Note: This essay reflects a personal memory of what the American civil libertarian tradition once represented to many people who came of age politically in the late twentieth century. Organizations evolve, and the American Civil Liberties Unionhas played an important role in many areas of constitutional law and civil rights over the past century.
The purpose of the piece is not to dismiss that legacy but to reflect on a perceived cultural shift in how civil liberties—particularly free speech—are understood within contemporary progressive politics. The older civil libertarian framework emphasized neutral principles that applied equally to all speakers, even those whose views were widely considered offensive or dangerous.
Whether that framework still holds the same cultural authority today is an open question. This essay is simply one observer’s reflection on how that shift has felt from the inside.
Epigraph:
F the CC
Steve Earle
When I was younger, the American Civil Liberties Union had a certain reputation among politically attentive Americans.
They had balls.
The ACLU was the organization that defended people nobody liked. Neo-Nazis marching in small Midwestern towns. Communists during the Cold War. Religious cranks, fringe activists, offensive speakers. The principle was simple and bracing: civil liberties matter most when they protect speech we find offensive.
I admired that. Many people did.
In the 1990s the ACLU seemed to embody a kind of austere civil libertarianism. The idea was that the Constitution protected everyone equally, and that civil liberties meant very little if they only applied to people we already agreed with.
And there were plenty of examples that made the point vividly.
The most famous was the controversy over whether a small group of neo-Nazis had the right to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the late 1970s.
National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie
Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors, which made the proposed march especially painful and inflammatory. But the ACLU nevertheless defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate, arguing that the First Amendment could not be applied selectively. Free speech, if it existed at all, had to apply even to people whose ideas were repellent.
That case became a kind of civic legend among civil libertarians.
There were many others.
During the Cold War the ACLU repeatedly defended the rights of individuals accused of Communist sympathies, arguing that political belief alone could not be grounds for government punishment. In later decades the organization defended the speech rights of controversial artists, religious minorities, and political extremists across the ideological spectrum.
Every once in a while a case would appear that tested the principle in uncomfortable ways. I remember reading about things like the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and the legal questions surrounding the government’s conduct toward Randy Weaver. Weaver himself was hardly a sympathetic figure to most Americans, but the civil liberties questions raised by the incident were serious enough that organizations committed to constitutional rights had to pay attention.
That, at least in my memory, was the ACLU’s zone of operation: defending civil liberties even when the individual involved was politically or culturally radioactive.
For a long time that seemed like the organization’s defining characteristic.
Then something began to feel different.
My moment of realization came around 2017 at a conference at Case Western Reserve University. The event was filled with what felt like an entire arena of fucking international liberals—academics, activists, policy types, the whole familiar ecosystem.
At one point a speaker took the stage and launched into a full-throated denunciation of Donald Trump.
Now, criticizing a president is of course perfectly legitimate speech. But as I sat there listening, something about the moment felt off.
The energy in the room was not about civil liberties. It was about political opposition. The speech had the tone of a campaign rally rather than a lecture about constitutional rights.
And I remember thinking very clearly: this is not the ACLU I admired in the 1990s.
Something about the mission had shifted.
To be fair, institutions rarely change because they suddenly become foolish. They change because the culture around them changes first.
The older civil libertarian tradition that shaped organizations like the ACLU grew out of a very specific intellectual climate. It emphasized neutral principles, distrust of government power, and a willingness to defend speech even when that speech was deeply unpopular.
The logic was austere but powerful: the moment we begin deciding which speech deserves protection, the principle itself begins to erode.
But the dominant strain of progressive politics today often approaches these questions differently. Instead of asking whether a principle applies equally to everyone, the question increasingly becomes whether a particular form of speech contributes to harm, inequality, or social injustice.
That shift in moral emphasis naturally changes how civil liberties are understood.
Speech that once would have been defended in the name of neutral principle may now be evaluated in terms of its social consequences. And organizations that operate inside a particular political culture tend to absorb the assumptions of that culture over time.
The ACLU did not necessarily set out to abandon its older civil libertarian posture. It may simply have followed the broader ideological current of the progressive world in which it operates.
Still, for those of us who grew up admiring the older model, the change can feel disorienting.
The ACLU once stood for the uncomfortable proposition that freedom of speech requires defending people whose views we might find offensive, foolish, or even dangerous.
It is not entirely clear whether the culture that once sustained that belief still exists.
