It is with the heaviest of hearts I come to you from Donald Trump’s surprise second term. I’d hoped we’d avoid this scenario, what with that landslide election he lost, but I foolishly forgot about the self-destruct clause the founders wove into the Constitution, triggered, as every schoolchild knows, whenever two idiot billionaires are wrong about the First Amendment at the same time.

And while I feel the leap to terminating the whole dang Constitution was a touch unwarranted here, I suppose this is just how history happens now, driven by the misconceptions of the morons with the richest daddies. Doesn’t strike me as any way to run a railroad, but at any rate, I am legally obliged to inform you the second inauguration was the single most attended event in human history, by several orders of magnitude.

It’s all so stupid and exhausting. I don’t specifically remember a plague of oddly confident dumbasses in the Old Testament story, but maybe God was just saving the good shit for a culture that needed a really special lesson.

I’m starting to understand why Republicans’re demanding so many investigations into Hunter Biden, since they seem to believe his dong is powerful enough to make millions of voters ignore a mismanaged pandemic and a crashed economy, and re-elect the blithering jackass responsible for both, even though he thinks the questions at the end of a cognitive test are “difficult.”

The must be some penis, is all I’m saying.

It would be really cool if anyone involved in inventing or disseminating this breathtakingly dumb narrative cared that they were so completely incorrect about the First Amendment, or “shadow banning,” or the mystical election-granting powers of Hunter Biden’s laptop, but I suppose that would require any number of qualities that’ve fallen out of fashion on the Right: thoughtfulness, humility, decency…I shouldn’t’ve even brought it up.

Anyway, yeah, the 45th President of the United States and frontrunner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination once again used the first, flimsy excuse presented to call for the overthrow of the entire constitutional order, he does that sort of thing from time to time, especially when he’s feeling cornered…sometimes people dress up and build gallows, it’s a whole thing.

Off-Brand Orbán’s casual fascism earned mostly silence from institutional Republicans, though it did get one whole minute on Fox News, and a brief, lonely round of applause from Paul Gosar, who likes to remind us from time to time that there’s a white nationalist dentist with a not-quite-functioning brain serving in the House of Representatives.

Between this and the Ye/Fuentes dinner, Republicans have been offered a steakhouse dessert cart of off-ramps, but I guess they’re watching their weight, though they always seem to find room for one more slice of electoral defeat.

Which brings us to the Georgia Senate runoff, and the most welcome end to the freakiest goddamn election cycle of my lifetime. Oh Herschel, I think I’ll miss you most of all, though I certainly hope you come to no harm in the never-ending war between vampires and werewolves, to which I assume you now return.

The state of conservative thinking has fallen so far that they apparently need debates and postmortems to figure out what went wrong in the 2022 midterms. Yeah, it’s a mystery, fellas.

Perhaps the answers lie in the chemtrails Doug Mastriano has been studying in his newfound free time, or the halo of Charmin-soft light surrounding Kari Lake on her wingnut media tour, or the unceasing parade of weirdos meeting with the drooling fop y’all have, for reasons which have never been quite clear to me, chosen to worship.

Why, in smoky cloakrooms, deep state pubs, and Clinton Foundation organ-harvesting lounges, talk has even turned to candidate quality, a blasphemous assault on a tried-and-true system that rewards those bold enough to paint game show hosts on their lawn.

In Republicans’ defense, the object of their adulation rewards them with a reliable stream of humiliation and defeat, and I think by now, we have to assume they’re into that. The Dotard was already a first ballot Loser Hall of Famer, but I think he’s doing some of his finest work right now. Watching Donald Trump lose is like watching Jordan in the playoffs, while Picasso paints Guernica on the backboard.

How can one man lose so often and so massively without simply dissipating in the wind? Most losers would lose the unlosable midterms and call that a fine day’s work, but not our Donald. Just this week, he faced potential criminal referrals from the January 6th committee, amidst a fresh wave of subpoenas from the new special counsel, to say nothing of the classified documents that keep popping up in his possession or, oh yeah, the seventeen felony tax fraud convictions. It’s like a century of Cubs baseball every three days.

Yes, victories have been hard to come by for the GOP of late, though they did sneak a reversal of the Pentagon’s Covid vaccine mandate into the NDAA, a triumph for the forces that would see more preventable diseases spread through our military, forces that’re surprisingly well-represented on Capitol Hill.

I wouldn’t worry, though, John Bolton will save the Republican Party. He’s gonna jump into the primary y’see, and Trump doesn’t stand a chance against that Hanna-Barbera-but-vaguely-genocidal charisma.

Milo Yiannapolous was fired from Kanye West’s “presidential campaign,” apparently losing a power struggle to Nick Fuentes; fortunes shift swiftly in the grifter game of thrones.

Speaking of which, I confess I haven’t allowed myself to indulge in fantasies of Kevin McCarthy’s yearslong crawl though MAGA sewage ending in one final Coachella porta-potty rather than the speakership; it feels like asking Santa for the shiniest toy in the Marshall Fields window when you know mom and dad can’t afford it…but to sell so much of your soul, only to trip over the likes of Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs at the finish line…oh man, I would walk out of that movie satisfied.

Not since Fox called Arizona have I seen Cult45 as incensed as that time an American citizen got released from unjust captivity in Putin’s Russia. They’re, uh, not taking the Brittney Griner news well, are they? Ye gods. An unusually ugly tantrum thrown by the ugliest tantrum-throwers in an ugly, ugly movement. Salty, no doubt, from the tears shed over the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act.

Heck, even the House sponsor of DeSantistan’s odious “Don’t Say Gay” law got indicted for wire fraud. Maybe he can share a cell with the election denier who voted illegally nine times. Of course, the real action on the anti-gay Right happens on the grassroots/terrorist level, as we saw in Columbus, and possibly Moore County, North Carolina.

I see we started exporting QAnon at some point, and all the fuckwit terrorist plotting that goes along with it. My apologies to Germany, though you have to admit it’s exciting we got in on the ground floor of the hot, new, global madness economy.

I think we’re going to be a leader in the field for the foreseeable future. That said, I’ve had my fill for the time being, so I’ll sign off here. Don’t lose too much sleep over Sinema, friends. And stay safe; it’s still pretty weird out there, and we need ya.