2.3 King of the Road

He had arrived straight from the airport, rolly case trailing behind him all the way to the maitre’d who tucked it away and gestured him into the quiet restaurant, the bar he could wait at. He got himself a topo chico, realizing after sucking down a few mouthfuls through the longneck bottle that there was a perfectly good glass with ice, there, for a more refined approach. Tyler belched out the carbonation, looked around guilty, sighed, and poured the seltzer, watching it fizzle, checking his wristwatch.

At this point, he was beginning to feel like time had lost all meaning, stale adrenaline electricity behind his eyes, joints feeling weighed down whenever he moved. His phone buzzed on the bartop, his sister–valeting, be in in 5m–and he realized he hadn’t reset his watch, the second time. Crossing back to LAX two brief days after having left, the mileage covered in the air and over the roads, chased by mostly sleepless nights had left him entirely unsure of a working definition for the idea of time. He had engaged in an unconscious defense, apparently, fixing  his position in time in relation to the next event, time counted until the next thing.

Five minutes until Mona would be in, it had been eighty-nine interminable minutes in the chick-fil-a with Dave, and it had been five hours in air over the expanse of all those states to finally arrive back in LA. Five hours of plans and schemes, conversations he half-followed, that he lacked that vocabulary for. He tried his best to keep up, mostly failed, caught whatever he could to sort out later as best as he could, some dim corner of his brain processing it all, trying to build an understanding. Wondering how much to leave out, and to whom.

Turning his back to the bar he watched the servers, runners, bussers be about their business. The back-of-house staff was mostly Mexican, front-of-house mostly white. Napkins were being folded elegantly, silverware polished, plates wiped and stacked, but there were also some sour mutterings and narrow-eyed glances stolen in his general direction. He realized that he wasn’t sure when the place closed, which he wanted to blame on his tenuous relationship with time. But, the slightly more likely culprit was simply that his sister’s assistant had made the reservations. He tried to remember her name, picture her face. He failed both efforts.

More than once, in similar restaurants, under similar circumstances, Meghan had pushed Tyler to be conscious of the weight of his family name. The heavy gravity that attached to it, the way it picked up objects and dragged them out of their trajectories into its greedy orbit. Maybe, she suggested, the servers weren’t always happy to stay open an hour later to accommodate him. That, and that he should always be tipping at least thirty percent, regardless of anything else.

He heard heels on the tile floor, clicking their way to him, pulling him out of his own head. Turning too quick, he ruined the carefully planned stealth bear hug his sister was leaning in to, tangled up his arms in hers. Laughing, she pecked his cheek lightly to avoid leaving make-up, then pushed him back at the shoulders for a let-me-get-a-good-look-at-you once over.

There was a time her inspection made him uncomfortable, her observations, always eliciting  a sense of being judged, measured, appraised. As recently as college he still felt a squirming guilt whenever Mona would look him over. Somewhere along the way something had shifted, maybe his therapist’s consistently-reinforced advice that he accept her looks as they were most likely intended, with love. Love and a deep, abiding concern for him from his big sister.

Barely through hellos she was already putting a hand on his back, maneuvering him towards the empty tables, one where the host graciously–and at least a little nervously–stood by, menus in hand. Even as she gently pushed she was instructing the bartender over her shoulder to transfer the tab and send over a margarita for her, thanking him before he could reply.

It was a strange family trait that had largely skipped Tyler–the absolute assumption that upon your arrival at any location, every one there was simply waiting for your direction. It was a trait she shared with their father, and it always made him cringe to see her doing it. Even if he recognized her version came with more gentleness, more encouragement, from a softer, less distant height than the ones which their father mostly deigned to condescend from.

People wanted to do things for Mona, they wanted to make her happy, and if they didn’t she would very patiently and thoroughly explain why they should. Her mom voice had evolved at least a decade before the birth of her oldest son, and she deployed it both knowingly and with a ruthless effectiveness their father likely would’ve admired. If he had ever noticed.

Arranging themselves at the table, accepting the menus from the host without acknowledgement, they waited until she had gotten to the give-you-a-minute-with-those withdraw, no specials on offer. Then they spoke all at once, over and on top of one another.

“No, no,” Tyler laughed, “you, you first. How are the boys?”

Mona rolled her eyes skyward, the harried mother pleading the gods for help. But only for a moment, launching without any more preamble into their schedules and sports and triumphs and fears. How everything is so much different from when we were kids and would you believe what one of them had accomplished. Or broken. Or said.

Tyler smiled through it, heartfelt and happy to hear the family updates and complaints, the stories of time spent running from one practice field to another, the unbelievable costs–and methods–of private schools for seven and four year old boys. It was new for them, this complicated web of family and life she had to spool out for him, every time, always updating.

How much life there was in her life baffled him. He asked once–how do you do it?–without specifying the pronoun. Despite the blurted and ambiguous nature of the question, she simply nodded, as if it made perfect sense. She had told him, “therapy. Lots of therapy. Microdosing helps, too.” They had laughed at that, but him nowhere near as hard and as long as she had.

She chewed the space between them, working–at length–through the details of the boys' lives and schooling, pivoting around a family vacation story to talk about couples therapy, how much progress her and Matthew had made. From there she offered some topline summary of the state of her media company, a much-truncated shareholders report, which he technically was in a weird sort of way, as one of the trustees of one of the family trusts that had invested. 

“So,” she said, after the ceviche and chips had been served and cleared, out of updates and stalling tactics to keep avoiding their particular elephant this evening, “this job.”

“This fucking job,” his laugh slid casually into a sigh, “I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the start, baby bro,” she offered, her kindest mom voice, a sound that always held his heart in her hands, the gentle-but-firmest of big sister pushes.

“He’s got me working for the campaign,” leaning into the sigh, now, “some ancient zombie motherfucker, probably handed out muskets at the Boston Tea Party.”

“Doing what,” she asked, chewing around the second course of grilled octopus.

“Meeting people, like, it’s kind of a shake down, I guess, but mostly just handshake promises, he, Dave, he keeps it vague, but it’s a lot of face-to-face talking, horse-trading,” he finally came up with, pleased to recall such an apt metaphor.

“Okay, so, how bad is it, then?” She asked, snorted a laugh at his deadpan eye roll, “okay, they’re gross, I mean, I know, you know, how much I donated against them, they’re awful. But..”

“But…”

“But worse than China? I mean, on a scale of one to shadiest-shit-dad-ever-did?”

“It’s, like,” Tyler frowned, exaggerating his internal calculations, keeping his sister in suspense, “like a solid seven-point-five of shady dad shit. Eight at a stretch.”

“Oh,” Mona squealed a bit, her brother wondering when it became second nature, and where she had been trained to not just appreciate, but enjoy hearing gossip. She practiced it as her father did, a sort of currency gathered and spent, she even called it chisme, with a straight face and his mom’s subtle Chihuahua accent. “Tell me,” she said.

Tyler proceeded to describe the flight, circumspectly and with furtive glances when naming names, Mona asking obvious questions he wished he had thought of, really at any time between then and now. She saw the picture more clearly than him, but seemed less bothered by it than he had expected. His chest felt a little looser, a tightness in his shoulders that he had acclimated to so rapidly he had failed to notice it worked itself out slowly, bubbling to the top of his mind. His big sister always helped him put things in perspective, make peace with things.

“So, basically this is like,” Mona paused and did her own calculations, “that mapping algo app or whatever, right, that he flipped to uber? That level of shady?”

“Sounds about right, I mean, that’s probably closer to eight, eight-five,” Tyler reckoned, expanding on the idea, “Y’know, judges. I think judges. Maybe the jurors?”

“Wait, that was the one with your new best friend, right? Wasn’t he involved? Your little air captain?” She had been tickled by his description of the flight back to LA.

“Ugh,” he grunted, giving up on words to pantomime frustration as the butt of her jokes.

“God,” she sobered, frowning in a way that made her seem exhausted beyond words, despite the furrow appearing in just one soft, gentle crease of her forehead. “I really need to get rid of my car. Like we,” she gestured between the two of them, “always knew he was an asshole, now he spent, what, forty billion so he could spend all his time telling the whole world?” She sighed, smiled again, the furrow gone, tone serious, asking finally, “how long until election day?”