Note: This piece uses the figure of George Santos as a kind of cultural parable. The story of Santos—his improbable congressional run on Long Island, the famous unraveling of his résumé (including the legendary and totally outta control Baruch volleyball claim), the rapid collapse of political support from fellow New York Republicans, his eventual expulsion from Congress, and his strange second act as a Cameo celebrity—forms one of the more surreal public morality plays of recent American politics.
The apartment story that frames the essay is not meant as a literal equivalence. Kitara is not Santos, and roommates are not members of Congress. The comparison operates at the level of archetype: the charismatic figure who arrives full of sunshine, quickly becomes central to a small social world, and then—through one small but revealing detail—forces everyone around them to confront the uneasy coexistence of charm and opportunism.
The name “Kitara,” Santos’ drag name from back in Brazil where he if from (Santos is gay of course) is used here in the spirit of narrative shorthand rather than biography. Anyone who has lived with roommates long enough will recognize the basic situation. Shared apartments are small republics built on trust, improvisation, and the quiet hope that everyone involved is playing roughly the same game. Most of the time that hope is justified. Occasionally it is not.
If the tone of the piece drifts toward amusement, and even affection, rather than outrage, that is deliberate. Characters like Santos—and the occasional fabulous roommate—have a peculiar ability to provoke both exasperation and reluctant admiration. The performance can be infuriating. But it can also be oddly entertaining.
Such people rarely disappear completely. They simply move on to the next stage.Sometimes that stage is Congress. Sometimes it is Cameo (get that scratch Georgie baby!). And sometimes it is just the memory of a roommate who once seemed almost too good to be true.
Epigraph
“People seldom do what they believe in. They just do what is convenient, then repent.” — Bob Dylan
I. The Fabulous Roommate
Every apartment has its mythology.
The quiet one who never emerges from his room except to microwave things at strange hours. The earnest one who tries to establish chore charts that everyone pretends to follow for about ten days. The one who adopts pets with a confidence that suggests the rest of the household has already agreed to care for them.
And then, once in a while, there is the fabulous roommate. Kitara was that roommate.
She arrived with the sort of personality that immediately rearranges the emotional furniture of a place. Cheerful without being cloying. Social without being exhausting. Organized without being smug about it. She seemed to understand, instinctively, the delicate social contract of shared living: when to chat, when to disappear, when to clean something quietly so no one felt guilty.
Visitors loved her. Friends who came by would inevitably say some version of the same thing: “Your roommate is amazing.”
And she was. At least at first.
She was the sort of person who made the apartment feel like a small, cheerful republic. There were occasional dinners, occasional drinks, occasional pets that appeared temporarily in the orbit of the household. Nothing dramatic. Just the easy, slightly improvised domestic life that happens when a handful of semi-adults share a roof and try to keep the machinery of living running smoothly.
There are people who move through life like that—people who bring lightness with them. People who make small environments work better simply by being present. You think, when you meet someone like this: what a lucky break.
II. The Sunshine Personality
There is another category of person, however, that resembles the fabulous roommate from a distance. These people also arrive with sunshine. They are charming. They are energetic. They seem to know how to move through rooms with effortless confidence. They shake hands warmly. They remember names. They tell stories. They radiate the sort of friendliness that makes everyone feel briefly like a co-conspirator in something cheerful.
The difference is subtle, and it often takes time to notice. These are not merely charming people.
These are the performers. And, one of the most remarkable recent examples of this type in American public life was George Santos.
Santos appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the political ecosystem of Long Island. His run for Congress was, at least initially, improbable in the way that many modern political stories can be. The district had long been competitive, but his rise through the local Republican apparatus was unusually smooth. There was little serious opposition within the party. The campaign itself unfolded with the sort of confident momentum that often accompanies candidates who seem, at least on paper, to possess a compelling life story.
And what a life story it was.
Santos presented himself as the son of immigrants who had risen through the financial world, a man with an impressive résumé and a philanthropic sensibility. He spoke of professional success, cultural fluency, and various achievements that painted a portrait of upward mobility and cosmopolitan competence.
The voters of Long Island sent him to Congress. And then, almost immediately, the details began to unravel.
III. The Volleyball Player
The first cracks appeared through the ordinary mechanism of local journalism. Reporters from Long Island newspapers began to do what reporters traditionally do: verify things.
The résumé turned out to be an imaginative document. The professional history did not quite match reality. The educational claims were questionable. Various details that had seemed impressive during the campaign began to dissolve under scrutiny.
One of the most memorable revelations involved an oddly specific athletic claim. Santos had described himself as a standout volleyball player during his time at Baruch College. Not merely a participant, but something close to a star—someone whose record-setting performance had been part of his biography.
There was just one problem. Baruch College had no record of him playing volleyball. None at all. Outta control. The story collapsed on that small detail. It is often the small details that do that.
A résumé can contain many large claims, and those claims can hover in a kind of vague plausibility for a surprisingly long time. But one precise, checkable fact—the volleyball team roster, the game statistics, the athletic department archives—can puncture an entire narrative.
The reporters pulled the thread and the sweater unraveled.
IV. The Grifter Archetype
Once the unraveling began, it accelerated. Claims about employment at major financial firms proved dubious. Educational credentials evaporated. Personal history mutated in various directions depending on which previous statement one examined.
Soon the story had migrated from the political pages into the broader theater of American spectacle. Late-night comedians noticed. Cable news panels convened. Social media filled with the strange, almost baroque details of the saga. Members of his own party began to distance themselves.
Several Republican members of the New York congressional delegation—figures who had initially welcomed a new colleague—publicly called for him to resign as the scope of the fabrications became clear. The situation became untenable. The House of Representatives eventually voted to expel him, a rare and historically notable step.
It was a dramatic fall.
And yet even during the collapse, Santos retained something remarkable.
Charm.
He gave interviews. He sparred with reporters. He adopted, at times, an almost mischievous tone about the entire affair. There was a faint air of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the story had become a kind of performance art about the boundaries of credibility.
The grifter archetype has a peculiar resilience. Even when the illusion collapses, the performer often remains oddly entertaining.
V. The Apartment
Watching the Santos saga unfold, I found myself thinking more about Kitara.
Because the thing about grifters is not simply that they deceive.
It is that they charm.
They charm their way into rooms, into institutions, into social networks. They radiate warmth. They build small communities of goodwill around themselves. And for quite a while, everything feels perfectly normal.
Until one day something small happens. Something missing.
In the apartment it was GM’s silver. Not a vast treasure. Not an heirloom of historic significance. Just a small, familiar object that lived in a particular drawer and had always lived there.
One morning it was gone. The initial reaction in situations like this is always practical. Maybe you moved it. Maybe it fell behind something. Maybe someone borrowed it.
The mind runs through a series of benign explanations, each one slightly less convincing than the last.
And then a thought appears.
Quietly.
Oh shit.
VI. The Knowledge You Don’t Want
Roommate life operates on a fragile form of trust.
You share space. You share kitchens. Sometimes you share pets, groceries, furniture, phone bills, music, stories. The arrangement functions because everyone tacitly agrees not to test the boundaries of that trust too aggressively.
When something disappears, the entire structure trembles.
But there is another complication.
Sometimes you realize what probably happened. And you also realize that confirming it would destroy the social equilibrium of the apartment.
So you do a strange psychological maneuver.
You know. But you decide not to know.
Life continues.
The dishes are washed. Conversations occur. The roommate remains charming. The apartment continues to function as a small republic of semi-functional adults.
But a hairline crack now runs through the arrangement.
VII. The Fall
For Santos the crack widened into a canyon.
The congressional investigation intensified. Ethical questions multiplied. Party support evaporated. Eventually the House voted to expel him, ending one of the most surreal political tenures in recent memory.
Yet even after the fall, Santos demonstrated a familiar trait of the charismatic grifter.
He adapted. He appeared on podcasts. He commented on political scandals involving others. He expressed a certain moral indignation about the ethical lapses of fellow politicians—including members of his own party—sometimes with a tone that was almost hilariously sanctimonious given the circumstances.
The performer remained on stage. And then came the truly modern twist.
Santos joined Cameo. And he’s fucking great on it!
For a fee, he would record personalized video messages: birthday greetings, congratulations, small performances of his peculiar brand of post-scandal celebrity.
The internet, as it often does, embraced the absurdity.
VIII. The Cameo
At some point I watched a few of his videos.
There he was, smiling warmly into the camera, delivering a cheerful greeting to a stranger somewhere in America. The tone was friendly, relaxed, slightly mischievous.
And I laughed.
Because the performance was genuinely funny. The charm, infuriatingly, still worked. It reminded me of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog.
The scorpion asks for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates, noting that scorpions have a reputation for stinging frogs. The scorpion assures him that such a thing would be irrational; if he stung the frog mid-crossing, both of them would drown.
The frog agrees.
Halfway across the river the scorpion stings him.
“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.
“I can’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s my nature.”
The scorpion cannot help himself.
But every now and then the scorpion also sends someone a birthday message on Cameo, smiling warmly and wishing them a fantastic year ahead.
