This Week and Next: The Unraveling
By Josh Powell
Oh America. This past week delivered a crescendo of chaos so spectacular, so breathtakingly unhinged, that even the most cynical found themselves reaching for their Xanax and wondering if those D.A.R.E. program warnings about acid flashbacks were finally coming true.
The week’s pièce de résistance—a double feature that began with Trump’s press conference on acetaminophen and climaxed with his impromptu performance at the United Nations. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The Supporting Cast of Catastrophe
First, there was Lee Zeldin (you can read my profile of him here), our toxic EPA Director, who managed to multitask between burying the Earth under a mountain of industrial waste and weathering the fallout from his 2022 gubernatorial campaign. Just this week, two Republican super PACs quietly settled an inquiry into illegal coordination with Zeldin’s failed gubernatorial bid, paying nearly a million dollars to make the problem disappear. Nothing says “I’m innocent” quite like having your allied PACs write seven-figure checks while you simultaneously deny any wrongdoing. Add to that the criminal investigation into fraudulent petitions his campaign submitted—complete with thousands of photocopied signatures—and you have Trump’s idea of a perfect cabinate member.
But Zeldin’s financial fireworks barely registered against the backdrop of the FCC’s ham-fisted attempt to silence Jimmy Kimmel—a move that sent Disney’s stock into free fall faster than you could say “fascist America.” One has to admire Disney’s sudden rediscovery of constitutional principles, particularly when their bottom line depended on it. Nothing like a billion-dollar loss to restore corporate America’s faith in the First Amendment.
The week’s most ghoulish moment arrived at Kirk’s funeral in Glendale, where Trump transformed a widow’s plea for peace and forgiveness into a carnival of partisan grievance. Picture, if you will, the president of the United States using a man’s burial service to float conspiracy theories about leftist assassination plots while declaring his hatred for political opponents. But perhaps more disturbing than Trump’s performance was the spectacle of the entire Republican establishment genuflecting before the memory of a man whose career was built on unapologetic racism.
Kirk, lest we forget, was the charming fellow who said “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified’” and declared that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He called Martin Luther King Jr. “a very flawed” man and “a mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s,” dismissed white privilege as a “racist idea,” and promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that has inspired white nationalist mass shooters. Yet there was Vice President JD Vance, declaring this a moment of conservative “revival,” and the entire Trump Cabinet treating Kirk’s death as if they’d lost a founding father rather than a provocateur whose stock-in-trade was racial resentment.
After Erika Kirk delivered an emotional speech forgiving her husband’s killer and proclaiming that “the answer to hate is not hate,” Trump took the podium and promptly disagreed. “He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them,” Trump said of Kirk. “That’s where I disagree with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Erika.” He then announced that “the Department of Justice is also investigating networks of radical-left maniacs who fund, organize, fuel and perpetrate political violence,” promising that “law enforcement can only be the beginning of our response to Charlie’s murder.”
Even by Trump’s standards of inappropriate behavior, turning a funeral into a campaign rally while contradicting the widow’s message of Christian forgiveness represented a new low-water mark for American dignity. That the entire GOP establishment showed up to sanctify a man who built his career on racial division only underscored how thoroughly the party had abandoned any pretense of moral authority.
The Tylenol Proclamation
But Monday’s dawn brought fresh horrors. Flanked by Dr. Oz and RFK Jr.—a duo that looked like they’d wandered off the set of an infomercial—Trump unveiled his latest scientific breakthrough: Tylenol causes autism. (You can read my column on this here)
The sight was almost too rich to bear: there was Trump, blathering on about acetaminophen’s supposed dangers to pregnant women, while Dr. Oz stood beside him looking like a man watching his medical degree spontaneously combust. The good doctor’s eyes darted nervously from side to side with all the composure of Kash Patel facing a congressional subpoena.
One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the American public that Trump hadn’t blamed autism on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Small mercies, indeed.
Acetaminophen is a safe medication, they were just lying. Why? Great question.
The United Nations Spectacular
The following day’s UN address provided the week’s grand finale. Despite the White House’s creative revisionist history—blaming everything from sabotaged escalators to malfunctioning teleprompters—the truth was far simpler and more terrifying: Trump went completely off-script for fifty-three minutes of stream-of-consciousness performance art that left international diplomats reaching for their translators and questioning their life choices.
Karoline Leavitt, our softball scholar and girl most likely to grow up to be Elise Stefanik, was all teeth, growls and threats related to the coordinated attacks on her Trumpy. “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately,” she declared on X, before escalating her conspiracy theories on Fox News. “When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she breathlessly informed Jesse Watters. “And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposely trying to trip up — literally trip up — the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it.” She promised to get to the bottom of it. Thank God.
Meanwhile, Fox News delivered commentary so detached from reality that I’m sure the older Murdoch kid’s billion-dollar payday seemed like the best deal ever. “Let Lachlan run Fox News,” I’m sure they all thought, watching Maria Bartiromo declare that “this could have been a massive, massive issue and the president being frozen there in one place makes him vulnerable.” She gushed over Melania’s heroic response: “Look how great Melania was. She is unfazed. She walks on it. It stops. She turns around to the president, and she just leads the president up and walks.”
These were stairs. A non-moving escalator is called a staircase.
Not to be outdone, Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) breathlessly informed viewers: “Thankfully the first lady and the president had their hands on the rail as they were going up the escalator or they likely would have fallen down and injured themselves. It seems to be intentional.” The congressman’s medical expertise apparently extends to escalator safety analysis, as he concluded with the political non sequitur: “I don’t know why we’re part of the U.N.”
Watching Trump’s UN soliloquy, one couldn’t escape the chilling realization that this wasn’t political theater or calculated chaos—this was the unvarnished id of American power on full display before the world’s assembled nations. No teleprompter required, no script necessary. Just pure, unfiltered Trump, speaking his truth to a horrified international audience.
The performance itself was vintage Trump: a nearly hour-long stream of consciousness that careened from self-congratulation to dire warnings. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he informed the assembled diplomats. “Your countries are going to hell.” He dismissed climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and declared wind farms “pathetic.” When discussing migration, he turned paternal and threatening: “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now.”
But perhaps most telling was his casual threat to drug traffickers: “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.” The leader of the free world, ladies and gentlemen, channeling his inner action hero before a room of seasoned diplomats who’ve spent their careers mastering the art of diplomatic understatement.
The truly unsettling part wasn’t the spectacle itself—we’ve grown numbly accustomed to that. It was the dawning recognition that this particular emperor’s nakedness had become America’s international calling card, broadcast live from the most prestigious diplomatic stage on Earth and it was no even close to the most shocking thing that happened last week.
If this is how the story ends, at least the final act promises to be memorable. Whether it will be survivable remains the only question worth asking.
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