“Six and a half months,” Tyler replied coolly.

“So six months, we’re not five, we don’t do halves.”

“Round up, not down. Also, six or seven months, whatever, both are a lot of months.”

“How long were you in Beijing for?”

“Too long. Eighteen months.”

“Okay, my point. Sure. How long were you at, what was it?”

“Scoreboard?”

“Scoreboard, yeah, that was like, long time?”

“Year-and-a-half, too, I mean maybe closer to almost two years.”

“Almost two years!”

“I liked Scoreboard. Kinda. And you’re, like, you talk about this like I’m some old timey gangster,” he shook his head, “like whatever the judge says, you trust I can do the time.”

“I offered you a job. Do you want a job?” Now a little more wounded defensiveness bleeding through than she intended, and his eyes rolled deadpan again, “Okay, okay, I’m just, like, you don’t have to play this dumb game he plays with you.”

“Mon’ c’mon,” this time verbalizing the work of the eye roll, “when was the last time you told him no?”

“Have you talked to him? What did he say, like, when he told you?”

“He didn’t tell me,” he smiled, pursed his lips, smiled again, his dimples showing a little sadness, “Monica came to the condo. She told me what was happening, gave me plane tickets, told me who to ask for. She even packed my bag before the movers showed up.”

“Movers?”

“They listed the condo.”

“They listed your fucking condo?”

“For rent,” he blurted an amendment when he realized the implication.

“They rented your fucking condo?”

“Yeah,” leaning back in his chair, his exhaustion manifesting all at once, “movers showed up, packed up my stuff, put it in storage. Monica brought some clothes, packed some others, handed me the tickets and sent me off to the sunshine state.”

“What did he say when you called him?”

“He didn’t answer.”

“He didn’t answer?”

“Monica answered. He doesn’t reply to my texts. When I call, Monica answers.”

“On his direct?”

“On his direct.”

“Oh fuck this,” Mona already had the phone out, dropped it on the table between them, the bussers retreating from her obvious fury. She punched in numbers and it began ringing. Tyler stared at her while it rang, silent pleading, doing nothing, It rang so long he looked away.

“Hello this is Monica, how can I help you Mona?”

“Hi Monica,” Mona’s tone had enough acid in it to strip paint, Tyler considered the ways and frequency with which this voice replaced the mom voice while Mona went on. “I would like to speak to my father, please. Tyler is with me. We would both like to speak to my father.”

“Oh,” was all Monica said, milking it for a good ten or fifteen seconds, dragging it out, “I’m sorry Mona, your father isn’t available at the moment. I can take a message?”

“Monica, why are you answering my father’s direct line?”

“Oh,” apparently, her common preface, “because your father is indisposed and unavailable at the moment. I can take a message, if you’d like.”

“Monica, I would very much like for you to tell my father that I called,” she amended quickly, “that Tyler and I called. I would very much like for you to have him call me.”

“I will deliver the message, Mona.”

“Have him call me,” she said again, her best corporate tyranny voice, stone faced and relentlessness clear in her tone. When she softened, it was only for a second, “please.”

“I will, of course, deliver the message, Mona.”

“Thank you. And Monica,” she caught her just before disconnecting, “have him call me on his direct number, please.”

“I will let him know, Mona. Have a great night. You and Tyler.”

And then she was gone, leaving in her place a family photo of Theo and Wyatt and Matthew. A dizzying expanse of apps and notification badges covering their faces, obscured their eyes. For a moment Tyler noticed that the knuckles of Mona’s right hand were going white, the slightest tremble running along her thin fingers, her long nails. She was silent, still, for just long enough that when she snatched up the phone and tossed it in her purse, he jumped. But only a little.

Mona dove in after the phone with both hands, rummaging the interior of her massive purse-shaped briefcase, big enough to hold a macbook and a make-up kit. After a few seconds she came up, grinning at Tyler. It wasn’t the mom smile, it was the let’s-get-into-some-trouble smile that, while less frequent, was not quite infrequently remembered from his childhood. Which had spanned her teens-into-early-twenties. In one hand she had a crumpled cigarette, pressed up against a bic lighter. In the other, a vape pen with a leaf on the tip.

