Memento Mori

After Tomorrow….

William TimbermanLeave a comment

If the polls are right this Monday morning, it’s probably time for Donald Trump to start thinking about where he can go in a couple of years, assuming he lives long enough to go anywhere but Hell.

Europeans won’t let him in, and he hates them anyway. Putin will drop him like the used tissue that he is, so Russia is out. How about where Idi Amin went? I’m sure that with his son-in-law Jared smoothing the way, the Saudis would let him spend a bit of what he’s stolen from us to build a Mar-a-Lago replica in the sand somewhere outside Riyadh. (It is kinda like Hell, Arabia Deserta, right? Hell with the fire out, so to speak.) And if Jared proves up to the task of negotiating just one more fabulous deal, I’m sure Satan won’t mind waiting a bit longer for the Donald and his gilded hotel blueprints to make their way to the real place.

The Real Trans Menace

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Donald Trump came out of his mother’s body an innocent, as we all do. Eighty years later, he teeters on the edge of the grave, a bloated sack of depravities few, if any of us can fully comprehend.

There’s a great sadness in this transition, as well as a great evil, both of which we not only witnessed but many of us actually endorsed. We should keep this in mind as we nurture our own children. If it’s true that no person is an island, entire of itself, then it’s also true that every part of the human archipelago is at least partly our responsibility.

The Sin of Pride

William Timberman

I once owned a raw silk sports jacket
I once owned a pair of cordovan wingtips
I once owned a Meerschaum pipe
More than once
I’ve found myself in places
Where history was being made

Saying this
I’m reminded of a French cartoon
I saw once, while waiting
For something
Momentous to happen

Four panels

In the first three
One stick figure waves a
Triumphant hand
And says to a second stick figure

Ma maison
Ma voiture
Ma femme

In the fourth
The second stick figure
Bends over, points to
His own
Stick figure ass
And says

Mon cul

Yes
That is it exactly

Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025

William Timberman

Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.

I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.

Memento Mori

William Timberman

Dear Sir,

You’ll be dead soon. What’ll be the use of all that power and money then?

Will it establish and preserve a legacy? I doubt it—ambitious people will come from near and far to piss on a tyrant’s legacy as well as on his grave. Pigeons will shit on his statues, and the funding he leaves behind to have them cleaned will be reinvested in bitcoin by his heirs.

Will it found a dynasty? Carefully managed, it might, but your sons are morons, and despite what you say in public, we know you find them weak and contemptible—imperfect copies of a perfect original. The less said about your daughters the better. They’re old enough now to be as uninteresting and as greedy as your current and former wives, but not as submissive, at least not to you, now you’ve married them off to potential rivals. I mean, really, what point is there in funding the rise of someone else’s dynasty?

I know Janis Joplin once told us to get it while we can, but she was talking about love, not a commodity you’ve ever had much use for, then or now. Let that be your last thought on your way out of here: when the getting was good, you were busy getting the wrong things, and now you’re out of time.

The End Of the Beginning….*

William Timberman7 Comments

The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?

*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q

The Hillbilly Pygmalion

William Timberman

George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.

Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.

Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.

*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic