Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are.
WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously…
Let me set the full scene, because context is everything here.
IHere is everything you need to know about where we are, assembled in one sentence:
The man who ran for president promising no foreign wars is now fighting three of them, needs $1.5 trillion to pay for them, announced on Easter Sunday morning — in an expletive-laden social media post that legal experts say constitutes a public threat to commit war crimes — that the federal government therefore cannot afford your healthcare or your childcare, called those programs “little scams,” and the Democratic Party’s response was to talk about crayons in a detention center.
That’s it. That’s the post. But since we’re here, let’s go through it properly.
Easter Morning in America, 2026
At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, the President of the United States — who was skipping church — posted this to Truth Social:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
A few things worth noting about this post, in addition to the obvious.
First: under international humanitarian law, attacks on objects “indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” are prohibited and may constitute war crimes. The destruction of power plants could lead to widespread blackouts and impact hospitals, water treatment facilities, and food supply chains. This is not a fringe legal position — in a letter signed by over 100 international law experts, the group stated that international law prohibits attacks on “objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.” Iran’s UN mission called it “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.” NPR’s legal expert on the story was more direct: international law expert Gabor Rona told NPR that the warning is a threat to commit war crimes both under international and U.S. law.
So to be precise: the President of the United States, on Easter Sunday, publicly threatened to commit war crimes. On social media. With a typo. Signed off with “Praise be to Allah.”
Second: the post was so unambiguously, unredactably profane — written in the official capacity of the Commander-in-Chief, impossible to paraphrase around — that it forced broadcast news to do something almost certainly unprecedented in American television history. CNN’s Jake Tapper warned his Easter Sunday audience that “the president did not use polite language” — and then read the post in full, live, unredacted, dropping the word multiple times. MSNBC’s Eugene Daniels initially censored himself, then stopped and told viewers flatly: “That is a quote from the president so, yes, we are saying it on television.”
Think about the standard that sets. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl triggered years of FCC investigations and a decade-long chilling effect on broadcast decency standards. Here were news anchors saying fuck on Easter morning because the President of the United States threatened war crimes in language that gave them no other option. That is where the bar is now.
Third: while Trump was posting this, the newly elected Pope Leo XIV was delivering his first Easter message from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica: “Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace.” The contrast was not subtle.
The Peace President and His Three Wars
Now remember who this is. This is the man who ran for president — twice — as the candidate of peace. No more foreign wars. No more adventurism. Kamala Harris would drag us into World War III. Trump was the dealmaker. The builder. The one who would bring everyone home.
He said he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. Not once — PolitiFact documented at least 53 separate occasions on which he made this promise, in carefully pre-written rally remarks, calling himself “the peacemaker” and quoting the Bible. When he failed to deliver, he told Time magazine he’d been speaking “figuratively” and it was “said in jest.” PolitiFact rates the promise officially broken.
Back in office, the peace president got busy. In January 2026, the U.S. military removed Venezuela’s president in an early-morning special forces operation. In February, joint U.S.-Israeli air strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, starting a war that has now been running for five weeks, spread across the Gulf region, spiked global oil prices to their highest level since 2008, and resulted in a U.S. F-15 being shot down over Iranian territory. Then came Easter morning’s war crime threats. Then came Trump telling reporters: “They’ll have no bridges, no power plants. They’ll have nothing. I won’t go further because there are other things that are worse than those, too.” Then came the suggestion he was considering “blowing everything up and taking over the oil.”
Meanwhile, he has openly threatened Cuba — told reporters “I think I can do anything I want with it” — has been aggressively targeting Greenland, a territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO ally, and has threatened Colombia and Mexico. He has given Russia a lifeline in Ukraine. He has alienated or threatened virtually every Western ally while emboldening adversaries. NATO analysts describe it as potentially the most serious crisis in the alliance’s history.
And all of this costs money. Enormous, staggering amounts of money. The proposed 2027 defense budget is $1.5 trillion — the largest since World War II. The Pentagon separately requested $200 billion for the Iran war effort. The national debt has grown by $2.8 trillion since Trump took office, and taxpayers now pay nearly $1 trillion annually in interest alone. One nonpartisan economist summarized it this way: “MAGA was told an untruth by Trump — no foreign wars, no adventurism. Now the defense budget has come in at $1 trillion, and he wants $1.5 trillion. This is a massive militarization — completely the opposite of what he told his base.”
The “Little Scams”
Which brings us to the day before Easter, and the moment that put me yelling at my radio.
At a private White House Easter luncheon — with cameras running on a live feed that was quietly made private on the White House YouTube channel afterward — the president said this:
“The United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”
There it is. The complete syllogism. We started wars. Wars cost money. Therefore we can’t afford your grandmother’s medication or your kid’s daycare. And by the way, those programs are “little scams.”
