Yes, the Wednesday *address to the nation* was one for the books. The psych books, that is, not the history books. We had a version of Donald Trump that was described as “a teleprompter on a coke binge speed.” In fact, the address brought to mind the *animation* of Donald Trump, Jr., far more than that of Senior. And aye, there’s the rub. It was a desperate act, a last minute thrown together staged performance that ended up falling on its face. Rick Wilson analyzes it and the entire context of where Trump is right now and it’s not a good place.
We do have higher values and this cavalcade of clowns in the Capitol can’t take that away from us. We have endured wars and natural disasters and plagues and we will survive Donald Trump like we have all the rest. Rick Wilson continues:
For ten years, he’s been the unwelcome guest buzzing in the background of every Christmas dinner and every Thanksgiving table, the phantom limb of anxiety we all learned to live with. We made jokes about the MAGA uncle from Facebook because the alternative was screaming into a napkin and a side of Xanax with the cranberry sauce. (The real kind, from berries, not served like a gelid lump from a can.)
But something has changed. The people who used to walk into the room itching for a fight, eager to “own the libs” before the rib roast and Yorkshire pudding, don’t have the same swagger anymore. It’s not shame, not yet. It’s worse for them: the dawning sense they got played. They were promised miracles, and the miracles never showed up, just the crypto scams and the garbage merch and the endless blame game and noise.
They wanted to feel seen and respected. And they’re slowly realizing the guy who told them he’d make America respect them… doesn’t respect them in the slightest.
Now, let me be clear: you are still going to wake up some mornings and think, “What fresh hell is this?” You’re still going to see cruelty, stupidity, and corruption. He can do terrible things between now and the end of his runway. He remains a dangerous and deranged lunatic in charge of a dangerous and deranged Administration.
But here’s why I’m insisting, stubbornly, on good cheer anyway: it vexes them.
Their movement is fundamentally unhappy and pessimistic. It lives in a state where the currency is fear, darkness, hate, paranoia, and this coalition of conspiracists and cranks and neo-nationalists and tech-bro freak shows and holy-roller weirdos? One thing: he held it together. He was the glue. When that glue starts to fail, the whole hate machine loses its most powerful avatar. It gets weaker. It gets more fragile.
Even now, you can see it from the inside. They leak. They bicker. They climb over each other for attention like raccoons fighting over a moldy hamburger bun in a Denny’s dumpster. And yes, it is harder to be a comic-book villain when you’ve surrounded yourself with morons.
And the morons are starting to jump ship, along with other people who are flat out burned out. Dan Bongino was predicted to leave and leave he has done. Now we wait to see what happens with Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel — and others, but those were the top three names to watch and Bongino has already toppled.
Just today Elise Stefanik, one the great white hope of her generation of conservatives, announced she’s walking away from politics along with Marjorie Taylor Greene. A month before the 2024 election, if you had predicted the defection of those two from politics and said that Trump would win, you would have been labeled a lunatic, completely out of touch with political reality. Yet Trump did win and Greene and Stefanik are retiring from politics.
Things are not happening the way Trump wants or needs them to happen. That was the motivator for his motor mouth address to the nation. Except it didn’t work and now what is he going to do?
