Who is Running the United States?

If anyone's in control, it sure as hell isn't the President.

On Wednesday, apparent president Trump did the most bizarre thing he’s done since the last bizarre thing he did and until the next even more bizarre thing which will probably happen before I publish this. He stood in the White House rose garden and gave a long, rambling, largely incoherent speech that culminated in him announcing crippling import tariffs against every nation on Earth. And I’m using the word “nation” very liberally here because the order specifically includes such, uh, “nations” as the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited Antarctic islands under the jurisdiction of Australia, and Diego Garcia, a remote island under the jurisdiction of Britain but solely inhabited by, uhh, the American Navy. It's allllll right here if you don't value your free time:

Through the entire painful bloviation you never get the impression that Trump knows what he’s talking about, and analysts whose eyes didn’t glaze over too much to see their screens were quick to point out that the numbers he was quoting make no sense, in many cases seem completely made up, and it sounds like Trump legitimately doesn’t know what tariffs actually are or how international trade agreements work.

Derp?

And now, he's reversed it again!! Stonks are back up! Art of the deal! Are we having fun yet!?

So that’s a little scary, but let’s wind back the clock.

After Joe Biden’s humiliating first and final 2024 debate against Trump, when he repeatedly seemed to forget what words were (and when they came to him, he used the wrong ones) former credible journalist and Platonic form of smug Matt Taibbi was over the moon. Vindicated again! It proved, as he’d long suspected, that Biden is a vegetable, and he’s been rattling on about it ever since. He’s dead serious (excuse the pun) when he insists that Somebody Else was secretly doing all of that president shit the entire time his presidency served as the bitter filling in Taibbi’s delicious Trump sandwich.

Or maybe not so bitter, because the Biden years were a career highlight for Taibbi who won’t criticise Republicans for Reasons and so he had forty-eight good chewy months of raw meat to throw to the gnashing jaws of his new hungry audience of reactionaries, from the Twitter Files to the Covid conspiracies and cringe anti-vax stuff, and now this. And he has to ride this for as long as it takes because what else is he going to do now that his audience’s guy is in charge? I mean besides this weird Men’s Rights activism thing he’s dabbling with now.

Because if there is one thing Matt will not abide it is when somebody who is not the president is secretly making president type decisions and attributing them to the president… when that president is a Democrat.

Now I’ll be straight with you: Joe Biden was too old and exhausted to run for a second term. That was a fuckin’ goof. I also happen to believe the explanation that he and his people gave for his catastrophic debate performance—that he had a bad cold that night.

Don’t scroll down to the comment section yet. This isn’t really the important thing about my piece today and if you want to yell at me I’m not going to argue about it. I will say this: The debate always felt like an anomaly to me. People will throw a whole bunch of other gaffes at me, I’ve seen them all. Some of them were deliberately manufactured by the media. Not all of them were, but for one thing, not only were there were fewer Biden gaffes than Trump gaffes during Trump’s first term, but there were far fewer Biden gaffes than George W. “King of the Gaffes” Bush gaffes.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee, I think it’s Texas, might be Tennessee uhh… fool me once… make the pie uh, *desperate confusion noises*

For another thing, most of these gaffes, combined with the softness of his speech and his slow, sloth-like movements always gave off “old” much more than “senile.” I just don’t see anything that indicates he wasn’t totally doing a presidency for four years.

But Matt thinks the evidence is overwhelming.

I don’t pay Matt so I can’t phase past his paywall and it’s entirely possible he does have overwhelming evidence that Biden was fully mentally incapacitated for four years and somehow nobody but Matt noticed until midway through the fourth. If so, I hope it’s more compelling than the evidence of senility he leads with, which is that Biden misuses the word “literally” an awful lot.

Damn, I literally feel personally attacked.

This opens up a lot of exciting possibilities, such as Pseudo Biden’s pardons not being valid, which means we can immediately arrest Deep State Commissar Anthony Fauci and sentence him to death by lethal injection (fitting).

But thank God Biden’s reign is finally over with his tyranny of boring national stability. People need a release valve for their directionless rage, so in comes Donald Trump to smash the country to pieces for no good reason and deal plenty of collateral damage to the rest of the world because Europe is a cuck or whatever.

So here’s the thing: If Trump is such a stable, focused, mission-oriented executive, then why does this feel like seasickness? Why does it feel like there are ten people at the wheel and none of them are the captain?

It’s been an open secret even during Trump’s first term that he wanted the prestige of being president without the nuisance of actually doing the job, and now is no different, but last time at least he abdicated his responsibilities to a bunch of establishment conservatives, so, while it was a shitshow, it still felt mostly like a bumbling Republican administration.

This time, the entire administration is made up of people like him. Cranks, con-men, opportunists, narcissists, and gutter fascists. The Trump White House is the Island of Misfit Toys. All of them want to be in charge and none of them work well with other people.

Combined with the extraordinary—effectively limitless—power that the Republican controlled Supreme Court and Congress have decided to award Trump in particular, what we’re left with is a situation where one man, this disinterested king, has near absolute control over the government and cherishes that in and of itself, but doesn’t want to be bothered making any decisions himself. So he delegates that power broadly and equally to a dozen different men who do not, themselves, want the spotlight of the presidency, but do want to make decisions.

And they all hate each other.

A Very American Fascism

Who is actually running the United States? Because it isn’t Donald Trump. When he’s not playing golf or performing ceremonial press signings of executive orders he hasn’t read or heard of before, he’s literally standing outside the White House with a script in hand, filming commercials for the products sold by the men he appointed to administration roles.

