Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Three Fates, gesso rosso
(circa 1868)

"…regrowing our backbones that render him powerless to do much more than resign in response."

I have saved what I have long considered the least likely EndDays scenario for this story, positioning it after presenting what I considered to be the more probable outcomes. Even a Truth & Reconciliation Commission seemed more likely to happen than anything resembling acceptance and contrition, because even the more mildly malignant narcissists rarely, if ever, come to anything resembling the acceptance necessary to engage in what I might recognize as Resigning behavior. That outcome seemed too far out of character to be plausible, if this incumbent can be said to exhibit any semblance of character. Resigning might constitute a strategic play, and this guy doesn’t exhibit much in the way of strategy, even on his few and far between better days. He seems to prefer reckless behavior over even self-preservation, perhaps because he had finally seen himself as being as powerful as he previously so often merely imagined he was. He certainly engaged as if no rules applied to him or his frail attempts at administration. He made bulls in china shops appear circumspect in comparison.

Recent events have suggested other possibilities. As his difficulties have exploded, his options for moving at least somewhat forward have been more stilted. What must have seemed like wide-open territory at his inauguration has shriveled and shrunk as his slowly awakening checks and balances have grown. The courts, especially, have finally found injunctions that have slowed what had at first seemed like an inexorable downward momentum. Anyone can disobey any injunction until enforcement kicks in. Then, continuing the behavior becomes something other than merely a matter of will. Until some real consequences start appearing, fantasy powers might well seem inexorable. After, they just seem silly. Even the least aware malignant narcissist might then take a few limits more seriously and choose to simply stop pursuing some particular fantasies.

Our incumbent has recently become quite practiced at feigning indifference as he shuffles away from another purely Pyrrhic victory. As his losses far exceed his few meager victories, he seems to have started anticipating what he might consider the worst outcomes. He has recently taken to issuing warnings in threatening tones, predicting perdition or worse if his proposals are overturned. He tends to rely on these sorry exit speeches once he’s exhausted every possibility of ever getting his way. He takes his toys, which almost nobody wanted to play with anyway, and stumbles home, pretending he won. He might manage to fool himself, which bothers almost no one because his losses can be easily chalked up to being our wins. Then, the cycle starts all over again. His acceptance nudges him in the direction of yet another poorly thought-through outrage, and all returns to right in his world. He seems to have little, if any, longer-term memory left, anyway.

He governs like a drunker sailor dances, practiced at compensating for wave action but still stumbling his way around the dance floor. He steps on almost everybody else’s toes in the process, but never notices. He still seems to believe himself to be a genius, in spite of or because he so often loses. His Resigning behavior might not signal anything like acceptance going on inside his ever-receding brain, but little more than a reactive response, like instinctively shrinking back from a flame. He has proposed and then abandoned a series of notions that most of us interpreted as seriously unserious. Rewarding previously convicted insurrectionists for what he labeled government persecution. Building a ridiculous gilded ballroom in a domestic economy where those who hold ten dollars in cash and no debt belong to the wealthiest portion of the population. He invokes yet another round of tariffs, justified, once again, by a fresh round of malignant fantasies. Even his former allies are eyeing the exits as he continues making headway toward finalizing the American Brexit: an utterly self-defeating economic retreat undertaken for no discernible purpose.

As unthinkable as Resigning seemed in the face of his haughty inauguration, the one where he very carefully avoided holding his hand on the proffered Bible as he swore, Resigning might be the more reasonable end for this weary would-be administrator. He seems tired, dozing through his own press conferences in the sort of resignation impossible to believably deny, however vehemently his few remaining supporters might insist otherwise. Even most allies have stopped denying what their formerly lying eyes insisted. The vast majority of The People can now finally be fairly characterized as resisters, and if there’s one skill Americans have traditionally relied upon with pride, it’s our resistance. Our country was founded by a band of resisters, and we’re never better than when we have something to passionately protest about. The fondly remembered solidarity of the Sixties, that budding Age of Aquarius, was not so much a new-age uprising as a conservative response to the 50s prosperity’s sanguine satisfaction that threatened our very character. Against this growing force, one his hapless proposals gratefully encouraged, we might not have precisely found the greatness again that he predicted, but we certainly seem to be regrowing our backbones that render him powerless to do much more than resign in response.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz