Last week, Donald Trump stopped posting to social media. He stopped having press conferences every time he walked into a room. He even stopped wandering about on the White House roof. He just…disappeared.
The White House admins tried to cover this up by posting old pictures of him golfing. They tried posting photos of Trump getting into the Beast that looked like they were taken with a flip camera phone that was zoomed all the way in from across the street. They had the kids say dude was fine. JD Vance said went on record to say he was fine. Someone on staff posted something like 50 different things onto his Truth Social profile within the course of a single day.
The rest of the world paused. Dare we hope? Dare we dream? Do we risk jinxing it by talking about the possibility of the greatest announcement ever being moments away? Some people even began to feel hope. Those who did say that it felt weird.
And then, on Monday evening, the announcement was made: THE PRESIDENT would be making an announcement in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon.
Social media exploded with hope and with warnings not to get too hopeful. We speculated about what it could possibly be. Would the feed start by showing JD behind the Resolute desk, playing with his hot wheels? Would TFG be in the chair, hooked up to marionette strings that were being operated by Stephen Miller? Would they hype everybody up just to cancel it?
Then today happened. The time for the announcement arrived…and passed. The White House pushed the announcement back by a half hour. Then another fifteen minutes. And then another fifteen minutes.
And then, the moment we’d all been anxiously awaiting. About 50(ish) minutes after the event’s scheduled start time the live feed began and something none of us could have possibly predicted happened.
TFG made some BS announcement about moving Space Force’s headquarters from Colorado to Alabama.
This isn’t actually going to happen. There are no bases being built in Alabama. There is no order from the Department of Defense to begin preparations for the move, nothing. So, y’know. A lie. Like any other day that ends in y.
After the announcement, TFG stepped away from the mic and ushered his sycophantic bystanders up one by one to give them the highest honor in the land: showering Trump with praise.
Pete Hegseth rambled for a minute or so about how much he loves Donnie and how Donnie gives the universe life, or some nonsense, and then bolted.
The governor of Alabama sang Donnie’s praises and then either stood so far off camera that nobody could see him or bolted, too.
After they had publicly praised Deare Leedr, they stood in a line behind Donnie for another forty minutes while Donnie rambled, waxed nonsensical about how awesome he is at fixing everything ever, told a bunch of lies and then took questions from the press.
The press? Only the loyalist friendliest folks. One of them even asked him how he felt about having died over the weekend. TFG claimed he both did not know that had happened and that he knew all about it but didn’t care because he was super active, like the activitiest, yugely active, more active than any President ever.
Honestly, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what Donnie was saying. It was all the same BS, though minus crazy sharks and whales being driven mad (bummer). I was paying attention to the people surrounding him.
Y’all they were standing so close to him. Like, if he leaned back a little, he could have been spooned by the guy standing behind him (not JD, the one next to him). As he continued to babble on and on, their frozen smiles became looks of desperation and then, finally dissociation. Balding tan suit guy looked like he was planning what to have for dinner. JD looked like he was trying to make a show of looking supportive but, not knowing how to make his face do that, mostly just looked like he was trying not to cry. Donnie’s big spoon stared blankly out above the cameras.
It was painful. And Stupid. And would have been hilarious if it were a SNL sketch.
If you want to read the posts I did on Bluesky before and during the non-event, here’s the link for that!