Trump? Dump!

I dream of a future where all these people are in prison.

Here we are again. My last obligation. Not that I’m obligated to write a newsletter. Maybe “my last commitment” is more apt. Though I am committed to my wife. My last responsibility? No. I have many of those. My last weekly appointment? Also wrong: I meet with my shrink once a week for fifty minutes. So how to characterize sitting down to write a newsletter, something I’ve done for a dozen years? If you’re thinking He hasn’t been sending me email every Tuesday for a dozen years... NIHILISTIC is my second newsletter. My first – See You Next Tue! – came about when it was suggested during a WFMU Marathon (the radio station’s on-air fundraiser and main source of operating funds) meeting that direct email was the best way to inform your listeners about your premium (AKA suckerbait). I stumbled on MailChimp and in February 2014, a month prior to the Marathon, sent my first See You Next Tue! (SYNT), which got its moniker from the fact my show Aerial View aired on Tuesdays... and I love a cheeky double-entendre.

SYNT transformed over the years, from punchy and informational to lengthy and confessional. In its last few years it documented each day of my week, with dialogue lifted nearly verbatim from my conversations, something that blew up in my face (turns out not everyone wants their conversations reported in a newsletter) and was a factor in shutting it down (the other factor was the aforementioned length: I’d often hear It’s so LONG!). Still, SYNT long outlasted the WFMU version of Aerial View, which ended in July 2016, and accompanied the revived thehoundnyc.com Aerial View (now with CURSING). I kept cranking out SYNT until June 10, 2025, when I made the difficult decision to mothball it and transition to NIHILISTIC.

As much as I love having a Substack newsletter for the extra distribution channel and increased exposure, I sometimes miss the omnibus nature of SYNT. Because it was about my life I had the latitude to write about anything and everything in it, Here, I feel more constricted to stick to Nihilistics-tangential material.

But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe I’m putting that stricture on myself.

So let’s wander afield a bit.

When I think about the year I launched SYNT – 2014 – the overriding thought is That was pre-Donald Trump. Well, no, not really. Donald Trump, of course, existed. I’d known of him since the 1980s when he was a tabloid newspaper fixture. He was on The Apprentice or had been on The Apprentice (I never watched it). But he hadn’t descended the golden Trump Plaza escalator to announce his candidacy nor ascended to occupy every waking moment of our attention.

Oh, what a blissful time that was. And I didn’t even know it.

In 2014 I was mostly dealing with the dark triad personality of my SiriusXM talk show co-host. Our interpersonal conflict just kept hitting new lows and I’d come home and complain to Sweet T. until she’d remind me about our agreed-upon half-hour bitching limit. Little did I know the entire nation – the entire WORLD – would soon be contending with a dark triad personality.

What is the dark triad?

From Wikipedia:

The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities.

The Wikipedia entry should have a picture of Donald Trump up top.

I remember how excited I was when I stumbled on the dark triad concept. I’m sure I rushed home and said to Sweet T. This is what I’m dealing with! That insidious combination of selfishness, “the ends always justifies the means” manipulation, lack of morality and empathy, unearned self-regard, an inflated ego, remorselessness, etc., finally gave me a framework to know what I was dealing with. Maybe I should be grateful for the training wheels of that situation because I haven’t fallen off this bike ride from hell yet.

But there are some days I feel like launching myself over the handlebars, to hammer myself and this metaphor into the ground.

You know this: life is already hard. When you add in a world-class unaccountable chaos agent like Donald Trump it’s like putting a hat on a hat. No one needs that shit. And, like all rapists, Donald Trump is relentless. Perhaps his age is finally slowing President Poopypants down but most days over the past decade I find myself saying, at some point, NOW what?

The latest? The Trump Crime Family sold 49% of their crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, to someone nicknamed “The Spy Sheik” for hundreds of millions of dollars. A few weeks later, Trump lifts the ban on selling the most advanced AI chips to United Arab Emirates. No doubt the Spy Sheik will turn around and sell the same chips to China. Oh, also: Trump is all over the Epstein files and The Daily Mail has an article advancing the theory that Epstein was running the world’s largest honeytrap on behalf of Trump’s fave dictator Putin and the KGB.

People, this is gonna sound nuts but what if, all along, Donald Trump has been working to DESTROY America, not make it great again? And, what if, his entire presidency exists to make him and his entire disgusting family richer (hello, Melania, with your $28 million take from the worst movie of all time) while keeping him out of prison? What if, and stick with me, the demolition of the East Wing was never about the ballroom but the bunker BENEATH it, large enough for Trump and his entire crime family (even TIFFANY?!) to ride out a suspended 2028 election until he can emerge into his third term?

See, the thing is, we’ve been fed so much bullshit and been gaslighted so long that I’ve begun to see that all things are possibly and nothing is forbidden.

Kinda like the Church of Satan.

As Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten, so I won’t profess to know where any of this is headed. But these past few weeks, with the growing Ice Out resistance movement that began in Minneapolis and the national walkout this past Friday, I’ve begun to feel something akin to hope. Like people aren’t feeling this shit anymore. That they understand what could be lost if we continue to sit on our hands. And, per those kids down in Texas who went all Weapons on some MAGA moron who gave them shit for walking out of school, let’s remember how Lilliputians in sufficient numbers took down Gulliver.

There’s still more of us than there are of them.

NOTE: You may notice I occasionally use AI tools to generate and animate images. I try to restrict such usage because it’s a slippery slope. But I pledge to you I will never use AI to do my writing for me. I’ve been seeing more and more long screeds on social media from “digital creators” (notice they don’t call themselves writers?) that’s clearly written all or in part by AI. The enshittification will have to continue without me.