Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino:
Erminia and the Shepherds
(1648–49)

"Our incumbent's Denial might prove widely communicable …"

True to his form to the very last, our incumbent denied any and all association with the epic electoral loss his permanently stalled MAGA movement suffered in this week’s midterm elections. After urging everyone beforehand to imagine he was on the ballot (he wasn’t), he later insisted that, had he been, his candidates would have most certainly won. His thought processes mimicked Escher’s geometric paradoxes, but, true to himself (if to nobody else), at least they were historically consistent. Now, though, the surrounding world has ceased even trying to mimic his thought processes back, so he finally seems utterly high-centered in his political fantasy. The wholesale rebuke of his policies and perspectives shocked even those of us who never once bought into the least of any of them. From here, it seems gravity finally promises to work right again. All is not yet right with this world, but it certainly seems to be righting itself or finally believably promising to right itself again.

Certainly, he will pull fresh shenanigans, for he couldn’t possibly live a shenanigan-free existence. He has been crooked so long that he could no more navigate a straight or narrow any better than he could float. He remains President, but with one significant difference. The fear he somehow managed to instill in both friend and foe has lost its hold. Yes, he will most certainly attempt to get away with more significant insults before his authority gets completely squashed, but not even he seems any longer capable of slipping away without consequences, without Comeuppances. I sense that his former allies, those held there through threat and genuine terror, might well become his most enthusiastic prosecutors, if only to try to purge some of the humiliation they swallowed when they failed to find their own backbone when it might have mattered. Those who feared they would lose access to power if they crossed him have now lost it anyway. They seem to have little left to lose now that they’ve so thoroughly compromised their very souls.

His Denial will most certainly prove to be the first tangible stage of his eventual Comeuppance. I am not crowing about an imaginary victory here, for the forces of light’s victory on Tuesday night was anything but imaginary. Their fruits remain unharvested, but we’ve gained access to the field, and we suffer no shortage of willing hands ready to help harvest the upcoming Comeuppance. This will prove to be the most dangerous portion of this term’s entertainment, for a former strongman in Denial, even if he was never more than a strongman in his own warped mind, remains an extremely dangerous entity. A rumor circulated a few days before Tuesday’s election that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that one with the unlikely cartoon name of Raizin’ Cain, denied the incumbent’s request for access to the feared and fabled nuclear codes. If true, this act represents a true act of courage from someone I might have mistaken for a bootlicker, if only because our incumbent recast his newly “reformed” Department of Defensiveness (née “War”) into a hotbed of testosterone and mediocrity. I honestly never believed old Raizin’ had that kind of heroism in him.

As our incumbent descends into ultimate irrelevance, expect him to keep making unsettling noises. He will keep deflecting ownership of anything untoward, so he’s unlikely to issue many blanket pardons, because those might require him to own the crimes that justified the indictments. He will more likely insist that a few of his formerly most loyal accomplices acted off script and somehow fooled him into acceptance. Had he had any notion of any wrongdoing, of course, he will insist, he would have shut down (insert name of blazingly illegal infraction here) in less than a fabled New York Minute. He will genuinely see himself as wrongly persecuted for the minor errors some faceless underlings committed. He will purport to have been simultaneously omniscient and ill-informed, all-knowing and misled. He will very likely become even more incoherent as the inevitable indictments start hitting home. Very likely, even Faux Snooze will wander off in the general direction of a different alluring aberration to support, and our incumbent will eventually fade to the back pages again, where he never didn’t actually belong. I see that his Truth Social Network’s stock lost another 23% on the strength of Tuesday’s results, reaching a well-deserved all-time low valuation.

The boldness with which the future caught up with the MAGAs should properly take anybody’s breath away. This electoral victory should rightly reassure democracy everywhere. No, we have not yet recovered our wounded Constitution. It remains freshly tattered. History has not yet been written, though it has started introducing its eventual authors. We can warmly anticipate a Speaker of the House of Representatives who speaks in complete coherent sentences and seems eminently capable of slipping into rapping rhyme schemes on occasion. This, alone, will take a little more than a little getting used to. I foresee our national obsession with wealth and possessions degrading into another potential, perhaps even Greater Depression, for we have pipers to pay and payment seems way overdue. The temptation will reappear to blame our collective Comeuppance on somebody else, to enlist some minority to carry our collective sins again. The upcoming Comeuppance will very likely initially more resemble purgatory than any heaven on Earth or anywhere else. Our incumbent’s Denial might prove widely communicable, though we will eventually prove capable of accepting both the blame and the reward of eventual acceptance. Bless us quickly, please!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz