My Head Hurts

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Donald Trump is awake half the night shitposting that James Comey is a traitor; Nancy Pelosi’s husband deserved what he got when he was hit in the head with a hammer; Democrats are commies, or socialists, or lunatics, or bad, or something.

Tuesday morning, he woke up and told us that Iran called him up, or maybe they shined some kind of Bat-Signal on the sky only he could see, and they told him a secret. He posted the secret on Truth Social because that is the place he conducts diplomacy and war planning. Here is what he said:

Iran has just informed us that they are in a “State of Collapse.” They want us to “Open the Hormuz Strait,” as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation (Which I believe they will be able to do!). Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Quite apart from the obvious absurdity of this outright, ill-conceived, and ill-presented lie, Iran’s leadership is sitting there watching CNN and reading reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and they have to be astounded at what has happened in the last three days in this country — from the attempt on Trump’s life to Kid Rock taking a ride in an Apache helicopter, to James Comey being indicted for posting a photograph of seashells spelling out “86 47,” to the Epstein files that include 38,000 mentions of Trump’s name and will not go away.

The mullahs’ heads hurt. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard generals’ heads hurt. And I thought my head hurt until I read a copy of the court filing submitted yesterday by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, he who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, seeking to get the federal court to dissolve its injunction partially ceasing work on Trump’s almighty ballroom.

It is the work of a deranged government led by a deranged man, and the filing itself is so deranged that it actually mentions “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as if it has legal meaning and relevance that the court should consider. In fact, the mention of “TDS,” as the filing abbreviates it, is in the same sentence with the shocking news that the lawyer for the plaintiff in the case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is also “the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig.” This comes just after Blanche writes the first of many sentences in which he deploys what we might call “Donald J. Trump’s Spelling Rules” by referring to the “Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service.”

The filing itself is so deranged that it actually mentions “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as if it has legal meaning and relevance that the court should consider.

And this is just before Blanche explains to the court that the construction work on Trump’s ballroom must proceed because “the lower section of the building does not work without the upper section and, likewise, the upper section of the building does not work without the lower. It is all one highly integrated unit!”

Whatever the fuck that means, exclamation point and all.

The filing goes on to explain that the ballroom is absolutely necessary because it will “shield the now-exposed East Room of the Executive Mansion and provide best in class, modern security to the President and his family, his Cabinet, his staff, and visitors.”

Who do not currently enjoy “best in class” security because the East Room of the Executive Mansion is exposed because Donald Trump tore down the East Wing exposing it. Here, Blanche has made use of the famous logic of the apocryphal patricidal killer who tells the court he should be shown mercy because he is an orphan.

I don’t even know where to begin. Third-year law students given an assignment to write a legal brief to be filed in federal court wouldn’t dare include such patent nonsense for fear of being flunked out of school.

But Blanche wasn’t finished. He goes on to explain that the Trump ballroom and its “secure facilities throughout the project” are “vital for the National Security of the United States.” So, we can ignore the trillion dollars we spend on bombers and jets and nuclear weapons and soldiers and sailors and Marines and aircraft carriers and destroyers and ballistic missiles and submarines because when we get the ballroom built, the “National Security of the United States” will be assured.

My head hurts.

I’m not even going to get into the rest of the miscapitalized words and utter absence of logic and legal relevance of the rest of the filing’s insanity, except to note that Blanche presents the court with the incredible lie that if Trump’s ballroom isn’t built, he will be forced to “risk his safety by attending events in unsecure venues.”

Because apparently, he won’t be holding any rallies to support congressional candidates for the midterm elections because he won’t have the ballroom where he can safely hold the rallies, having imported thousands of voters from Kansas and Alabama and Michigan or wherever to the White House for political rallies that will be illegal on their face because they are violations of a federal law against holding political events on government property.

But let’s not blame Blanche. He’s just an errand boy sent to file papers in court that reflect the fact-free schemes and lies and… (I’m searching for words and not finding them) represented by what Trump told an interviewer on a news show when he called in on Sunday morning.

Trump claimed he isn’t worried about Iran anymore. This is our president talking to his MAGA followers on Fox News:

When you have, you know, lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them — they have no ships because of the blockade — what happens is that line explodes from within. Both mechanically and in the earth, something happens where it just explodes. … So it’s a very powerful thing that takes place, sort of having to do with nature.

Have you got that? Trump has been told by someone, or he has invented from whole cloth, or he read it on a MAGA website, or he came up with it somewhere, that because Iran can’t move its ships, all the oil in the ground in Iran is going to explode.

He has invented from whole cloth, or read it on a MAGA website somewhere, that because Iran can’t move its ships, all the oil in the ground in Iran is going to explode.

Let me ask you something. If you were the leaders of Iran, whoever they are, would you send someone to Pakistan, or anywhere else for that matter, to make a deal with a man whose mental faculties are so depleted that he believes this shit?

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Trump’s ballroom. If we’re lucky, and Trump’s appeals up the chain of federal courts to his six lickspittles on the Supreme Court somehow end up following the law and end the privately funded construction project on the taxpayers’ land of the White House, then presumably, Trump will be forced to fill in the hole he’s put in the ground next to the “exposed” rest of the White House, and he won’t get his ballroom.

Or we can wait until January 2029 when a sane Democrat moves into the White House, and we can jackhammer the monstrosity down to the ground.

But how we’re going to get out of Trump’s war on Iran is beyond me. Iran’s leaders are bad men who are mean as snakes and will kill their own people by the tens of thousands to stay in power. But they are not insane.

Our president invents things that do not exist. He believes things that are not real. He is a thief and a sex criminal. He falls asleep in public almost daily in front of dozens of people, and nobody in the White House, including the mainstream media, says anything or asks him what is wrong with him.

Iran sees all this. Every last maniacal moment. It isn’t just the East Room of the White House that is exposed. We are exposed.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country with this unstable, disturbed man as president until 2029. 

My head hurts.

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. A graduate of West Point, Lucian K. Truscott IV has had a career spanning five decades as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. His columns appear in the Lucian Truscott Newsletter. This column has been adapted with the author’s permission.