So Trump was Almost Assassinated
The protagonist of the world seizes another story arc.
In close-up, on television, at a glance, with the volume cranked low, Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president. That effect becomes less convincing the closer you pay attention; on his worse and wetter days, he has the tone and texture of a gas station hot dog. The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots, where Trump can be seen at podiums tipped oddly forward like he’s about to float toward a freshly baked pie, or in courtrooms where he appears to be falling asleep while hanging from an invisible parachute, or making pouty faces intended to convey that he is listening very strongly to what someone else is saying. These slapdash performances of executive seriousness tend to have the unintended effect of making Trump look like he’s upset about various things that he can’t quite understand or express. But he has never seemed more presidential than when he’s been shot at—graceful, dignified, almost statesmanlike. The infinite cloudless sky, the waving American flag, blood trickling down his cheek, his fist thrust straight into the air.
And just like that, the gooner brainrot of the Hawk Tua Era has passed and given way to the Donald Trump Attempted Assassination Era.
Everything about this election has a surreal feel to it. The way people started cracking jokes about Trump immediately after his grave brush with finality, it’s like a reaction to a crazed last episode of a prestige TV drama. (Shit, I can’t help myself. The Taftcels must be in shambles after J.D. Vance will make up one-half of the fattest running mates, but I can see why Trump would prioritize body size for a Veep’s qualifications—given recent events, he needs a line-of-sight obstruction.) The man goes from burping up doomy skeins on The Invading Brown Hordes and swaying oddly and doing accordion things with his hands to ducking then repeatedly yelling at Secret Service during rapid gunfire to let him grab his shoes. The idea that the Trump campaign staged this botched hit-job as a photo-op has been circulating the Blue MAGA dregs of social media, given that the most cowardly queen in America responded to an assassination attempt with a simulation of gravitas. Trump is America’s demented spirit, and he is ultimately a showman willing to die for the shining eternal image of himself.
Every president shapes the broader cultural moment they preside over, but Trump sits so heavily in time that everything surrounding him sags under the weight of his huge diaper dumpster. The bleakest and most singular impact of his utterly deranged hysteria is his total absorption into this moment. America at large now experiences and engages with things more or less as Trump does. His bizarre, blustering approach to the world has not been tempered or focused or in any way changed as a result of assuming the highest office in the land: He can be disgraced, investigated, indicted, even convicted for the sleazy misdeeds that he’s absolutely guilty of and it doesn’t stop him. Even a bullet can’t disrupt someone who lives so deliriously, delusionally in the moment. Trump floats in a weightless suspension between his last con and his next one, identifying no identifiable reality but the one blurring in front of his nose.
After decades of steepening precarity and relentless grinding political misery, Trump is what this glorious and savage empire has inevitably disgorged. The machinery that allows him to blithely lumber through the cribbed sanctum of America’s imagination is running on the exhaust fumes of his own mania. Even given that most political media figures function less as journalists than TV recappers—running down new plot developments, sketching the performances, credulously Putting It All In Perspective, offering on-the-fly prognostications of what it means for the next episode—everyone is mouthing the same line about how it’s actually bad to shoot people even when you disagree with them or if they pose an existential a threat to our democracy. There is the drearily familiar sentiment that violence has no place in American politics, hymning along the nation’s unrelenting output of unaccountable police impunity, or as the abstract horror of effectively endless, obviously pointless genocide and suffering is happening somewhere over the horizon. The punditocracy is shocked that a bloviating putz who regularly incites political violence could become a victim of political violence.
It is axiomatic in the information age that nothing gold can stay, and it is entirely likely that this event won’t sway the election results and instead dissipate into the vast continuum of American absurdity. This nation is new every morning, awakening into the same sour dream. The future and the past are both gaudy, gilded blanks. Nothing connects, nothing is related to anything else beyond the sort of anxious and amorphous grievance that Trump sells. The rhythm of every news cycle is more or less the same; the variables have changed under the pressure of a meandering incumbent squaring off against Project 2025, though, this has had the strange effect of destabilizing what had become a more or less automatic process without altering our stage-managed decline in any meaningful way. Some very daunting shadows are troubling the corners of these familiar shots in a way that ensures Trump will either always look like a photo negative of himself or our glorious God-Emperor. The cameras still whir into action, and that alone guarantees Trump will keep showing up, because it’s simply his primal instinct to seize another opportunity to talk on television.
And all this political drama just had to happen during the same week I was considering a soft launch of my mustache!!
Also… Have You Read Melania’s Political Statement??
We all know Melania cried when they missed.
My Notes app when I’m cross-faded. This is the Covid “Imagine” video all over again. Just coconut tree levels of yapping.
“Who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine…” What do you think recognized means??
“His laughter, ingenuity, love of music…” Trump’s love of music confirmed—he possibly even likes Bjork. The Donald should release his favorite songs each year like Obama.
“In this earthly realm…” A celestial being wrote this.
“His human side…” Girl, where?
“Violent bullet” implies there are gentle bullets.
This is so Lana-coded… So which Lana del Rey album do you think is Melania's favorite? I’m guessing either Chemtrails Over the Country Club or Ultraviolence.
Either ChatGPT went crazy on this one, or Melania needs to write a novel about elves and fairies. Take it to a publisher, Yappitha Christie!
*me when dawn is here again in this earthly realm and Americans need to uniquely unionize and summon the inhuman political machine because of his love for music and laughter*
We all have free tickets to the best show on Earth. All is theater to distract us from the $300,000 a plate fundraising dinners, Davos ski weekends, lobbying across the invisible political net and legislative musical chairs where a spy agency head plops down into a corporate board seat. You know, where the places were real decisions are bought and sold. We need some bouncers at the revolving door pronto.
And Sam, not a fan of mustaches but go ahead and try.
Nothing makes sense, I like to pretend I’m from another planet and that everything happening around me is merely woefully lost in translation.
(The universal translator loves this newsletter. It makes sense.)