The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how Pope Leo XIV, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is "too liberal" and "weak on crime"—for God's sake, there's graffiti all over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!—apparently in tantrum response to Leo XIV having criticized both Trump's war of aggression on Iran and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's framing of that war as having been ordained by God. A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder.
What else. Oh right. Also, toward the end of last week, Trump announced that the United States would begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz, which the nation of Iran has been blockading ever since the U.S. attacked that country illegally and without provocation at the end of February. For those catching up, Trump has spent the past several weeks desperately attempting to browbeat the rest of the world into opening the Strait by force on his behalf, while also continually insisting on his social-media website that the Strait is of no consequence and also that the U.S. military could open it at any time. Keen students of history may recall way back in double-aught-one week ago, when Trump threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Iran if it did not open the Strait within a few hours. A lesser tactician might observe that responding to a blockade of the Strait by blockading the Strait is the equivalent of punishing a guy for punching you in the face by also punching yourself in the face. What this analysis fails to apprehend is that, in war, you cannot be defeated if, whenever anything happens in the war, you say that it was no big deal and also everybody else's fault and also good actually and due to your genius.
OK back to the AI image of Trump as Jesus Christ. As one might imagine, Trump's choice to propagate this image has not gone down super well with whole huge swaths of the populace, including many of the types of people who, while politically conservative and otherwise sympathetic to many of Trump's hatreds and resentments and perhaps before now proud to have voted for him, are sensitive to what my colleague David Roth called "red-letter Antichrist Shit," and so get a little itchy when an elected world leader A) starts an elective war in the Middle East, and B) portrays himself as the Messiah. In fact, many of those people spent much of the past 36 hours calling him the Antichrist, right there on his own website. Trump deleted the image at some point around midday on Monday.
A little while after deleting the post from his social account, Trump staged a press event at the White House in which he had two bags of McDonalds food delivered to him by a lady wearing a red T-shirt with the words "Doordash Grandma" on the front. Look man, all I can do is describe these things. I am not responsible for the world being like this.
In any case, this was to promote the "no tax on tips" provision included in the huge spending bill Congress passed last summer, which allows workers in certain jobs to deduct some tipped income from their federal taxes. I do not think that many laborers in tipped lines of work will be offended when I say that, at a moment when the U.S. President is posting memes of himself as Jesus Christ, threatening nuclear holocaust, and adopting the opposing side's strategic aims in a war for the sake of declaring himself its winner, nobody is all that curious to discuss his thoughts on the "no tax on tips" thing at an event at which he will be present to answer questions from reporters.
And so it was! Standing beside the Doordash Grandma, Trump fielded a question from a reporter: "Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself, depicted as Jesus Christ?"
The only salient facts about Trump's response to this question are that not one single person on Earth—not Trump himself, not the reporter, not Doordash Grandma, not the most spiral-eyed MAGA-hat freak alive, not anybody—believes a word of it, and that nobody is even supposed to believe it. The objective is to provide a line of bullshit that some people can pretend to believe, or pretend to think anybody else believes, and so perform the Rite of Declaring This News Cycle Finished. This is an exhausted bit of theater in our ragged, sputtering politics, and nobody much bothers with feigning sincerity in any of its roles at this point—but, as Jesus himself said: "Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness."
Anyway here is how that went:
TRUMP: Well it wasn't depict—it was me, I've, I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there which we support. And uh, only the fake news could come up with that one so I had, I had uh ... I just heard about it, and I said, 'How did they come up with that?' It's supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better, I make people, uh, a lot better, as an example, uh the 11,000 I uh—
[turning toward Doordash Grandma]
—I understand your husband's going through a treatment?
DOORDASH GRANDMA: Yes sir. Yes sir.
TRUMP: He's going through some very serious cancer treatment, so—
DOORDASH GRANDMA: Yes sir.
TRUMP: —this goes a long way.
DOORDASH GRANDMA: Yes sir it sure does.