And you find yourself laughing anyway.
The truth about characters like Santos—and perhaps about certain roommates—is that their charm is not an illusion.
It’s real.
The trouble is that it coexists quite comfortably with everything else.
Dedication:
For Kitara. May you make a fucking mint on Cameo and look totally gorgeous while doing it.
Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other pieces about American grifters.
Note: This essay concludes the small series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces explored several very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan, the sly tactical persistence of Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks, the tragic artistic authenticity of Amy Winehouse, and the mythic public legend surrounding Muhammad Ali.
The story of Rod Blagojevich introduces a different category altogether: the shameless comeback.
Unlike the other figures in the series, Blagojevich’s return to public life does not depend on moral vindication, heroic persistence, or cultural myth. Instead it illustrates something more peculiar about contemporary politics and media. In an age of fragmented audiences and constant attention cycles, a disgraced figure may sometimes reappear simply by refusing to leave the stage.
Whether one sees Blagojevich’s re-emergence as comic, absurd, or oddly instructive, it provides a fitting final example for the series. Not every comeback is admirable, but each one reveals something about the strange ways public life allows stories to continue.
Not all comebacks are noble.
Some are heroic, like the moral vindication of Kofi Annan. Some are tactical, like the sly fourth-quarter returns engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks. Some exist somewhere between tragedy and authenticity, like the brief blazing career of Amy Winehouse. And some, like the legend of Muhammad Ali, grow into something close to myth.
But there is another type of comeback altogether.
The shameless comeback.
For that, it is difficult to find a more perfect case than Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois whose political career once appeared to have ended in spectacular disgrace.
The original scandal is by now familiar. In 2008 federal investigators revealed that Blagojevich had been recorded on FBI wiretaps discussing how he might profit from appointing a replacement to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The recordings were devastating. In one of the most memorable lines in modern American political scandal, Blagojevich described the Senate seat as something valuable that he was reluctant to give away for nothing.
The fallout was swift. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature. Later he was convicted on multiple corruption charges and sentenced to federal prison. For most politicians, this sequence would represent the end of the story.
Disgrace. Prison. Silence.
But American public life has always contained another possibility: the comeback powered not by redemption but by spectacle.
Even before his imprisonment, Blagojevich seemed instinctively drawn toward the theatrical dimension of his situation. He appeared on television talk shows, launched media interviews, and treated the unfolding scandal almost as if it were a strange kind of reality program in which he remained the central character.
His appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Donald Trump, felt less like an attempt to restore dignity than a recognition that modern politics and entertainment had already merged.
Then came the commutation.
In 2020 Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence, releasing him after several years behind bars. The decision itself was controversial, but the effect was unmistakable: the stage was suddenly open again.
And Blagojevich, to his credit—or perhaps to his creditlessness—walked right back onto it.
The most striking feature of his post-prison public life has been the absence of embarrassment. Many disgraced politicians attempt some form of contrition when they re-enter the public conversation. Apologies are issued. Lessons are discussed. A tone of humility is adopted.
Blagojevich chose a different path.
Instead he embraced a kind of shameless persistence, appearing in conservative media outlets, repositioning himself politically, and speaking about his case with the tone of someone who believes the whole episode was misunderstood or exaggerated. The ideological shift from Democrat to Republican was particularly striking, not because party changes are unheard of but because in Blagojevich’s case it seemed less like a conversion than a strategic recalibration.
It was, in other words, a comeback powered by the modern media ecosystem.
In an earlier era, a corruption scandal of this magnitude might have consigned a politician to permanent obscurity. But the fragmented media landscape of the twenty-first century offers a different possibility. There is always another audience somewhere, another platform, another narrative waiting to be constructed.
Blagojevich appears to understand this instinctively.
Which is why his story belongs in a series about comebacks, even if the comeback itself is of a peculiar variety. Unlike the moral return of Annan or the mythic return of Ali, Blagojevich’s version depends less on redemption than on endurance.
The secret of the shameless comeback is simple.
You refuse to leave the stage.
You keep talking. You keep appearing. You keep telling your version of the story until, slowly but inevitably, the scandal itself begins to blur into just another chapter in the larger spectacle of American politics.
In that sense Rod Blagojevich may represent a distinctly modern form of comeback: not heroic, not tragic, but theatrical.
And in the strange carnival of contemporary public life, theatrical persistence can sometimes be enough.
New Note (2025): Since this piece was first published, Japanese Breakfast the band has gotten even bigger, Michelle Zauner wrote another book, and the cultural universe has shifted enough times that some aspects of this essay may be outdated. I’ve kept the original text intact because the dream-logic and breakfast-logic still stand.
I live in Kyoto, Japan, and after many years here I’ve traveled pretty widely—especially in the greater Tokyo area. Traveling in Japan is pretty easy as long as you can manage a little spoken Japanese and read a train map. The trains are famously efficient and connect most of the country, including every major city.
I haven’t driven a car here in more than fifteen years and don’t miss it at all. Trains and taxis get the job done just fine. Overall, I love traveling in Japan and I love exploring Tokyo, a city that contains worlds within worlds. I have almost no complaints about Japanese travel.
Except for one.
It is nearly impossible to get a good breakfast—or really any breakfast—when you’re on the road.
Now, it’s not that Japanese people don’t eat breakfast. They do. The archetypal morning meal—rice, miso soup, maybe a little fish—is as recognizable in its way as the “full English” of sausages and beans. But the Japanese breakfast is overwhelmingly a home operation. Once you’re traveling, the options narrow to two—two and a half, if we’re being generous.
I. The Hotel Breakfast
Mid-price and nicer hotels usually offer a breakfast buffet with “Japanese” (rice, miso, maybe grilled fish) and “Western” (toast, jam, and some ambivalent eggs) selections. Except at the truly top-tier hotels, these buffets manage to be both overpriced and bad. A traveler is lucky to escape for ¥1,500–¥1,800 (about fifteen dollars before the yen weakened), and more commonly pays north of ¥2,000 for a pretty uninspired spread.
Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.
In my experience, Japanese hotel breakfasts are among the weakest anywhere in the world. I take this as symptomatic of a broader truth: Japanese people simply don’t care about breakfast when they’re on the road—and maybe not all that much at home either.
II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast
When I have raised the issue of the lack of decent breakfast in Japan, Japanese people usually point me to the convenience store. And it’s true: you can purchase food and coffee at any of the ubiquitous combinis—Family Mart, 7/11, Daily, Lawson, and the rest. They’re open 24 hours, and they stock a range of items that theoretically qualify as breakfast. Hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, rice balls, steamed buns, fried chicken, sometimes bananas, and of course hot and cold coffee.
I’ve certainly been in situations where I had no choice but to fall back on the combini for breakfast while traveling. And this is…fine, to an extent. But most combinis have nowhere to actually sit and eat, and in any case you can’t really call a combini breakfast nice.
Most Japanese folks seem to regard a combini breakfast as perfectly acceptable—desirable even. And while one can admire the low expectations, or the cultural pragmatism behind them, it’s possible to admire those qualities and still wish for more.
III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop
Starbucks are fairly common in major cities and usually open at 7 a.m. (if you’re lucky) or, more commonly, 8 a.m. They should really open at 6. The food offerings are overpriced, and Starbucks has never truly figured out its food—which remains baffling. Still, one can grab a few combini items and smuggle them in, or settle for a four-dollar fragment of quiche with your Americano. I would not classify Starbucks as having breakfast, per se, but they are pleasant enough to sit in, and one can create a simulacrum of breakfast there.
Then there are the local coffee shops. These, fortunately, often open at 7 a.m. or even earlier, and serve strong coffee—often brewed by hand at the counter with a drip filter—and a breakfast that nearly always consists of a single piece of white toast and an egg. White toast, egg, and handmade coffee with old guys reading the paper around you is, I admit, at least an approximation of breakfast, and I have certainly relied on this setup while on the road.
But it’s still not quite what we are looking for if we want a hearty, balanced breakfast. There is no French toast, no fruit bowl, no omelette, and only very occasionally a strip of bacon. None of the staples one might reasonably expect from a decent, full breakfast.
And that’s more or less the list. You can also find 24-hour beef-bowl restaurants, but they are cheap as and not exactly the sort of thing you look forward to when greeting the day. Beyond that, most restaurants simply don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 for lunch. The concept of brunch—dicey even under ideal circumstances—barely exists outside the swankiest of upmarket hotels.
It is, put bluntly, really hard to find a proper breakfast in Japan unless you make it yourself. And that fact continues to puzzle me. I understand that most people here eat rice and miso at home, or grab something at the convenience store. Fine. But metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 30 million people. None of these 30 million want a real breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m.? Not even a few hundred thousand?
It seems incomprehensible. And yet, incomprehensible or not, this is simply the reality. There is no broad Japanese market for breakfast. I mean, I’m in the market—but apparently one man does not a demographic make.