Out on the patio area, where the host graciously assured them they could smoke without being bothered, as Mona had asked, she sparked at the lighter until it caught. Took one deep, long drag, exhaled orgasmically, Tyler feeling mild discomfort at witnessing it, but taking the cigarette when she passed it, doing the same. She followed the cigarette with the vape, its tip glowed bright in the darkness that had fallen, the restaurant quiet, still and empty with them away from their table, staff skeletal and out of sight.

Tyler thought of the glow on the vape pen, as he took a deep hit, as some sort of bat signal that would call down the law on him. Reminding himself that it was an entirely legal vice always calmed his anxiety while mildly harshing his high, ruining his enjoyment with unasked-for-permission.

“Such a fucking bitch,” Mona finally said, having exhausted her ability to hold it back.

“Monica?”

“Of course, Monica,” she stage-shouted, energetic outrage made self-conscious with smoke, “she’s just such a fucking bitch.”

“So, yeah, that’s what happens when I call.”

“Fuck, I talked to him,” she counted first in her head, then shifted to fingers, “like, four days ago. He texted me and I called him back.”

“Was it about your netflix password? Or did you just somehow, suddenly forget how to text,” he asked, the question muted by him holding back his breath until he coughed out it and the punchline question mark he had been holding back both.

“Shut up,” and for a split second her voice took him back to his childhood so fast he expected her to punch him on the arm for emphasis, “it was business, business stuff.”

“So the superhero franchise?”

“Movie.”

“Movie?”

“Singular. Bombed.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. We’re just, y’know, it’s not the right time for being an indie darling that makes sjw horror movies. It’s,” she sighed, “that’s why I wanted to meet tonight, I’m flying out tomorrow to meet some people. Investors.”

“How bad is it?”

“Listen,” and corporate Mona was gone, her register firmly mom, “it’s not bad. Not really. It would be better if Death Shot First Shot hadn’t flatlined in its second weekend,” she slipped for just a second,” but it’s fine. I’m fine. The company is fine.”

“Is dad helping?”

“Baby bro,” she replied, mom voice full effect, but her eyes dropped from his, “yes. A little, okay? Just a backstop. A bridge loan.”

“Sure,” he replied, ducking to catch her eyes, his smile wide, the sadness in it pushed deep down into his dimples, “it’s fine.”

“He wouldn’t stop you, you know.”

“From what?”

“Leaving. Coming to work with me. Whatever. He wouldn’t, like, cut you out of the trust. I don’t even think he can.”

“Yeah,” chuckling, “the condo is in my name, you know? Technically he can’t tell me to leave, the mortgage is in my name, the trust pays it, but it’s mine.”

“I know, yeah.”

“I don’t feel like suing or getting sued by my father because he made the trust stop paying my mortgage, you know?”

“It’s not like that, come on,” she exhaled, faltering, “he’s not like that.”

“He isn’t,” this time his laugh didn’t have any bitterness in it, just incredulity, “he wouldn’t stop paying my mortgage? He wouldn’t make me go to court?”

“I don’t know. I mean,” she tried laughing, it didn’t take, she powered through, “yeah, I mean. I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“How do you do it,” he hadn’t realized he was asking before it just came out.

“Do what baby bro,” she asked, sadness in her eyes, or maybe just light reflecting from the restaurant behind him, her facing it to face him.

“Just,” he put the cigarette between his lips and wrung his hands for emphasis, “live. The boys. The company. Matthew. Whatever. Just live, without getting sucked into all this bullshit. All his bullshit.”

“I told you.”

“LIke, how are you happy, how did that happen?”

“Baby bro,” she said again, her nickname for him hugging him whenever and wherever he heard it, “I told you. Therapy. Microdosing.”

“That’s it? That’s the secret.”

“Open marriage.”

“Oh my god.”

“You asked.”

“I didn’t know I was asking that, jesus.”

