Bernhard Åström
Indianer i Masaby
(c. 1925)

"Our current president only exists in fictional form on some livestream that never was alive, ripening for his Comeuppance."

Donald J. Trump’s second term was almost entirely a fictional affair. This alone explains why it had no central theme beyond incoherence. It was not just that the incumbent was increasingly displaying the effects of his widely speculated prefrontal dementia, something he referred to as “fake news,” but that he lacked coherent purpose. He had no reason even to become president. No agenda. No motive, other than self-service, which had always stood in for his missing character. He recruited an equally unfocused cohort to populate his administration that, unsurprisingly, never once proved itself capable of administering anything. It would have been a complete joke had it not injured real people by inflicting actual damage, much of it inadvertent. It was as if we’d elected a chimp president. He could wear the uniform, albeit cut funny for his figure, but he couldn’t steer anything, much less our ship of state. Anybody could explain his track record by randomly sticking pins into something, drawing the resulting perimeter, and calling it a work of original art. It was all a fiction.

Much of whatever anything becomes results from our own more or less willing suspension of disbelief. These are not mere actors on some stage, as The Bard once reflected. Each life remains serious business, but we don’t usually take very much of what we witness very seriously. No, we try to stay light-hearted. We interpret liberally without usually acknowledging when we are. We casually construct the continuing passion plays we witness, largely clueless that we author them. I don’t know our president from Adam; in fact, I might understand Adam better than I understand our incumbent, though I’ve never met Adam either. Unperturbed by my sincere lack of information, I manage to fill in enough details to form a satisfyingly coherent picture, failing to acknowledge that I am creating a complete and utter fiction for myself.

In this respect, every president has been as good as a fictional character for me, but not every presidency has been fictional in the ways that this one has. It’s as if every label lacks definition. Ask what Make America Great Again meant, and you’ll get as many different responses as you have respondents. Not even the president ever manages to repeat a definition of this foundational meme. And so it has been with everything he’s initiated. Each seems vacuous underneath, a big fat dormative perhaps intended only to impart a sensation. MAGA makes people feel stupidly proud, idiotically patriotic, as if they were “Onward Christian Soldiers” and actually “marching as if to war.” Not to war, mind you, but ‘as if’ to war. The entire administration that, curiously, has never once successfully administered anything might just as well be referred to as an ‘as if’ effort, which is to say, no effort at all. It administers ‘as if’ it were administering; people dress up in the uniforms of the roles they pretend to play, but it’s just that: all play, poor performance, absolutely absent substance.

This fictional context makes for a Comeuppance-rich environment. Virtually anything could be falling apart and likely already is. Think about that for a minute and reflect on just how much this administration, apparently baffled by the whole concept of administering, has failed. Virtually every initiative eventually ended up sideways to some judge or popular opinion. They have spent the vast majority of their term appealing rulings they never had any hope of winning. Then they initiate another effort beyond even the liberal bounds of presidential powers. It predictably sours before accomplishing much besides some fresh chaos. Much of this shit never appears in newspapers because it wouldn’t make believable fiction, let alone acceptable headlines. The chief difficulty in attempting to run a deliberately fictional presidency turns out to be the believability factor. The public gladly engages in MakeBelieve even when an administration actually administers stuff. When even the suspension of disbelief gets coerced, believability plummets. Ergo, a real and continuing threat of a Comeuppance.

I cannot say from where the fatal Comeuppance will appear. It could come from anywhere because this sphere spews so damned much ultimately unbelievable fiction. Each lacks substance, and any one could prove to be too much for the performance to continue. It could come from a proverbial horseshoe nail or an everyday hangnail; this administration, which lacks any notion of what administering means, will fail. It will be remembered as a cautionary tale, an avoidance lesson, and one that, sadly, will never be forgotten. The future will wonder what substance supported the rise and the elections, and if history proves smarter than her forebears, she’ll acknowledge that the substance was fiction. Since the advent of television, the American public has grown increasingly preoccupied with immersing itself in fiction. Now we scroll and maintain continuous access, feeding an insidious addiction. A fictional presidency simply found its moment in history. Here, before the Comeuppance, it still reigns supreme. Our current president only exists in fictional form on some livestream that never was alive, ripening for his Comeuppance.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz