I know how this is all gonna play out now. For the sake of mild-but-instant gratification, let’s get to the Trump tweet:
Donald Trump is going to not be president at the end of January. But of course, he’ll never concede that fact, because conceding is weakness and Trump will refuse to show weakness until the sweet, sweet day when his lipid-infested heart finally stops. Until then, history’s biggest chump will keep on deluding himself that he’s still Very Important And Highly Regarded By Many Of Our Most Well-Known Citizens, and he’ll keep up the façade every day for the rest of his miserable fucking life. Why stop now?
So, with that in mind, I know the endgame here. Trump will be replaced by Joe Biden. He won’t concede, formally or informally. Quite the opposite. He’ll say he won. Over and over. He’ll say he was illegally removed from the White House and that the courts will vindicate him. They will not. But Trump will ignore them and continue to insist that he is President. He will NEVER stop believing he is President. Ever. And every day that he is not President, he will still behave as if he is. He will make weird proclamations and issue executive orders written on construction paper. He will also start his own shitty streaming news network where he is still President 24/7. This will all be highly amusing except for the fact that millions of people will literally believe all of this and will take his imaginary presidential actions as ironclad law.
There’s money in big men pretending that they can bend reality to their will. I can laugh at every fake thinker like Matty Yglesias launching their own awful Substacks by announcing that they were cast out from jobs they voluntarily left, but people fucking buy that shit! I can laugh at Marjorie Taylor Greene's hotel workout, but that piece of shit and her paranoid daydreams have a vote in Congress now.
I can laugh at Elon Musk for being a hilarious paper tiger all I like, because he is one. He’s also worth a mint and has a rabid following (WHY?) that accepts his reality as THE reality. That following includes city planning commissions that have granted him approval to, on a preliminary basis, sketch out models for urban infrastructure that are inferior to systems that ALREADY FUCKING EXIST, but LOOK future-y enough to delude people into believing, with all of their soul, that those models are innovative and necessary. And then Musk and his marks commit to his ideas so fully that no other reality is allowed to exist. The actual truth isn’t worth acknowledging in the slightest. Look down and you’ll fall.
Thanks to and including Donald Trump, a lot of otherwise unremarkable men have discovered that the best way to get people to buy into their Ponzi scheme is for THEM to buy into it as well. That completes the circle and cuts out reality entirely. This presidency was merely the test run of false cultural ecosystems. Given that half the country thinks the coronavirus is a fucking prank, that test run was an inarguable success. It’ll be copied ad infinitum, especially by Trump himself. Why accept the truth when it sucks so badly, and when the system is set up so that you don’t really have to?