“But you asked. That’s how. You just, like, get on with it, you know? You meet somebody and you fall in love and one day you’re a mom. You have some friends from school who know your dad has money, they want to make a movie. So you make a movie. Now you’re a mom and a studio and a ceo and you’re pumping on a PJ taking you back and forth from talent in LA and money in New York. It just happens.”

“He just, he let you.”

“Yeah. I know bro,” she dropped the cigarette and tried to crush it out with a heel but missed a little, the point a little too narrow and sharp. “He let me, but I also never asked, you know? I just decided this was what I’m doing, so I did it.”

“Yeah.”

“And then I got therapy. And started microdosing. And started–”

“Thank you, I’m good, that’s good. Thanks.”

“You could come work for me. That’s what I wanted to say, before. He wouldn’t stop you. He wouldn’t fuck with the company, with the money, just to fuck with you.”

“He might.”

“I wouldn’t let him.”

“How would you stop him,” he asked, it was a question–an entire ritual–they had repeated for most of a decade, now.

“I wouldn’t let him.”

“It’s fine, Mon’, thank you,” he leaned into selling it, thought of how many actors his sister had likely critically assessed. “Really. Fine.”

They returned to the table, Mona’s left-behind margarita was now mostly salty slush. The table had been cleared and reset, dessert menus laid out neatly. The restaurant had formally closed two hours prior. They pushed away dessert menus, congealed into a consensus of stuffed, and she ordered a single espresso while assuring him one-point-five margaritas and some THC wasn’t enough to make her drive home dangerous in any way.

“How long are you in town for?”

“Dunno,” he shrugged, “he’s got some meetings I’m not going to.”

“So, couple days?”

“Maybe a week. Maybe.”

“You going to see Meghan?”

“Dunno.”

“You should go see Meghan,” she clarified as she shooed the waiter–gently-but- firmly–to just leave the card reader with them so she could calculate tip in peace.

“Yeah,” he huffed a little, as he always had when she landed her point, when he knew she was right but didn’t want to give in, “maybe.”

“Always liked her,” she drew a wild arc of signature after leaving fifteen percent, pretax.

“I know,” he slipped into his sportscoat, aware for the first time of the cold wind blowing in off the ocean, the way California weather was always a little two-faced.

“She’s nice.”

“You tell me every time.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said as the valet ran for her late model tesla and he fished out his phone to call a car opposite her direction home. After the hugs and the goodbyes and talk soons. After there wasn’t anything more to say, they had said goodbye, so they left.

Monday Author’s Note

Hey gang, thanks for hanging in, it honestly surprised me how easy it was to simply not be capable of keeping up with a self-imposed schedule to write, edit, polish, and publish about 10,000 words a week. You all, I presume, are not surprised, I was moderately surprised. But, luckily, it’s still roughly coming together. As we, collectively, enter week three of this little experiment, you’ll have somewhere between a fifth to a quarter of what I expect to be the overall novel in your hands, right now. It gets me all excited just doing the math!

So, how often and for what I’ll wind up using this space for is still a little up-for-grabs; there’s admittedly always some didactic desire I initially plan to satisfy by talking about process and research and context of what’s happening off the page that’s driving what’s on it. But generally I assume that an explicit effort to demonstrate to readers how clever I am is far more likely to shatter any illusions I’ve successfully managed to build to that effect in the writing.

There’s a similar temptation–which, if we’re being honest, probably rises from the same look-at-how-smart-I-am show off desire mentioned above–to use this space to hold forth on the actual real world politics unfolding, that which the fiction is always gamely chasing after. I do think that I have the somewhat rare but always unpleasant ability to look at politics with the sort of jaundiced eye it requires; that is being wildly passionate about the ends while relatively dispassionate about assessing the means and their effectiveness. 

This month marks the beginning of what Twitter pundits and other social media personalities are referring to as Pollercoaster. With the election, as I write this, only about two-and-a-half- weeks off (or, by my most optimistic math, halfway through the novel), the polls remain surprisingly close. I say surprisingly given just how much of an utter shambles the Trump campaign has been since the withdrawal of Biden and elevation of Harris. 