He called Medicare, Medicaid, and childcare little scams. On tape. At the White House. The administration then tried to bury the video.
Let that sink in for a moment. The programs that tens of millions of Americans paid into their entire working lives — programs that one-third of Americans eliminated everyday living expenses last year just to afford — dismissed as “little scams” to pay for three wars nobody voted for, started by a man who campaigned on ending wars, announced on Easter morning alongside a public threat to commit war crimes against civilian power infrastructure.
This. Is. The. Moment.
The Crayons
So we were driving back from Easter dinner with the in-laws, listening to NPR. The guest was Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania — a member of both the House Foreign Affairs and Appropriations Committees. The interview was ostensibly about the budget and the Iran war. This was the moment. The other side had just handed you the clearest indictment of their own governance in recent memory, on tape, now trying to hide it.
And Rep. Dean opened by talking about a detention facility in Texas.
Specifically, her visits to the Dilley, Texas ICE detention camp and the Philadelphia ICE facility — the conditions she witnessed, children who were terrified, unable to eat or sleep, a two-year-old with a mouth infection so severe it had turned green. She noted, to her credit, that the ICE spending connected to the budget. She tried to draw a line. But the opening — on the morning the president called Medicare a “little scam” and threatened to bomb Iranian hospitals — was detention center conditions.
Let me be completely clear: Rep. Dean is not wrong about what she saw. Those conditions are genuinely horrifying. She is doing her job by visiting those facilities and bearing witness.
But here is what the Gallup polling released this same week found: healthcare affordability is the number one concern of Americans in 2026 — cited by 61%, leading the economy by ten full points. Illegal immigration ranked among the lowest concerns, dropping seven points to its lowest level since at least 2020. On the top issues — healthcare, prices, the economy — Democrats are trusted more than Republicans.
The president of the United States called your healthcare a “little scam” to pay for his wars. The Democrats’ best response was ICE detention.
You had 90 seconds on national radio, a perfect setup, the ammunition already loaded — and you talked about crayons.
I don’t say this to be cruel. I say this because we — the country, the majority of Americans who want a government that works — cannot afford this level of strategic ineptitude from the only people currently in a position to stop what’s happening.
The Structural Problem Nobody Names
There is a reason Democrats keep fumbling these moments. The health sector — insurers, HMOs, pharma, hospitals — pours hundreds of millions of dollars into Democratic campaigns every cycle. It is among the top institutional funding sources for Democratic incumbents.
That money doesn’t buy votes on specific bills. It buys something more insidious: a party that is institutionally, structurally reluctant to make healthcare the sharp, populist, winning issue it should be. Because the moment you start landing punches that actually hurt — hard caps on premiums, drug price controls, real accountability for insurers — the donor calls start. So instead of drawing the straight line from “we’re bombing Iran for $1.5 trillion” to “you can’t afford your insulin,” you get a pivot to something that fires up the base but loses the middle. It’s safer. It doesn’t threaten the funding stream.
This is not a problem unique to Rep. Dean. This is the architecture of the party.
Running the Numbers
Since the Democrats won’t do this, let me.
On “open borders”: No Democrat has ever proposed eliminating immigration law. That is a fabricated position. But “open borders” as a governing posture — a systematic choice not to meaningfully enforce immigration law — is a fair description of how the Biden administration operated. Border crossings averaged 2 million per year from 2021 to 2023, record highs. More than 2.3 million migrants were released into the country in that period. Biden signaled a posture change from Day One, dismantled deterrents, and let the numbers speak while his team talked about humanitarian obligations. The result: 51% of Democratic voters now believe their own party supports open borders, per Harvard-Harris. You cannot blame Republican messaging for that. When your own base thinks you’ve abandoned enforcement, you’ve lost the argument.
What Americans actually want on immigration is neither the Republican nor the Democratic caricature: 79% say legal immigration is good for the country (a Gallup record high), 85% support a path to citizenship for Dreamers (also a record), 75% support deporting immigrants who commit crimes — including 72% of Democrats. That is the Democratic Party’s actual position. They simply cannot bring themselves to say the enforcement part first, so the rest becomes unbelievable.
On the national debt: 88% of Americans say the debt will impact them and their families. Nobody disputes this. But when you ask how to fix it, the answer isn’t what Republicans are selling. By a 75-point margin, Americans prefer raising taxes on the wealthy over cutting Medicare or Social Security — 82% to 7%. That includes 74% of Republicans. In a University of Maryland study where Americans were given the actual federal budget and asked to balance it themselves, bipartisan majorities reduced the deficit — and over 90% of those reductions came from tax increases. Democrats hold the winning position on fiscal responsibility. They just keep letting Republicans define the frame.
On waste and fraud: 62% of Democrats support a full-scale effort to find and eliminate waste and fraud in government. Nobody is pro-waste. The disagreement is about what counts as waste. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food assistance each have support from over 75% of Americans, including strong Republican majorities. Those aren’t waste. The waste is a $1.5 trillion military budget for wars nobody voted for, built by the man who promised no wars.
On civil rights: When you frame the issue as trans rights, you get a polarized debate where you’re playing defense. When you frame it as government staying out of your personal life and your family’s decisions, you are describing a value that cuts across the entire American electorate. That reframe is free. Democrats can’t make themselves do it.
A Brief Note on the Man Himself
I lived in New York City for most of my adult life. I know Donald Trump far better than I ever wanted to. I read The Art of the Deal when it came out and briefly thought he might know something. That lasted about five minutes.
The business record is what it is: six corporate bankruptcies, Trump Mortgage folded in eighteen months, Trump University ended in a $25 million fraud settlement, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Airlines, Trump Magazine — all gone. While his casinos collapsed, he collected millions in salary and bonuses from the companies he drove under, leaving 253 subcontractors unpaid after the Taj Mahal alone. His response: “The money I took out of there was incredible.”
I watched The Apprentice and thought: this man is performing wealth. Playing a successful businessman on television. All costume and delivery, no underlying reality.
You asked what it means when a person can’t stop putting his name on everything — buildings, casinos, universities, steaks, airlines, bottled water. There are two well-established psychological frameworks for it.
The first involves narcissistic personality disorder traits. The clinical literature is clear: grandiosity is not confidence — it is a defense against its opposite. People with these traits build an idealized self-image precisely because it allows them to avoid deep feelings of insecurity. The name on the building isn’t a celebration. It’s a paper-over.
The second is Terror Management Theory, a well-researched branch of social psychology. The theory holds that humans face a fundamental conflict between the drive for self-preservation and the knowledge that death is inevitable. This produces existential terror, which people manage by attaching themselves to things that feel permanent — what psychologists call symbolic immortality. You can’t live forever, but your name on a skyscraper can. The healthy version of this impulse produces genuine contribution — art, science, institutions that outlast their founders. The pathological version produces a man who stamps his name on everything in arm’s reach, hoping the sheer volume of branded objects compensates for the nagging suspicion that none of it will actually be remembered.
The person who needs his name on everything is not a confident person. He is a person who, somewhere underneath all of it, does not trust his actual legacy to survive him. The brand has to do the work because the work won’t.
That is not the psychology of a builder. It is the psychology of a man running from something.
And that man is now running the United States government like a private company — which was always going to fail, because the objectives are completely different. A private company optimizes for the principals. A government is supposed to be there for everyone.
The Part I Hate Most
I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I have no party affiliation. I belong to what I can only describe as the Party of Common Sense, Logic, and Science — which, as best I can tell, has no representation in Washington at all.
But the math is what it is. Right now, before the two-party system can be meaningfully reformed, the Republican Party under this administration needs to lose power. The damage is real and accelerating. So the instrument available to stop it is the Democratic Party — the same party that just had the perfect moment handed to them on Easter morning and used it to talk about detention center conditions.
The actual Democratic platform on almost every major issue aligns with majority American opinion. Most Americans support legal immigration and a secure border. Most Americans want the debt reduced by taxing the wealthy, not cutting essential programs. Most Americans think government wastes money but strongly support the programs people actually use. Most Americans believe everyone deserves to live their life without the government in their business. The Democrats agree with all of this. They just cannot say it in language that wins.
Meanwhile: the peace president started three wars. He needs $1.5 trillion to fund them. So he got on camera and told you he can’t afford your healthcare or your childcare — called those programs “little scams” — and then on Easter morning, in a profanity-filled social media post that legal experts say constitutes a public threat to commit war crimes, threatened to bomb civilian power plants and bridges while the new Pope called for peace from the Vatican balcony.
The Democrats had 90 seconds on national radio.
They talked about crayons.
WTF is wrong with us.
Sources: Gallup (March 2026), Harvard-Harris Poll (April 2026), NPR/WYPR transcript — Rep. Madeleine Dean interview (April 5, 2026), Time, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera, PolitiFact, The Washington Post, NPR, Common Dreams, Fortune, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, CBS News, University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation (June 2025), Verasight/Strength in Numbers (January 2026), Navigator Research, PRRI, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Migration Policy Institute, Cato Institute, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Wikipedia (Business career of Donald Trump), Psychology Today, NCBI/StatPearls (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski & Solomon 1986). International humanitarian law citations: Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions; letter signed by 100+ international law experts, April 2026; NPR interview with Gabor Rona, international law expert. Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Wikipedia (Business career of Donald Trump), Psychology Today, NCBI/StatPearls (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski & Solomon, 1986).
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