2025-06-17 TEN YEARS AFTER

The Decadent Decade

Ten years. Ten. Fucking. Years. I must have written over a million words — maybe well over a million —on the fetid subject of Donald Trump, the most malevolently loathsome biped this country has ever vomited up. But what were the first words I wrote after viewing that absurd escalator descent, a decade ago yesterday?

Ah, to experience again the giddy certainty that this vulgar buffoon posed no real danger. Clearly, this was written by someone whose mind couldn’t encompass the notion that there would ever be — could ever be — a President Donald Trump. (My dismissal of the very idea was not unique. The Huffington Post made a big deal out of its policy of only covering the Trump campaign in its entertainment vertical.) Even now, it still seems beyond belief.

My scroll through my Facebook archives brought back a lot of memories. Here are some from the first fortnight of the Trump campaign.

And now back to the present. My friend Victor Fresco — creator of many brilliant TV shows — had the definitive sign at the Santa Monica No Kings gathering, so much so that Lawrence O’Donnell led with it last night.

As has been well-documented by now, there were quite a few great signs. Here are some that I saw in Santa Monica …

… and here are links to other collections from The Atlantic, AP, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, Talking Points Memo, USA Today, Reuters, Buzzfeed, and more Buzzfeed. It was an outpouring of visceral detestation that was the opposite of deranged. This is the very worst person we’ve ever seen, purest evil. Satan has a poster of Trump over his bed. It’s hard to imagine him experiencing a single redemptive moment — what would it be? — as he relentlessly continues to bludgeon us with his utter irredeemability.

He’s cratering in the polls and he keeps octupling down on every error. The beauty of the parade fiasco is that it was a 100% self-inflicted wound. Baby wanted a parade — wah wah wah — so he got his parade and it sucked so bad and so few people were even there to watch it go by that, combined with the earlier vigorously expressed hatred from five million just fucking disgusted Americans, it was as thoroughly mortifying a day as we could have asked for.

In his typical self-destructive way, Trump not only set himself up for utter humiliation — the thing he hates as much as he loves revenge — but sentenced himself to being thoroughly and publicly bored for three hours. Imagine what’s going through that pumpkin head as he sits there forced to watch a parade of suckers and losers.

Here, more laughing at him.

And what the hell, this again.

I’m always happy to find reasons to like the people whose work I respect and admire, so I was delighted to find this piece. I love Carrie Coon.

MeidasTouchNetwork has far surpassed the Lincoln Project as the go-to source for people who despise Trump with every cell in their body. Here they’ve curated a great No Kings speech by Jamie Raskin.

And here’s an item from yesterday’s Meidas newsletter. It is gratifying to see that so many online sources have stepped up to fill the gap cravenly left by virtually the entirety of the mainstream political media.

Yesterday, The Bulwark’s Tim Miller interviewed the newly independent Terry Moran (who I once had dinner with while he was covering the first Menendez trial for Court TV). Moran, cravenly fired by ABC News for daring to tell the truth about Trump’s and Miller’s psychotic hatreds, has joined the growing ranks of formerly mainstream journalists going rogue, often — as is the case with Moran — on Substack.

Another satisfying move: Alexandra Petri has left The Bezos Post and is now writing her brilliant columns for The Atlantic. Here are her first two: So, What Did I Miss? (“‘How much can possibly happen when I’m on parental leave?’ I said five months ago. … If Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, expresses the desire to fire every federal employee for no reason, so that cancer research grinds to a halt, and foreign aid grinds to a halt, and the lifesaving medications that we have already stockpiled are instead just wantonly destroyed, someone will say, ‘No, thanks! Do not do that!’”) and My Super-Special 79th Was Not Super Special (“What does a president have to do to get the right kind of birthday tank parade? I have been dispatching troops to American cities and Stephen Miller is openly speculating about rolling back habeas corpus; it is not even subtle at this point what kind of government I’m going for!”).

What could the intelligent and sane world leaders have been thinking as they listened to this cretinous drivel at the G7 yesterday?

Wanna see a thoroughly drunk Trump supporter being interviewed on Fox during the military parade? Yes, you do. Click here to watch.

And then there’s Utah’s repellent senator Mike Lee, who (or whose depraved staffers) made a special effort to earn the contempt of millions of people who might not have even been aware of his existence before he posted a bunch of tweets idiotically blaming the Minnesota assassinations on the left when, in fact, the killer was a Trump supporter.

Minnesota senator Tina Smith’s Deputy Chief of Staff Ed Shelleby then eviscerated him in a letter of such exquisite savagery that it demands to be quoted in full:

I knew Melissa Hortman. Many people in this office did. She was a longtime friend of Senator Smith’s, who had seen her hours before she was murdered. So you’ll forgive my candor as I speak through enormous grief.

It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend. I am not sure what compelled you or your boss to say any of those things, which, in addition to being unconscionable, also may very well be untrue.

But that is not the point. Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success? Using the office of US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination — is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?

Let’s recap Saturday so you fully understand what Minnesota was going through. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered. Sen. Hoffman and his wife were shot numerous times and remain hospitalized. By the grace of God it appears they will survive. Senators are discovered to be on a hit list of an armed man on the run — Senator Lee’s colleagues. And the decision of the office of Senator Mike Lee was not to publicly condemn the violence or to express condolences to her shattered children — it was to intimate that Melissa and Mark somehow deserved this? By making jokes? Did you have any consideration for the survivors in her family? For the Hoffmans in the hospital? For their families?

You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet[s]? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?

I pray to God that none of you ever go through anything like this. I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings. And I pray that if God forbid, you ever find yourselves having to deal with anything similar, you find yourselves on the receiving end of the kind of grace and compassion that Senator Mike Lee could not muster.

And finally, much fun was had last night laughing at Trump’s sadness, by Colbert, Kimmel, and, of course, A Closer Look.

Uproariously more all the time.