A lot of the response from the Right to that change has been high comedy, which I’ve enjoyed watching as much as I have been drawing on it for this project. There were weeks of half-hearted feints towards clearly losing attack lines (e.g., the recently uncovered trollfarm spreading rumors about Harris’ sexlife¹ ) that drew deep on the right’s racism and misogyny. There was the, frankly terrifying and dangerous, efforts by Trump supporters to link assassination attempts to some shadowy and undefined “they” representing their opposition² . In just the last few weeks there’s been a lot of loose talk from Trump about martial law³ , invoking 18th century laws last used last century to justify internment camps of US citizens⁴ , or just taking policy cues from the Purge horror movie series⁵ . The dark comedy keeps darkening.

What’s come back to me is my fear that Democrats will, in their most time-honored fashion, fuck this all up just at the one yard line. At the time of the VP debate last week I was already feeling hinky–Harris’ Brat Summer/These weirdos entry into the race had been phenomenal. I’m of that vintage of voter who would probably struggle to explain to someone too young to have experienced it first hand exactly what it was about the first Obama campaign that was so inspiring, so hopeful for so many.

And for one glorious month or two it felt a little bit like that, again. I don’t think most people make the mistake that Republicans assume they do, specifically I think the minority of voters who punched their ballot for Obama thought he was perfect, or would immediately right all wrongs. I certainly didn’t, even if at that time I think my dispassionate politics failed a bit, and even with reservations I hoped Obama would be more than he was ever able to be.

Even this takes a bit of unpacking; if I tell you I think that Obama’s singular success beyond passing the ACA–no mean feat, Biden was right on that one, it was and is a huge fucking deal–it’s probably easy to read as a dismissal, as me saying it wasn’t that big a deal at all. But I’m convinced that it is both undeniably true and hugely important. If you don’t think it’s important, ask yourself how half the American political spectrum, including many wealthy, well-educated, successful, and–much as I may hate to admit it–smart people took it. 

This group, conservatives, were so shook by it they all willingly debased themselves to pretend that their standard-bearer, Trump, isn’t a colossal fucking idiot. He is a dweeb of absolutely epic stature, the kind of king-hell moron who would wind up in an argument with a child for the sake of their own poor excuse for an ego and then lose. Actually, that last one was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy. I’m pressed for time so not going to dig up the link at the moment, but I highly recommend punching a search along the lines of “my pillow guy moron argues with child” into google, it’s a real hoot.

But that still makes my point! The party of William F. Buckley, talented racist author, snazzy dresser, and a man of an absolutely made up rich-sounding accent became the party of Trump. The party of George W. Bush, the scion of a political dynasty that started with the fucking Mayflower and already included a former President, saw his party go over to standard-bearers like Mike fucking Lindell and a Baldwin no one can remember. Imagine that with me for a second, close your eyes and try to imagine the man who drowned New Orleans, invaded Iraq, and somehow got away scott-free with that and myriad other war crimes and misdemeanors lived long enough to see his legacy get shit on by a fake billionaire with spray-on skin tone. 

The irony would be delicious if we weren’t all busy choking on the tragedy. I’ve long maintained that there's nothing inherently interesting about Trump other than his position in the world. Even the novelty he can offer us of more overt racism and bloodlust, or weird and dumber public statements, has completely worn its welcome out. We–those of us who are having any kind of ongoing, sustained conversation about politics–know what a remarkable specimen of a sort of uniquely American moronic chowderhead Trump is. 

In any just world the karmic retribution that Trump supporters would find themselves receiving would be having to be represented to society at large, to the world, by this fucking guy. The shame of it should be fatal, but unfortunately the rest of us get all the symptoms even without their specific social disease. What is there even left to say about him? The only thing he can do that’s even noteworthy is be more racist and unhinged or just finally fucking keel over. 

But we’re sort of living in Trump’s world, which is the backlash to having lived, even briefly, in a world with a Black President. The symbolism where the great original sin of slavery and white supremacy saw itself repudiated where it had been most virile, by the children and grandchildren of its greatest defenders couldn’t be more perfect, more ideal. But it only works if you stop the story after Obama wins office, and the shine comes off pretty quickly starting pretty early on in his tenure, then running in a straight line up to today, when some polls are again showing the election in a dead heat between Harris and Trump.

