Trump Controls America's Aux
For the love of god take it away from him.
I recorded this one for you guys, click the player above if you’d like to rest your eyes and listen to the dulcet tones of me yapping.
This week’s episode is brought to you by an airtight TikTok argument that Melania is Donald’s dom. HAPPY SCORPIO SEASON.
Shoutout to my readers who regularly smash that like. Your generous engagement keeps me going and I hope all your dreams come true! 💖
How we all doing? These are such difficult times for those of us radicalized against stupidity. The good news: There’s just two weeks left until the U.S. presidential election and this is the home stretch. The bad news: The home stretch to … what?
My birthday is the day after the election, and I’m turning 39, so I’m contending with the decay of American democracy and the decay of my youth. Unclear if this is actually my midlife crisis since I was born with existential angst and everyone in my family lives forever. Two of my grandparents are still alive and in their mid-nineties. I just spoke to them on the phone. My other bubie died five years ago, at 99, on Halloween. I miss her so much. When the veil gets thin enough next week, I hope she comes back and haunts me. She’s probably mad that I still don’t have a husband.
My soul incarnated here with a few purposes, but my favorite one is showing the world that women can age like George Clooney. I guess I have no choice but to keep being myself as I barrel towards 40.
On Sunday morning, I was out on a lovely stroll, en route to pay my happiness toll — an iced oat latte from the best coffee shop in LA, a coffee so good it actually makes me moan when I take my first sip — when a thought popped into my head, not unwarranted but kind of unprovoked. If Donald Trump wins this fucking election, I am moving. I’ve lived in America for almost fifteen years, but I’m not American, and I will be done.
My beloved people in Toronto reading this, don’t get your hopes up. I don’t mean witnessing the next four years from a bird’s-eye view. I need to go somewhere far, far away, where this senile criminal doesn’t stink up the zeitgeist like a bad fart that lingers for over a decade. Perhaps I can go live with that one Amazonian tribe, and use their Starlink to work remotely.
I haven’t lived in Canada since 2010, when I moved to New York. That was Obama’s America and New York is technically part of America, but it’s also its own thing. Then, I moved to Los Angeles in 2016, and unwittingly took a vow of surreality that simply needs to end.
That spring, I started a new job as a “Trends Editor” for a website with a liberal, social justice slant that aimed to get as much traffic as possible from posting articles on Facebook. The bulk of my job was to “package” stories with a headline and an image that would entice people to click. Like Stonehenge aligns with the sun at solstice, the timing of me taking that job spookily aligned with Trump’s presidential run becoming an actual thing.
The Facebook “share this story” era feels so twee compared to TikTok’s algorithms, but Facebook was a major player in Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and eventual victory. When I tell you that the site I worked for could not stop writing about him, it is because, against all odds and Republican establishment opposition, he clinched the party’s nomination. And also because, well, the people were clicking.
I remember being shocked at how many times the site was writing about him each day and voicing that concern to my bosses, who I don’t think even responded. Lest you think I’m telling you this story to tout my own integrity, a couple of weeks later I got reprimanded for photoshopping Trump pointing to a nuclear explosion for an article that speculated he shouldn’t have access to nuclear codes. Before it was taken down, it did huge numbers, obviously.
The spectacle of Donald Trump running for president crossed the aisle in the sense that it engaged everyone — it freaked out the liberal crowd we were pandering to and appealed to a group of “others” so large and out of our own editorial purview that none of us even saw it coming when Trump was elected that November.
I left that clickbait job in October of 2016, but my sources told me there were no plans in place to address a Trump victory on election night. Just like there were no plans at my new job on the digital team for Chelsea Handler’s Netflix talk show, save a throwaway joke about Ann Coulter taking over as host and a lot of pre-taped fanfare for the first female president who never came to be. The next day, Chelsea openly cried on air as she spoke to Senator Barbara Boxer for an hour.
The Age of Unhingement™️ had dawned and the very first pussy hat was knit and worn.
The past eight years have been so fucking nuts that I had to create an entire shtick about it. Trump’s not the only reason we’re collectively unhinged, but he’s the main character in the Hollywood adaptation. I crave sanity. I crave relief. I don’t want to watch this orange menace and his deranged band of racist demons dismantle what’s left of America for four more years.
Donald Trump took over the aux last week at a rally and what happened next was so bizarre that at first I didn’t even find it funny. Don’t worry, I’m OK, I came around eventually. Then, it got me thinking.
In 2016, Trump took over America’s aux and turned his horrible playlist up to 11. He has dominated American culture for the past eight years as we’ve all watched him sway and been forced to listen. He lost the last election, he staged a coup, was impeached twice, and has 34 felony convictions. All that and we remain powerless to pull the plug on him. I don’t want to leave my perfect 1920s apartment and my nice life in Los Angeles, but I can’t lose another four good years to Donald Trump noise pollution.
If Trump gets another term, he has concepts of a plan to do enough horrendous shit that Satan himself must be inspired. But nothing makes sense anymore, so here we are, two weeks to go, wondering if he is going to win again even though his photo ops are now so staged they look AI-generated. The “October surprise” this election year seems to be his descent into (further) madness, but his ability to drive clicks and views hasn’t cracked. Trump managed to suck all the air out of the internet in 2016 and eight years later we still can’t get it back.
I need to be very clear here, I don’t actually think he is going to win. I think we are in for a lot of crazy shit over the next few weeks, but it is my belief that Kamala Harris will be the first female president, finally healing the pantsuit-shaped wound in so many of our hearts.
That said, one of my favorite ways to soothe my own anxiety is to imagine the worst case scenario and find a way to make that OK. I have the privilege of owning both a Canadian passport and an unbreakable spirit. If Trump is re-crowned and takes his Shakespearean perch, I will go on tour and turn this newsletter into my worldwide search for the hinge.
Before I go, I have a couple orders of business:
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know about my obsession with the pussy hats and where they’re at these days:
If you have a pussy hat that is still in your possession or know someone who does, I would really love to talk to you or them for a new project I’m working on. You can reply to this email or click here.
And, for anyone who’s tracking, I have not made any TikToks yet, but I did make a profile. So, I guess one follow = one vote for me to whore myself out in bite-sized videos so a publisher will buy my Unhingement-themed book proposal. I’m still procrastinating because I don’t want to do it. A TikTok ban is now at the center of my vision board so if that happens soon, you’re welcome.
Take great care of yourselves, my loves. Until next time!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz