Further

Hours after exultantly posting 24 photos about his gaudy new marble bathroom and hours before he defiantly refused to fund food stamps and health care subsidies for 42 million Americans, King Donald held a glitzy Great-Gatsby-themed party for his robber baron cronies and their plastic molls, thus adding to his myriad crimes by defiling a luminous, pivotal book that assails the moral depredations of the rich. Tell us without telling us you don't know how it and its toxic Gilded Age ends.

So much winning. As government employees work unpaid, soaring health care costs loom, DOGE cuts slow air traffic and social services, the U.S. debt rockets to a record 38-plus trillion dollars, and health experts say the country wastes nearly $400 billion in food each year, MAGA Republicans are playing a vile real-live version of The Hunger Games, threatening to make over 40 million Americans, about half of them kids, go hungry in order to...umm... wait....stick it to the Marxist libs? Perversely, unwittingly highlight the damage wrought by their fucking Big Beautiful Bill that mindlessly cut $187 billion from food stamps in the august name of making fat cats fatter? Drive home the righteous insistence of these princes among men that if we don't let them take doctors away from sick people they're gonna take food away from poor people?

As our decrepit despot traipsed across Asia, he was fêted by leaders anxious to dodge his peevish trade wars by assiduously plying him, as one would for any dangerous, demented child, with adoration and treats: burgers, golf clubs, trinkets, ketchup and, in South Korea, even a crown for the wounded boy who would be king. Still, he couldn't keep up. In Japan, he wandered off mid-glitzy-ceremony like a nursing-home gramps looking for pudding, to be steered back in place. Nothing to see here.

The decline, of course, is ongoing. Monday, Trump told reporters he'd gone to Walter Reed Medical Center and gotten an MRI as part of a "routine yearly checkup,” except he'd just had one six months ago and an MRI is decisively not part of a routine test, but not to worry: He said it was "perfect," except that doesn't exist. For those inexplicably wondering about his cognitive state, he said he also aced a "very hard" sort of "aptitude test," except it's a very basic dementia screening that requires the patient to solve elementary-school level problems like remembering five words, identifying a giraffe or lion, and drawing a clock; he added that the test "took a while" and "was difficult,” two key factors doctors consider when assessing cognitive skills

We know the awful, the stupid, the cruel goes on, but we're heartened by the birth of "a new unified theory of American reality" to help explain the darkness. It's called, "Everyone is twelve now." Suddenly, we get it: the right's puerile idiocy, pointless vengeful assaults on law and decency, poop-bombing and racism, staggeringly simplistic solutions to issues like, "Let's arrest everyone" and "Why don't we just blow them up?" At 12, they learned to slap nasty names on anything they didn't like; now, they still do.

What one grateful patriot calls "the most important political thread of our time" came from one Patrick Cosmos, a musician and frequent Bluesky user who goes by @veryimportant.lawyer. All we know about him is that his moment of snarky political clarity swiftly spread across much of social media - an irony unto itself given that many attribute the current Infantilization of right-wing discourse, at least in part, to a scattershot Internet that gives an instant platform to the most vicious and pea-brained among us. Still, many argue the notion those in power never got past being 12-year-old, emotionally stunted losers deeply resonates in a grim cultural moment of conservative ascendance that feeds on ignorance, bullying, fear and lack of critical thinking.

Amidst plunging polls and righteous rage at his Epstein Memorial Ballroom, the inept manchild faces growing resistance, sublime to ridiculous, to his nascent kingship. Cue anti-ICE whistle kits - “Form a crowd, stay loud" - rainbow church steps, Newsom hawking knee pads, D.C. Jedi suing individual goons, and a successfully mobilized Bay Area, including his iconic bookstore's revival of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's howling edict that his people not "allow their rights to erode/and their freedoms to be washed away."

Trump was already underwater with the lowest approval rating for any president, even him, at this point in his reign - see no jobs, high prices, cancelled SNAP benefits, murdered innocents, rounded-up brown neighbors - before his abrupt, illegal obliteration of the East Wing for a gilded obscenity to host his billionaire suck-ups. For many, the travesty is a bitter echo of what in part got us here: Obama's mocking, gaudy, then-hilarious 2011 vision of a lurid purple "Trump White House, Hotel, Casino, Golf Course" with glitzy tyrant chandeliers and half-naked women welcoming you. Now, of course, we are about to have the execrable real thing, a tacky "abomination," born of his "poisonous bravado," bearing the "bombast (of) a dictator-for-life megalomania vibe."