TRUMP: Yeah.
You can understand the confusion. Like everyone else, I am used to seeing doctors portrayed in art as wearing a long flowing white robe and a red mantle, with mystical light in their hands, healing sick people by touching them on their foreheads, with a sunburst of heavenly light in the sky behind them and kneeling people looking on in prayerful wonder. You encounter the word doctor, that's just what you envision. It's culturally encoded! Whereas Jesus, if I remember correctly, is typically depicted with all of that stuff but also a beard, which Trump clearly does not have in the AI image of him supernaturally healing a guy with the touch of his hand while dressed as Jesus Christ.
By total and inexplicable coincidence, this week there is renewed public interest in the issue of the 79-year-old lifelong degenerate with his finger on the Armageddon button being, as they say, "a few Apostles shy of a Last Supper." To that I say (paraphrasing Jesus), let he who has never countered a blockade by blockading the same body of water cast the first stone here. As soon as possible. Hey-ohhhhh!
This brings me to what is for my money the funniest part of this whole not-actually-funny thing: a sentence from the journalist Peter Baker's New York Times article about the question of Trump's brain. (Emphasis mine.)
While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public's eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.
As the New Yorker has its famed two-step, this is a classic Times maneuver: carefully sidestepping the tricky commitments of describing reality—What if somebody suspects that I think things???—and reporting only that people have opinions. "Forensically debated"! Signs and wonders.
Ah yes, truly that is the news. Not that Donald Trump is demented and out of touch with reality; nor that by absolutely any definition of "stability" he is at best mid-collapse right now; nor that multiple times per day he says and does things that are plainly and utterly disqualifying in the position he holds. The story is that people are debating whether any of that is true.
Which, not to nitpick, but that ... isn't true! The article produces no evidence of an actual "debate," any more than there was a meaningful debate during all the years the legacy press spent treating anthropogenic climate change as a contested political wedge issue rather than a set of plainly observable scientific facts. It features quote after quote from public figures all over the political spectrum, including some who know Trump personally, saying things to the effect that the President pooped out his brain and accidentally stepped on it and it shot out from under his shoe and smashed into a wall and splattered all over the place and then he fell down a flight of stairs into a swimming pool and was underwater for 12 straight minutes and has not been the same ever since they hauled him out and drained the gallon of pool water from inside his skull. Representing the "The President has a brain, it is inside of his head, and it works actually" side of the discussion are a couple pro forma quotes from a Fox News ghoul and an actual White House spokesperson saying, in effect, "Nuh-uh."
It's not a bad article in the context of Baker's oeuvre: He's the weenie who proudly boasts of never voting in elections, so rigorous is his commitment to the imaginary journalism principle of refusing to have thoughts, form conclusions, or participate in society. It seems well reported and certainly gives Trump's own words and actions plenty of space to speak for themselves. It even features a jarringly strong subhead for the Times:
As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as "lunatic" and "clearly insane."
But old habits die hard, I guess. The headline—"Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate"—to its credit treats the erratic behavior and extreme comments as facts, before retreating to the position that the story here is the revival of debate over what those facts mean, rather than the U.S. president talking and acting like Cobra Commander suffering from high-altitude cerebral edema. Imagine the Times bringing this approach to a story not involving the behavior of an authority figure or powerful rich guy, and thus not triggering the paper's reflexive wussy deference to power:
- Boiling Lahars, Ash Plume Visible from Space Spark Debate Over Whether Mount St. Helens Is Erupting
- SS Grandcamp Explodes in Texas City Harbor, At Least 500 Dead, Critics Say
- Huge Tiger Clamped To Neck, Spreading Pool of Blood Spark Debate Over Whether Roy Horn Being Attacked by Tiger
Not everything is a matter of debate, apparently. The mental health of the guy likening himself to Jesus Christ, in between florid threats to annihilate tens of millions of people and incoherent blather about the pope's failure to clean up the mean street of Vatican City, on the other hand, is—and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
