Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar Rose series
(circa 1872 )

"…just imagine what will happen after the midterms render them lame geese."

One other end state for our present administration that has gratefully seemed absent without leave since being installed, occurs to me, one that probably works as effectively as any actual ending. A stymied administration that was always incapable of administering anyway, probably accomplishes nothing destined to survive its tenure. Our incumbent seems contorted, as if attempting to wriggle his way beneath a very narrow, flimsy barricade. He’s very likely too fat to succeed. His ill-crafted policies sit InLimbo, neutralized by courts, trading partners, and what he might label fickle public opinion. His policies, such as they were, which he apparently borrowed from seriously unserious people with little notion of how governance actually works outside of the Old Testament, have universally failed. Each advertised transformation has gone bust in turn, leaving divots rather than the promised holes-in-ones. He cheats himself at golf, too. With midterms expected to further humiliate ‘his magesty’, he’s seemingly frozen in place, as useful as he could ever possibly be.

He still continually foments chaos, though even this seems to have an increasingly lessening effect. Markets correct within seconds of another of his perfectly predictable phony pronouncements. The War with Iran has already ended dozens more times than it ever began, an immaculate conception if I’ve ever seen one. Our economy is already the best ever, though the actual effects don’t seem all that obvious unless you’re one of the few it was intended to trickle up to. His Cabinet seems perfectly suited to his service, more at home on the cover of The Enquirer or as lead on Faux Snooze following some scandal over another predictably failed policy, defending the absolutely indefensible with another clever equivalent of, “I know you are, but what am I?” For entertainment value, these clowns have become world-renowned, as long as your taste trends toward the slapstick varieties. It seems as if they aspire to be the laughingstock, though most of their jokes aren’t actually all that funny. They seem incapable of self-deprecation, which further froze their public’s potential ardor. They behave far too seriously for people who are supposed to be saving civilization from certain ruin. Would it kill them to poke some fun at themselves sometimes, instead of at everyone else?

Those who long held that government was best served in infinitesimal pieces, that it should be shrunk until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub, welcome to your dream come true. Except it’s more like a nightmare for you, isn’t it? Your oxen were gored right along with your opposition’s. They might have declared war on woke, but your cherished privileges were also severely wounded. Infringing upon even your enemy’s rights unavoidably also infringes upon yours. The sides were always illusions. The issues, deflections. The corruption, almost complete, were it not for a cadre of grossly underappreciated watchdogs and institutions. Nameless ones, or as good as nameless, that helped rein in the worst that corporations have always been capable of inflicting upon real citizens. Corporations were never people, but lesser beings, incapable of feelings, created not to voraciously feed off the people but to help feed and sustain them. Taking off the controls doesn’t even help the corporations in the long run. They reliably self-destruct through unregulated speculation and corruption. Everybody misses their mommy when she’s gone.

Society, too, sits frozen in almost stunned silence. Who suspected that was even Pandora’s Box we were prying open? Who wasn’t surprised by the malign indifference that came streaming out, as if the Presidency was his alone to steal. He was distracted by stuff that surely seemed more important to him. He was too busy to administer, too distracted to lead, too immersed in scandal to even pretend to be anybody’s moral guide. He was never present in the first place. Elected to serve as the most powerful human on the planet, he was already otherwise employed on something obviously more important: himself. Now he inhabits an echo chamber. He turned his neighborhood into a wrecking yard. He plans to erect architectural monstrosities to himself, each a perfect portrait of irrelevance in practice. He rarely says anything of any significance, and he even more rarely ever did. He was never more than a pretender to a non-existent throne. Only he was surprised when he discovered there was no real underlying power attached to the role, other than his own, which he’d never had and had hoped he’d gain once he ascended. He even disappointed himself.

Oh, he has inflicted pain on many, but these acts were obviously each a crime of omission, if only because he always lacked the necessary understanding to deliberately commit anything, good or ill. He was never not a shill, ill-prepared to perform the expected duties of any elected or appointed office. He recruited his kind to support him in his imaginary administration, one apparently incapable of coherently imagining what actual administration might entail. They shared the questionable skill of showing up absent, of blankly staring into cameras as if nothing whatsoever were happening behind their eyes. They dress up well. They are mostly gone, junketing overseas on less than a whim, and hardly notice when locals protest their presence and chase them back home again. They are the very model of modern major nothingness, an existential danger to the spirit and the soul of us. Fortunately, they remain suspended InLimbo. If they’re already lame ducks now, just imagine what will happen after the midterms render them lame geese.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz