I refuse to be shocked and awed by an Orange Cheetoh

some words of comfort after a fraught first week

Say it after me: I am beautiful. I am special. I refuse to be shocked by anything Oompa Loompa Fuckface does or is connected to this time around. And while this past week has been exhausting, when you’re feeling your lowest keep this crucial factor in mind: Trump’s blitz of executive orders has been met by an equal blitz of lawsuits.

Granted, Trump is pretty good at putting on a show, although not as good as he pretends to be. Despite his claims, The Apprentice only (barely) cracked the top-ten of most-watched shows in its first season, but can showmanship destroy a democracy?

Doubtful.

One distressing story that I’ve seen circulating this week in various forms on both social media and in prestige mainstream media like The Atlantic and that’s not connected to Trump, or not directly connected, is the story of Hitler’s first 53 days in office. The story is circulating, because it’s meant to draw attention to the way Trump, like Hitler, is also moving quickly to consolidate power.

But here’s one key difference right off the bat: Germany was operating on 14 years of democracy. We’ve banked about 250, give or take. And while I do not mean to downplay the threat Donald Trump presents to our always fragile republic, I think we can all agree we will not loosen our grip on the ideals of our Founding Fathers or from our democracy quite as easily as the German people did after they’d been conditioned by millenia of kings and kinglings, feudalism and empire. Granted this is somewhat chilly comfort. But I’m serving it up first like a palate cleanser between the news of one-more-shitty-thing after another It’s also not meant to position us as superior to the 1930s-era Germans. Far from it. It’s just meant to remind us not to give into fear: our era is a different time, and we’re a different people. Most of us wouldn’t even wear masks to save our own stupid lives. We’re many things, we American people, but one thing we aren’t is biddable.

What we are is troublesome. We are quarrelsome. We are not conditioned by our culture to blindly accept authority. Or not yet at least. And while Trump’s Chumps, as I personally like to call them because it helps me laugh at the unlaughable awfulness of blue collar folks falling into line and worshipping a wealthy, two-bit New York City conman who’s partially gotten rich off not paying his own workers, this quarrelsomeness might end up being the thing that saves them. After all, grocery prices have not gone down. At some point, even Trump’s most ardent supporters will have to notice eggs have gone from a cheap staple to a luxury good. (Egg prices have risen 37% already and are predicted to rise another 20% in 2025. ) At some point, maybe not until it’s too late, maybe they’ll finally see “Daddy” Trump (barf) isn’t saving this country. He’s ruining it. But let’s shelve that line of reasoning lest I fall into the trap of my own pointless optimism about human nature and take you guys with me. To paraphrase, Jonathan Swift, the Trump Chumps have shown they can’t be counted on to reason themselves out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

Let’s count on the good people instead. And yes, I’m about to do that by quoting the worst person on the planet: Stephen Miller, who recently told the New York Times he believes that “those he regards as Mr. Trump’s enemies— Democrats, the media, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and portions of the federal bureaucracy— are depleted and only have so much bandwidth for outrage and opposition.” That’s not a bad coalition to count yourself a part of.

And while Miller’s goal, the Times reports is to overwhelm the good people “with a blitz of activity” and friends and acquaintances of mine are already reporting feeling the effects of that overwhelm and while that does piss me off, I refuse to let someone as fundamentally foul as Stephen Miller or the reality star villain he reports to or Elon Musk, the comicbook supervillain who funds them, dictate my mood for the next four years, and I do not want him affecting yours, either. Here’s what I want you to keep in mind instead every time you hear another horrible, awful, no-good, shitty thing that Miller, Musk, or Trump has got planned: they know Trump only has two years to try to push through his stupid blitzkrieg of buffoonery agenda before midterms will realign whatever mandate he believes he possesses. (Side note: and that mandate ain’t much. Margins were razor thin in the last election, and many people sat out the election on the Democrats’ side because of a combination of Biden’s policies in Gaza and their own misogynoir).

Trump is working within the parameters of a measly two year deadline, which is hardly time to plan a wedding let alone a coup of a country as vast and with a bureaucracy as entrenched and extensive as the one possessed by the USA. Not to mention the massive mountain of lawsuits in his headway. Most important BY FAR is this key fact to keep you smiling: his own MAGA legal work is substandard slop.

That mountain of executive orders?

They were for show. It’s to impress those folks you see at his rallies who rail against DEI but have no idea what those letters stand for— I dare you to ask one of them what they are— and less idea of what DEI does. Hint: DEI is the reason JD Vance attended Yale’s law school as a veteran, for example. Yes, DEI also helps veterans. Basically, Trump’s hoping we won’t look too closely at his puny but scary and terribly uncoordinated gyrations behind the curtains as he casts his looming evil shadow on our walls and that we will thus cede ground very easily like those other tv shows did the first year The Apprentice aired.

We will not. We’ve seen this show before.

And maybe Trump’s got his slop buckets lined up faster this time around, but we also know who and what we’re dealing with this time around, too. He can’t shock us if we expect the absolute putrid worst fuckery. Are you with me? Personally, like I said from the get, I refuse to be awed by an orange cheetoh tool of the techbros. I’m tired, yes. I’m sad, yes. Shocked, awed, impressed, frightened? FUCK NO.

There are more of us than there are of them. We need to laugh. We need to be patient. And we need to have faith in our institutions and in each other. Together, we are stronger and together we will laugh and we will prevail. And hey! Even if we don’t, even if Trump does manage to ruin the promise of this country, I hear they’re giving away villas in Italy!

Sorry not sorry to threaten you with a really scary fate like that. Take a breath. He sucks. We don’t.