Go figure.
Now, I’ve covered the issue of Japanese breakfast—its scarcity, its odd cultural positioning—to the best of my ability. But before we move on, I want to add a few details that may seem unrelated. Let’s see if we can get them to connect.
Because the truth is, I dream about getting breakfast in Japan. And in a surprising number of these dreams, the Trumpster shows up.
More precisely: the dreams focus on the fact that the Trumpster and I share a birthday (June 14th), which makes us both late Geminis. Late Geminis, I have good reason to believe, are uniquely dangerous and slippery. But in my dreams the Trumpster isn’t dangerous at all. He shows up as basically an empty suit.
Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:
I am at a breakfast buffet in Japan. This is at a hotel that I am not staying at, and I may indeed be attempting to crash the buffet while masquerading as a hotel guest. Trump is there with an entourage, and he sees me staking out the buffet. I make a comment to him that we are both late Gemini, and he nods, curtly but with some minimal consideration. He sees me trying to steal the breakfast, does not care, and would probably provide cover if it came to that. He and I are not aligned, but nor are we enemies.
Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:
I am outside in the morning, standing on a dock or something of that nature. I am looking for breakfast, and not finding it. There is a commotion above me to the east, and I realize that Trump is being rolled out, literally on like coaster wheels, for a speech. He is on some kind of sliding seat and when this seat hits the balcony he stands up and postures about like Mussolini. I am watching and he sees me watching, but continues with his Mussolini act. I realize quickly that this is a total act and that he doesn’t even want to be there. He is not dangerous in this moment or in this speech, just faintly ridiculous. Still, no breakfast.
=====
What do Trump and breakfast have to do with one another? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that Trump, although maligned by nearly everyone I know (I know a bunch of liberals), and apart from being an egotistical, mafia-adjacent, easily flattered, shape-shifting sociopath, is also pretty funny. Before I lose half of my readership, I’ll just nod to the comedian Shane Gillis, who made this point several months after Trump left office.
Has enough time passed that we can admit Trump was funny? Can we finally admit that he was funny? (…) He was funny (…) I saw it. I’d show my friends I’d say look at that. They’d be like “what?”
“It’s funny.”
“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”
I don’t know, during Hurricane Dorian he was like “maybe we should nuke it” (…) Like that was a real suggestion from the President (…) “Hey we got a big storm coming, you want me to blow it up?”
They were like “no, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I fuck around, it’s what I do,” is a great summary of Trump’s whole approach to governing. Now, is there anything funny about his terrible immigration policies, his attempted pressure of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 1800 votes, his total disregard of democratic norms? No, not really. But is there anything funny about his speculation that maybe a little light and a little bleach could cure COVID? Why yes, there is. Is there anything funny about his noting that Frederick Douglas is getting bigger and bigger these days? Yes indeed. Is the way he pronounces “huge” funny? It’s funny to me anyway. And in my dreams, the two above being part of a series of about four or five total Trump breakfast dreams, he always shows up as semi-defanged, basically neutered, and non-dangerous. I think this is because, as a fellow late Gemini, I kind of have Trump’s number. It takes a late Gemini to know one, and I know this guy. In fact, I see right through him, to the extent that I know he’s not even there.
One other salient piece of data, there is an indie rock band called Japanese Breakfast that is getting bigger and bigger these days (they tell me “sir, this Japanese Breakfast is getting bigger and bigger these days, and I say look at that, wow, this Japanese Breakfast is really getting huge”). I don’t know them that well, but they sound like the kind of band I would like. I do wonder though if their name is not an ironic nod to the fact that Japanese breakfast is not a thing. Is the band name self-effacing, or even self-erasing? Does Japanese Breakfast the band exist at all? Does Trump? There is a way in which the Trump presidential term has come to feel like a fever dream or collective delusion, a set of events that cannot really have occurred as we recall them. In this sense, the Trump presidency may in the future be subject to Phantom Time Hypothesis speculation. And he and his handlers have already played right into this speculation what with their first lady doubles, the totally unhinged press conferences with the ubiquitous helicopter waiting in the wings, and the classic Trumpism, “we’ll see what happens.”
Here is what I think. Japanese Breakfast as a band exists. The Trumpster exists, but his wife spent most of her time in the White House being doubled. Trump and I are dream doubles, and I have his number. Japanese people don’t care about breakfast. And I am always starving at around 9 AM when on the road in Japan. Someone should look into the matter. I hear the Trumpster is free these days, maybe he’s the guy for the job.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with American politics, albeit from a slightly different angle.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 