes out to you,” Mr. Musk spent the rest of this week making Nazi puns. Meanwhile, some of his fans, including an Anglican Catholic priest in full frock, sought to emulate him and received swift consequences.
Disbelieve your own conscience, your eyes, your sense of reason, your judgment, your morality. Only believe in the leader and his pantheon of subordinates. This is the new Republican creed.
I wish I could describe it otherwise. I have agonized to find a less tired conceit until I realized it was not a metaphor; Republicans do view Mr. Trump as having the authority of the Christian God. They will not disobey His commands, even when they are monstrous, obviously untrue, or cut against conventional morality, because, like Abraham on Mt. Moriah, they choose to trust that it must be right if their Lord orders the innocent murdered. (To be clear, in this metaphor, the babe Isaac is the American People.)
There is no religious bone in my body, and if there were I would donate it. But even I can tell you the Biblical penalty for idolatry is ultimate, and in all the world’s faiths and literature, the consequences of hubris are equally severe. Where do Republicans think this all ends? Do they imagine a morning will arrive when all will be revealed, and all the evil acts they are party to will have been good at their roots? Mr. Musk captioned his fake buy-out letters to federal employees with the cliché “A Fork in the Road” (recycling verbiage from his 2022 sabotage of Twitter). Well, there is a road, and it does fork, but Republicans in the House and Senate—and the voters who enable them—are also on a journey. It winds from Mt. Moriah, where they are commanded to unthinkable acts, to Hell, which awaits them on the day they realize they have committed their souls to stupid and evil men. Pray some revelatory light intercedes for them soon.