The man is a fucking mascot. At this point we’ve basically made a pact to pretend that Ronald McDonald actually is the CEO of McDonald’s. Will the actual U.S. President please stand up?

Is it the white supremacist Stephen Miller, a man who seems determined to make himself look like the half-human familiar who conducts day business for a vampire coven? That’s easy enough to imagine as you watch him dropping executive orders down in front of the vacant president for him to sign, giving performative summaries of something that’s probably cruel. Trump, unbothered to read what he’s signing, pretends to listen or care.

Stephen Miller reportedly prefers the idea of killing migrants rather than bothering to detain them but we’re not quite at that stage of historical reenactment. Nevertheless it’s a pretty easy to see his fingerprints all over the program of disappearing and deporting people to foreign gulags for having the wrong tattoos (or any tattoos).

There is, of course, Elon Musk, who has repeatedly been accused of being the real president. The centibillionaire who ironically thinks empathy is a “mind virus” while his own brain seems to be gradually melting down into a viscous foul-smelling sludge. But if Musk ever had any ability to run a complex operation, or at least not destroy it (as his position at the head of several large companies seems to attest) then the mind virus—or brain-eating parasite—of Trumpism seems to have burned that ability away. He only knows how to destroy things now, whether it’s Twitter, or now Tesla, or huge swaths of the Federal government.

Once you steep yourself this deeply in fascism, destruction is all you know and all that you’re capable of. Once Musk’s ransacking of the government reaches a critical point, there’s not much more he can do without nicking some vital artery. He won’t stop before he does, though, and the vacant president doesn’t seem interested in ever reining him in, so I suppose the best hope is that whatever is eating Musk’s brain reaches one of his key motor centers first.

LUNGS.EXE has stopped responding

On the topic of destruction, though, let’s talk about these tariffs. The big, beautiful tariffs that Trump has repeatedly, repeatedly shown that he does not understand. They might not be as evil as the concentration camps but they’re the most destructive thing he’s doing right now and I suppose you could say that the ringleader of this particular big top clown funeral is Howard Lutnick.

Except that’s not really true either—the real name behind the tariff situation is ChatGPT.

It took less than a day for those paying attention to spot the unmistakable residue of large language models all over “Trump’s” grand tariff scheme. That’s far and away the best explanation for why it lists uninhabited islands, military bases, and other esoteric non-sovereign entities as “countries” with independent economies and hallucinates the idea that the penguins and leopard seals of Heard Island are unfairly taxing United States imports.

Do you think Lutnick, the only man in the administration who looks more like a used car salesman than Trump, is proud of his work here? Was he really so taxed (again excuse the pun) by the assignment of designing a coherent trade war strategy that he took Elon’s advice and just fucking asked Grok?

The tariffs situation has been a mess from the start. First Trump said he would tariff Canada and Mexico, then he walked that back after a big, beautiful deal he said he’d made, which really just entailed those countries following through with Biden-era deals they had already made and were going to do anyway. Then he threatened them again, then paused them, then decided he would tariff a whole bunch of countries but only for certain goods and only if those countries already levied tariffs, then finally he announced every country on Earth would be tariffed including some that came to him in dreams. Now he’s saying he might walk them back again even as official White House comms say he absolutely will not. It’s easy to imagine Trump as a puppet with five or six of these other power hungry ghouls fighting over which one of them gets to drive their whole arm up his ass.

Hey, you know what the Nasdaq absolutely loves? Rapid, violent, unpredictable, and severe changes to United States foreign economic policy. That stuff gets the Dow nice and horny. Awesome economic stability coming up.

Who is running the United States? I know for sure that it’s not this guy:

I’m not so unsophisticated as to use a term like “cuck chair” but come on

Nor is it Vice President JD Vance. My initial prediction coming into this fiasco was that Vance was largely going to be running the show for the next four years, and I wasn’t alone, with news outlets at the time warning that he was the cold and insidious “Trump with a brain” who was gearing up to be the shadow president of the second Trump administration.

Somehow, though, he seems to have left that brain back in Appalachia along with his charisma. People just barely seem to tolerate JD Vance, and his only purpose seems to be acting as a pissweak Herald of Galactus type figure, visiting all the countries Trump has announced he’s going to invade, educating them on how they can make this easy on themselves.

“I’m going to ask you one more time before these guys behind me get mad, okay? President Trump was told that there would be green land here. For the last time, where is the green?”

Now, Vance might very well be the VP, but there’s another “V.P.” in this story, if you catch my drift. If you’re picking up what I’m laying down. If you can smell the borscht I’m cooking. I know that, from the very second I opened with the question of who’s really in control of the USA, a bunch of you started wiggling in your chairs like you’re busting for the toilet, reading this far waiting for me to drop that name.

And guys, I don’t know anything about that, but apropos of nothing it’s pretty curious that Trump’s list of countries to levy tariffs against might include a few offshore oil rigs and some of the larger bodies in the Asteroid Belt but the one country that isn’t included at all is fucking Russia.

Really my biggest motivation for including this bit is that it’ll piss off Matt Taibbi if he ever happens to read this.

I tried to find an image of Taibbi angry but he literally only ever makes this face

Everybody who doesn’t suck was afraid of a second Trump presidency because of the virtually unchecked power he was all but guaranteed to have, but the reality I think is worse. We were fearing Napoleon, but we got Game of Thrones.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard anyone say they loved the way Game of Thrones ended.

Only this man has the power to change destiny now.