The Dodgers Went To Grandpa’s House!

There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse.

It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is.

From https://newrepublic.com/article/157154/enduring-delusion-chastened-trump">the earliest days of his presidency there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture for the possibility that Trump would not so much grow into the job as be transformed by its sheer prestige into a totally different type of person—not just chastened by the awesome responsibility of it all, but changed by it in a way that forced him to become human in all the ways that he had spent his life avoiding.

This was embarrassing even then, and seems more so after a decade of Trump-centric national humiliation and decline.

It's easy enough to understand as a sort of elite coping mechanism; no one really knew what to expect from the installation of one of the dumbest and worst men this country has ever produced into its highest office, although it was natural to hope the outcome might be something other than "exactly what you would expect to happen in those circumstances." It is perhaps more easily and correctly understood as an expression of just how much that elite cohort believed in the majesty of the edifice they'd constructed around the shabby, brutal business of American politics.

There might be some dead-enders still holding out for a Grinch-type outcome, there, but after a decade in Trump's fragrant shadow it's clear that things broke the other way—every institution and tradition and office held up as grand and permanent rapidly and readily debased and degraded itself in Trump's image, or in his honor.

They could not believe that this office might become as stupid and small as he has made it, because they'd worked so hard and for so long to make it so large.

But what was implicit in the desecrations and derelictions of his first term is explicit and thuddingly literal in his second; he is literally https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/politics/trump-regime-change-book-haberman-swan.html">supergluing shit onto the walls of the Oval Office and https://defector.com/dead-country-fair">kicking everyone off his lawn.

In every sense, the White House will require a gut renovation once he's finally extricated from it.

There's just too much grease and gilt on all of it now.