John Kay (caricaturist)
The Favourite Cat and De La-Tour Painter
(1813)

"Maybe his omniscience amounts to his Comeuppance."

At some indefinite point, our incumbent became a caricature of himself, an open running joke that he himself never suspected. Oh, his spider senses might have registered his growing unpopularity, but he had never developed the senses to accept such judgments. To him, he was a misunderstood genius, a wrongly maligned savior. He never stopped believing his own propaganda. Comeuppances work like any other experience. They ultimately demand acceptance, but like any difficult-to-swallow medicine, they often spark a process. Disbelief commonly accompanies initial twinges that something might be amiss. Anger might reasonably follow and precede some bargaining, which often feels like negotiating with an insistent demon. Acceptance might follow, but as a practicing malignant narcissist, our incumbent has been cycling through his disbelief, anger, and bargaining stages without seeming to come any closer to exiting into acceptance. His Comeuppance might manifest in just this cycling and end with him never even suspecting that he was never anything but the very soul of accepting.

Advisors and supportive followers eventually come to see the swirling, and they begin their own cycling toward their own unwished-for acceptance. A few drop out after accepting the way it is. Some will even come to realize, as a nearly complete surprise, that he was always this way and that he’s only shifted by an insignificant degree, that he never wasn’t malignant. These early accepters distrust their eyes for a time after they depart, but they had to leave. The rest of the cabinet and adviser cadre continue their denial/acceptance cycling alongside his, producing emotional and intellectual turbulence that increasingly crosses into incoherence. This presidency seems obviously afflicted, though its purpose increasingly becomes failing to keep this deep dark secret that was only ever truly a secret to one, and he still considers himself omniscient.

His Comeuppance might never need to progress any further than this, for such continuing turbulence renders even the simplest challenge ungovernable. Our incumbent already exhibits the reverse Midas touch: instead of turning everything he touches into gold, he turns it into shit. He, of course, believes he does possess the Midas touch, so he surrounds himself with what he experiences as self-created gold. Everyone else in his retinue knows for certain that stuff ain’t Shinola, but they continue carrying on, still cycling toward a begrudging acceptance, and in active denial that everything’s really just as bad as it actually seems. It’s actually much worse!

He was always a rather masterful SelfSaboteur. One doesn’t experience his string of bankruptcies without possessing a certain talent for engineering failures. He was always the sort of businessman that business schools advise their students against becoming. He made the ugly American look passable in comparison. It was as if he was always actively plotting against himself, as if he was aching to be punished, though exclusively preconsciously. He would vehemently deny that he ever once tried to fail, or that he just as actively sought punishment, and he would doubtless complain, as we’ve all seen him complain, when publicly blamed for his transgressions in court, no less than when he’s been battered in the never-ending court of public opinion. He must not notice when he’s SelfSabotaging, though even his most entranced followers surely at least sometimes see. The harder he tries, the greater he SelfSabotages. He is and probably always was his own Comeuppance.

I expect the cycling to continue. It’s not in our incumbent’s profile to ever gain acceptance, so he will continue to be “unjustly treated” until he finally goes off the rails, as if he was ever on rails before. I shudder to imagine how much momentum might go flying then, and in what directions. His might well be a spectacular Comeuppance, though thoroughly unsurprising to everyone, except him. In the meantime, his current form of Comeuppance will continue in increasing earnestness. He must try to prevent the press from reporting what’s actually going on. For him, their reporting actually constitutes just what he says it does: Fake News. It could never occur to anyone so skilled and experienced in SelfSabotaging that he experiences anything other than whatever he firmly believes he does. The rest of us can’t quite see or accept what’s happening. Maybe his omniscience amounts to his Comeuppance.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz