I’ll preface this with the fact that the privilege of living in Australia means that there isn’t a whole lot that Donald Trump can personally do to me if you bozos across the pond actually decide to give this colossal fuckwit a second shot at the presidency. I wouldn’t be directly in his crosshairs anyway, I’m a boring white cisgender heterosexual male age 25-45 who loves New York and hates California. I have friends over there who I’d be concerned for, but all things considered, I’m not living in one of the countries he’d be looking to nuke and if he did an apocalypse somewhere else the radiation cloud would take ages to get here. Ever seen On the Beach?
For these reasons, Donald Trump news has just completely fallen off my radar. I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome, I have Chronic Trump Fatigue. And from the temperature online it feels like I’m not the only one.
Every other day I see a news story that should be the biggest news story of the past hundred years. Sometimes they don’t even fully register with me anymore. The entire Trump Organization was just ordered by a judge to be dissolved and sent into receivership for massive fraud. That’s like literally the biggest corporate news story out of America since Enron and I didn’t know about it for, like, a week. It’s completely bonkers.
Remember when Trump stole White House documents and it was basically the biggest thing that had ever happened? If that happened tomorrow and you told me about it, I don’t think it would register any higher on my radar than, like, Keffals trending on Twitter again. Or like Britney Spears dancing with knives in her underwear, that was kind of hot.
I’m serious—Donald Trump could steal the Bill of Rights and hide it in that hotel from Home Alone 2 and I don’t think I would remember seeing it in the news. He could wade across the Potomac in his underwear and shoot a gun at the Pentagon.
The exhaustion came early for me because I was working for Cracked in 2016 and as soon as he was elected fifty research assignments came down the pipe from editorial and they were all Donald Trump. I had to find every movie cameo he’d ever done. The silver lining was it was supposed to be the greatest time in history to work for a comedy publication. But the joke was on us because internet comedy didn’t even survive until the midterms. Fucking whoopsiedaisy.
That’s probably the reason I haven’t really written about Trump in this newsletter until now. I wrote more about Donald Trump than any Australian should ever have to. Now I can’t find anything to say about him amidst the relentless onslaught that has been this single individual.
Back in August a judge ruled that Trump was guilty of raping someone. This is a former President of the United States. Back when this insanity was still fresh, it was actually kind of sort of a big deal when it was discovered that he was cheating on his wife with a porn star, but we all sure forgot about that small fucking potatoes real quick, didn’t we? Bill Clinton had affairs and he was impeached for it, it became the world’s biggest scandal for years. Donald Trump raped someone and we tried to remember if that was something we already knew about him or not.
It's astonishing, but I am completely and utterly bored of Donald Trump now. The way I feel about Donald Trump doing anything is kind of like how I feel about The Simpsons seasons 25 and up. And god damn let me tell you I was a Simpsons fan in the day. I literally didn’t know until the other week that Mrs Krabappel died and that happened ten years ago. Some of you didn’t know that happened until just now when I told you. Yeah, her voice actor Marcia Wallace passed away. Discovering that was more interesting to me than the former President of the United States being fucking arrested in Georgia.
Holy shittttt the Republicans sure love the fuck out of this guy though, huh? No politician in Australia has ever in our entire history loved another politician the way yours love Donald Trump. None of our politicians have ever even liked another politician.
They’re nominating him for Speaker of the House of Representatives. I looked it up and that’s a completely different job to President but they want him to be that as well. They want him to be both things. Speaker is third in line to be President also so he would be in his own line of succession. That’s like being your own nephew. What the hell is going on? This isn’t even a nepotism thing, like I could understand maybe if they wanted another Trump to be Speaker (not Eric) but no they just want Donald to do every job in the whole government individually and possibly the country. They want him to be the Elon Musk of governance. Yeah well Elon Musk has 10 full time jobs and can’t do one properly.
Most celebrities get a good 10-20 year window of anyone ever having heard of them but Donald Trump has been a public asshole my entire life at a rate of ever increasing intensity. Vanity Fair was writing jokes about him when I was 4. I was still fresh on the Cracked payroll when Luke McKinney wrote about how Trump knows the exact radius of stupidity because he has to buy belts. Entire comedy careers have risen and played themselves out just during the span of time that he’s been the most easily ridiculed man in America. Making jokes about him now is like making jokes about airline peanuts.
I had to look up the latest news about him in order to write this. Apparently it just came out that he was sharing classified submarine information with an Australian billionaire I’d never heard of but I looked him up and he’s the president of a box factory. If Obama did that then the resulting scandal would be officiated with the sought-after “-gate” suffix and his entire family would be thrown into a black van. His dog would be impeached. When Trump does it, it ranks lower on social media than Loki: Season 2.
The thing is, this should be great poetic justice because being considered boring is exactly the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to Donald Trump. You think he dresses like a clown accidentally? The man who obsessively reads about himself has been reading jokes about his makeup and his hair and the little white circles around his eyes where the cucumber slices go relentlessly for the past forty years and every year the face paint gets brighter and the hair gets stupider and the tie gets longer. He knows he looks ridiculous and that’s his brand and it keeps people talking about him.
However—there is no poetry or justice in this world, and Trump will never fade into obscurity. He’s tapped into a new fundamental force—the Clown Force—and it can’t be reconciled with Einsteinian physics. Trump is now the Cosmic Background Radiation of human news. When you scrape off the layer of current events there’s this omnipresent reality of at least 12 things Donald Trump did before lunch that each deserves its own Gitmo sentence.
And it just. Keeps. Coming.
The problem is that boring doesn’t necessarily mean possible to ignore. I wish to God it was possible to ignore. I work an office job, I know there’s a type of boring that slides under your fingernails like bamboo toothpicks. I was never actually particularly interested in American politics until Donald Trump made American politics the world’s problem. I don’t want to know who MTG is. I remember when that meant Magic: The Gathering.
And you people are going to put him back in the White House, aren’t you? I know that look in your eyes, America. You want to see how far this goes. You see a guy who has—what is it now, like, 200 criminal charges against him?—and you think “wow that’s nuts, now that he’s pissed off and insane with rage and vengeance, let’s give him the nukes back” because you want to see how far this goes. Because your balls have gone completely numb from being kicked in them for eight straight years and you think the only solution is to swap them out for spiked boots.
I know Americans. You fear the hollow type of boring that would come with the absence of those boots crushing your nuts. You got addicted to the drug that is a relentless and featureless blur of Donald Trump news and built up a tolerance to it and now you need more of it to feel something again. You think four more years of quiet doddering Joe Biden will feel like ketamine withdrawal.
But brothers and sisters you need to detox yourselves. You need the number for poison control. I promise the passage of time will bring with it new and fascinating dumb shit. You’ll get over it, in time you’ll, I don’t know, elect Rob Schneider president or something, I’m fucking sure of it. Or the guy who sells the pillows. Just, for the love of God, get a new thing.
aren't we all
Lots of banger lines in this 🤌 I didn't know about Mrs. Krabapple until I read it here.