Absurdity Continues Eclipsing Parody*
I needn’t stay up for Saturday Night Live’s cold open. Events having eclipsed parody in their absurdity (again), I confess that watching him and his loyalists debase themselves is entertaining and mildly consoling.
In the beginning, I braced for bad news, knowing Project 25 detailed the architecture and fixtures of a fascist takeover of the United States; that he’d lied when claiming obliviousness to everything Project 25; he was attracting anti-democratic and racist idealogues like flies to a huge pile of steaming shit where the maggots could flourish. While paying close attention since the inauguration has been arduous, I promised myself to resist his administration’s gutting of the Constitution. Unfortunately, I can’t get the Hungarian-American philanthropist to finance me.
This week, I watched the U.S. attorney general dissemble before the Senate Judiciary Committee, refusing to answer whether she had seen photographs of Epstein’s close friend of 15 years cavorting with “half-naked young women” aka children, and whether border czar Tom Homan kept and failed to pay taxes on the $50,000 in cash he accepted, on video, from undercover FBI agents in a bribery sting. It was a clever way to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid perjury and obstruction of justice and Congress. In this circumstance, you are welcome to draw the adverse inference: we all know had she answered — truthfully — she would have repeated “yes.” If the answers were “no,” wouldn’t she have said so?
The GOP is in control of a shuttered government, their wagons circled for pedo-protection, and they are projected to take away health insurance from millions of Americans while blaming democrats, repeating the false claim the latter are holding out for taxpayer-funded healthcare for non-citizens. They will manufacture any lie, however obvious and preposterous, to try diverting attention away from their ineptitude, unpopular agenda, protection of pedophiles, and the real reason for shutting down the House and refusing to swear in newly elected Representative Adelita S. Grijalva (D-Az) — it has everything to do with the Epstein files.
They stand before cameras with straight faces — except the speaker who presents with the smug smirk of pious certitude he was born with — and lie vociferously with talking points spoon fed them by White House propagandists and with as much staged conviction as their soulless eyes can muster.
They must think their devout listeners and those within earshot of Fox News are imbeciles.
My post from last week, Project 25 — Promoting Violence Against Dissenters to Accumulate and Wield Power that Isn’t His, shone Trump through the lens of his incorrigibly unethical, cheating fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn taught Trump many lessons how to survive in a world of organized crime including always to accuse your enemy of the same terrible acts you are committing — or worse. Trump mastered those lessons which he is bestowing on the next generation of delinquents.
I laughed out loud over their most recent projection onto their political enemies their true motivations, claiming the “No Kings” rally in Washington D.C., slated for October 18, is a “Hate America rally,” according to number two in the House Steve Scalise (R-La). “And Democrats want to keep the government shut down to show all those people that are going to come here and express their hatred towards this country that they’re fighting President Trump, that they’re keeping the government closed, as if it’s something to be proud of,” Scalise said.
Speaker Johnson (R-La) added, “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for Oct. 18, the Antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all going to gather on the Mall.” Johnson added, “It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes, but the Democrats in the Senate have shown that they’re afraid of that crowd. And so they’re willing to hold the American people hostage so that they don’t have to face an angry mob that’s a big chunk of their base.” GOP Leaders Call ‘No Kings’ Protest A ‘Hate America’ Rally, Baselessly Suggest Terror Link (Arthur Delaney, Huffington Post, October 10, 2025).
What is it with Louisiana?
Then, of course, there’s the Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump has been begging for. In her brutal opinion, Maureen Dowd suggested the “Norwegian Nobel Committee would no doubt discontinue the award before it would give it to him.” Answering the question why the U.S. president was not this year’s recipient, the Nobel Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes tactfully explained the committee bases its decisions on “courage” and “integrity”:
“In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention. We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what, for them, leads to peace. This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”
Maybe the committee concluded that murdering people on boats in international waters in violation of U.S. and international law, accelerating climate change and destruction of the planet, turning the military on his own people to suppress lawful dissent as he crushes the democratic order, falsely claiming he has ended no fewer than eight wars, and pathetically demeaning himself before the world, among many other reasons, were not qualifying.
But that hasn’t stopped his lickspittles in Congress who are working — not to end the government shutdown — to advance a resolution to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. . . . Okay. . . . The Kremlin joined Congress, weighing in as part of their continuing and successful campaigns to flatter. Of all credible sources on courage and integrity, Putin claims the Nobel Committee’s “credibility has largely been lost,” for giving the award to someone other than Trump. Does anyone really believe the Committee could have maintained credibility had it awarded the prize to Trump? Kind of like awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh and Jim Jordan.
The White House found it necessary to announce that even though he lost to a Latin woman (and probably hundreds of runners up), he would still try for peace. Thank you for that assurance.
Trump can hang his congressional Nobel Peace Prize next to his display of fake Time Magazine covers plastered with his face and his club championship trophies.
And what does a middle-east country get for bribing him with a $400 million 747? Its very own “Qatari Emeri Air Force facility” in Mountain Home, Idaho, according to the secretary of war who made the announcement at the Pentagon while seated next to Qatar’s Minister of Defense, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani. That was the story line until he caved to criticism from all quarters, and “clarified” the Qataris will not have their own military base on American soil, but the partnership will “host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots,” at the Idaho location.
On a more serious note, adding to his campaign against protected dissent, he declared on Truth Social that “Antifa” — the antifascist movement with no leadership or organization — is a “major terrorist organization.” There is no federal law under which groups are designated domestic terror organizations. Federal law, however, makes it illegal to provide “material support” to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. He now plans to designate “Antifa” an “international terrorist organization” as further pretext, throwing around false allegations that billionaire investor George Soros is funding a network of militant left-wing activists. As one commentator explained:
“This absurd idea is among an array of repressive proposals, ranging from the illegal to the unconstitutional, that Trump and his acolytes have pulled from a cartoonishly blatant playbook of fascist scapegoating — conspiracies of Jewish dark money and all. The Trump administration will likely fail to bring successful prosecutions against the disparate liberal and leftist individuals and organizations they see as a well-funded criminal network. But we are long past the point of pretending the administration will be bound by law, or tethered to factual reality, when it comes to achieving its broader authoritarian goals.”
For now, I agree with Governor Gavin Newsom and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that laughing at them, mocking them, and pointing out their stupidity and self-debasement may be an effective way of exposing their treachery and hatred for the American experiment.
*Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, the talented fiction writer and novelist, is my brother. He deserves considerable credit for offering substantive and technical suggestions to my blog. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.