The worst president in American history, a vulgarian of grotesque appetites and lamentable tastes who is physically decaying right before our eyes, a two-bit chiseler and a liar and a boor who is bent on erecting hideous monuments to his self-imagined greatness, today puts the capstone on his enshittification of Washington, D.C., a place and a people he is determined to punish and humiliate for despising him. We hate him here for what he is and what he is not, and we hate him in voting numbers unequaled elsewhere in the country.
It is all so pathetic. The city brakes to a dead stop today for Trump’s grand prix, a roaring, shuddering, choking, gas-gargling, pavement-shredding event particularly popular in Trump-red America. Cars will be racing at 180 m.p.h. in a 1.7-mile track around the Mall, past the U.S. Capitol, the Washington Monument, the National Archives, the National Gallery of Art, and the Lincoln Memorial; quite aptly, the ground beside the benighted, beshitted Reflecting Pool will serve as the location for “Pit Row.”
The National Gallery decided to conduct a vibration study, after which they boarded up glass skylights, and erected wooden barriers around outdoor sculptures in the fingers-crossed hope they’ll be protected. Two hundred manhole covers have been welded down to prevent the aerodynamic downforce and suction generated by racing cars from lifting or displacing the heavy metal discs and hurling them like Frisbees at the crowds.
It’ll be classy all around, the White House assures us.
Remember when Washington celebrated itself and the country like this?
Well, Trump shut that place right down in a temper tanty when it wouldn’t rename itself after Himself. Now, the White House celebrates itself and the country like this:
Trump has transformed the understated elegance of the people’s home into the gaudy, bawdy gilt-and-velour decor of a 19th-century San Francisco bordello.
Trump is still manhandling politicians to approve his planned, brutishly large 250-foot monument to himself — the so called “Triumphal” Arch (actual anagram: “Hail Trump”) would dominate 37 surrounding historic sites and mar multiple sight lines to the grandeur of Federal Washington.
Also, by the way, the world is falling apart all around him, a state of affairs he brought about — shockingly — all by himself. Whatever small restraint he showed in his first regime has been jettisoned this time around, as his wits fail and his gall wells up in his distended gut. This time, Trump has gotten rid of any top staffers with the gumption to challenge him, and replaced them with spineless apparatchiks and stooges, most recently an emotionally injured young woman whose infatuation with her boss seems to border on the psychotic.
That’s where we are today, here in Washington, as a town. The bordello of the Western World.
How the hell did this guy happen?
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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
And finally, just to remind us all that other big cities have big, pathetic sideshows of their own, here is a photo and headline from yesterday’s New York Daily News:
Officers seize super-sized illegal snake near Coney Island boardwalk
Conservation officers confiscated a colossal — and illegal — snake near the Coney Island boardwalk after its owner tried to make it a sideshow attraction.
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And from today’s Mailbag:
Q: I loved that picture of the mobbiest mobster of all, Johnny Dio.
But not all mobsters look like they came out of Hollywood casting.
My father-in-law was on the fringes of the “rackets,”, as he called them, in the 1920s and early 30s. He knew members of Detroit’s Purple Gang, and was himself a member of the Little Jewish Navy, which smuggled whisky across the Detroit River from Ontario to Detroit. In later years he was a friend of a most unlikely-looking hitman from Minneapolis, Israel “Icepick Willie” Alderman.
A: Wow! He looks like an uncle of mine. Icepick Willie, unsurprisingly, got that name because of his favorite means of offing people during the Prohibition era. He would bring them to a speakeasy he owned, get them sloppy drunk, and then unceremoniously jab an icepick into their ear, through the eardrum and into the brain. They’d just quietly keel over! And he’d have them gently dragged out, ostensibly to be driven home to the missus. The missus never saw them again, of course.
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Okay, that’s it for the day. If you’re thinking of becoming a paying subscriber, consider making the move now, before the price hike goes into effect next Saturday.
You forgot one…..racism. Obama so pissed off the stupid racists that they voted for the white nationalist promising to make racism (and misogyny) great again.
"We have met the enemy and he is us," how that wise 'possum of the Okefenokee put it in another context. Beneath our "shining city on the hill" has always run a polluted stream, and depending on the socio-political climate, either stayed in unseen presence or emerged and became a visible torrent. Such is our mythology. We have always had two parallel "stories:" The aspirational myth --- liberty, equality, opportunity, exceptionalism and the submerged reality --- tribalism, status anxiety, racial hierarchy, distrust of elites, and periodic eruptions of populist anger. Trump didn’t create the polluted stream. He drew from it, amplified it, and made it visible again. And he unfortunately had the exact "skill" set for the moment when the flood was strongest. It was a "fit" problem; not a "fluke" issue. He didn’t just express anger —- he performed it. He had decades of experience manipulating attention --- tabloids, reality TV, branding, conflict-driven publicity. Trump’s style --- blunt, transgressive, norm‑breaking --- resonated with a large subset of voters; he didn't speak like a politician, he spoke like someone fighting on behalf of a threatened tribe. His carefully crafted "outsider" persona wasn't a liabilty, it was an asset: his norm breaking signaled to supporters that he was "real," "tough," and "not controlled." And, the party formerly known as Republican in 2016 was fragmented, leaderless, and unable to stop a populist takeover. His gold-and-monuments aesthetic can also be viewed as eye-wateringly inevitable: growing up in outer-borough aspirational luxury, he internalized a simple visual language --- wealth should be visible, undeniable, and theatrical. Gold communicated "rich" instantly and became a brand, a political message. And let's remember that Trump has always built shrines to himself --- towers, casinos, golf courses, plaques, magazine covers framed on walls: not just simple vanity --- identity construction. No other politician had an aesthetic that so perfectly matched the emotional landscape of the moment. He didn’t just tap the polluted stream --- he built a golden fountain on top of it.