The year in re-phew! Part 1

Countin’ down (and out) 2026

U.S.A.F.

[Time for the end-of-year roundup! Oh, also a heads-up: Next week I’ll be off the grid. Like this stupid country, I’m beat!]

10. Musk and the Feral Rich. The man they call Apartheid Clyde rampaged into the new year by pushing his DOGE dopes into the federal bureaucracy, allegedly to “cut” “waste” but more likely to steal data and wreak havoc on behalf of the deranged wrecker Trump, who sanctioned it.

But Musk overplayed his hand, attempting to push a Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin with (as I wrote at the time) millions of dollars and his own loathsome presence, and reaped only disaster and some rare negative press, requiring Trump to pretend not to know him. He also took some dings from gamers when his use of ringers to inflate his Diablo IV performance was discovered.

Since then Musk has quietly watched his money roll in, but his fellow hyper-rich have picked up the slack as public nuisances. Peter Thiel sweatily raves about the Antichrist, the Ellison family gobbles up media with which to fluff Trump, Marc Andreessen grooms a racist murderer, and Alex Karp delivers suspiciously animated fascist rants. As the enormous distance between the top oligarchs and the rest of us widens, their ideas of how America should work get crazier and crazier, and also more likely to be realized unless we sack up and confiscate the obscene wealth that both maddens and the empowers them.

9. RFK those germs away! Actually the Health and Human Service Secretary doesn’t believe in germs, which may suggest a philosophical basis for his loony policies, but let’s be real — if there’s any philosophy behind Kennedy’s rampage against vaccines and scientific research, it’s eugenics with a side of sadism, as is discernible is his yak about autism and “wellness farms.”

This dovetails with the vandalism of Trump, who said he hired RFK to “go wild” on public health policy, and apparently meant it literally, as shown by the spectacle of the two seriously damaged men yammering on TV about how Tylenol might cause autism because homina homina so we’re gonna make them put that on the label.

When, late in the year, journalistic catastrophe Olivia Nuzzi and her former boyfriend spread stories about Nuzzi’s affair with RFK, it not only nauseated everyone within their blast radius, it got major press including a weird puff piece on Nuzzi in the New York Times — and also distracted the public from the HHS Secretary’s ongoing sabotage of the U.S. public health apparatus, which I half believe was the intention (though RFK’s decision to treat the Hepatitis B vaccine like an untested novelty rather than a proven disease barrier briefly won some attention back to his malignity). Anyway, good luck in cold and flu season, especially if you and your children live anywhere near one of the many measles and whooping cough clusters under RFK’s watch.

8. Vice-President Fuckface goes full fash. When some credulous editors pushed JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as the straight truth about America’s poor white men (i.e. they was all pilled up, dagnabbit), they probably thought they were doing America a favor. Surely this son of the sod had a message of hope for the dispossessed! As it happened, his message of hope was instead heard by deranged tycoon Peter Thiel, who saw a perfectly bland proletarian face for his extreme rightwing beliefs and financed Vance’s successful Ohio Senate race — a stepping stone to his slot on the 2024 Trump ticket.

As VP, Vance has been a minor player in the administration, as veeps usually are — though Trump did call him in to help him bully Zelenskyy when the Ukrainian leader came to ask for help repelling Trump’s buddy Putin. But Vance has been more effective in advancing his own career as right-wing successor to Trump.

For instance, Vance went to the reliably conservative media — like Ross Douthat’s podcast — to both show loyalty to the big guy and stake out his own claim to Trump’s followers. He told Douthat that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who became the administration’s most high-profile target in its effort to show Americans they could do anything they wanted to any brown person they could lay their hands on, was a “reasonably high level gang member in MS 13.”

That was a lie, just as Vance’s claim the year before that Haitians in Ohio were eating people’s pet cats and dogs was a lie; but like the Haitian story it was catnip to the hardcore Trump base, which Vance had clearly decided would be his base, too. (Vance also told Douthat that Trump was a “humanitarian” interested in prison reform, an even bigger lie than the other two.)

What is most interesting about this pitch is that Vance is perhaps the least charismatic or convincing of any of Trump’s would-be successors. That’s why I call him Vice-President Fuckface: He’s been promoted to the front of the line without having any of the qualities (beyond his willingness to lie egregiously) that excite the Trump base: none of the egotism, preening, high energy, or other alpha aspects that sets the MAGAs barking. He’s still the same guy who couldn’t convincingly order a box of donuts, a watery nonentity.

So Vance pushes hard, as he did at the recent Turning Point AmericaFest convention, the only way he can — by saying coarse fascist shit. He talked about how under Trump “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” He called Minneapolis “Mogadishu.” He called America a “Christian nation,” though his wife is an Indian-American Hindu. (I’m beginning to think that, as I fantasized back in March, Vance would happily cut her loose to win the approval of the racists he’s trying to inherit.)

These disgusting comments got the fash freaks at AmericaFest roaring. But I suspect that, even if MAGA has any juice left in 2028, Vance will suffer the same problem as Ron DeSantis had in 2024: However willing he is to debase himself, he just can’t play butch.