It’s hard to get excited for any Democratic candidate, given their fecklessness in standing up to Trump during his years in office, their keystone-cops-level uselessness in defense of democracy, and their utterly immoral embrace of genocide and apartheid. But even given all that, there’s still something hopeful, and useful, and exciting about seeing Harris stand to break another series of barriers, serve as another living, breathing, achieving repudiation of both the original sin and the backlash to the last repudiation of it. Coupling that with her campaign’s immediate and savvy embrace of TikTok, social media more generally, and the not-fucking-around-this-time tone of the “y’all are weird” strategy, it was intoxicating. 

Maybe, briefly, it seemed as though some of the old magic was back, and the flailing, fumbling responses of Trump’s campaign just made it that much more exciting. But now, three weeks out from election day and hours past my own self-imposed deadline, I can tell you all that hope seems to have mostly evaporated. A snapshot of polling aggregates from today courtesy of 538 shows that Harris currently leads Trump by 2.4% points, that’s down from her relatively more commanding high of 3.3% points in late August⁶ , when her campaign and running mate were more openly dismissive of the weird freaks they were running against.

I didn’t find the time to say it in the immediate wake of the Vice Presidential Debate last week, but it instantly struck me how the Walz’s clear and pressing goal of playing to the center, finding common ground, and not going after Vance and Trump too forcefully wasn’t going to help. It represented a terrible failure to contextualize their campaign as what it is, an unpopular and unrepentant white supremacist campaign, captained by a moron, managed by feckless thugs.

For all the navel-gazing that the media and pundits engaged in after Trump won office the first time they never really grappled with the most important part of his victory–that it represented a triumph against democratic representation and all the values we claim. More than anything, those first few months between Trump’s election victory and his inauguration, showed how little people understand not just politics, but our own systems. 

Of course the guardrails failed and the investigations couldn’t turn into legal action, because the system is designed to reward mediocrities like Trump and Vance (and Pence before him). The antiquated and antidemocratic design of the Electoral College, like the Senate, wasn’t necessarily a great idea in the first place, but whatever time they’ve had is long since gone. 

That these systems gave Republicans not just power well beyond what their popularity (and this just personally, as politicians, once you poll their actual policy the results are dismal⁷ ) was bad enough. But ultimately these antidemocratic systems first empowered them and were then used as proof, aided by the media, that they spoke for the majority all along.

Anyone reading this is likely already to know, uncomfortably well, just how hard it is for the Democratic Party to wield power to a degree that reflects their popularity. What amazes me is how our media and political discourse talks around that simple fact, and in the ways in which that simultaneously magnifies and normalizes the fascist threats we’re struggling with. 

First the fascists are laundered into reasonable people, representing some chimerical silent majority. Then their genocidal, racist, antidemocratic ideas get laundered as well; because the system is democratic, its winners must be representative, and if they’re representative of the will of the voters, then their ideas and policies must be taken as reasonable to most people. It all devolves to a perfect circle–Trump’s election triggered media self-reflection that presupposed he and his policies (to whatever extent we would call them that) were popular, and that therefore it was all the blue state voters and coastal elites who must be out of touch.

This assumption, of course, would mean that the actual will of the actual voters was also out of touch, and failed to adequately represent some mythical Real America. So we were left with a popular, reasonable President who defended white supremacists, maligned dozens of countries and their citizens both at home and in the US, and recommended fighting a viral epidemic with bright lights and ingested bleach. Again, the punishment for being whatever combination of ignorance, fear, and moral failure leads to believing in Donald Trump would be that you could fucking have him. But, no, we all have to have him.

The best news I can offer you about that is, conveniently, quite congruent with the best advice going for the actual Harris campaign that actually is responsible for beating Trump. He’s not popular–he’s never been popular, his movement isn’t popular, his policies are unpopular, and he’s a weird freak. If Harris and Walz can just find their way back to saying that, and to keep saying that for the next three weeks, we might just be on the verge of another great repudiation of these dipshit revanchist scum. It not, well, it wouldn’t be the first time I would have to rewrite the planned ending of this fucking thing. 

As always, thanks for reading, I hope you all have a great week. Signing off with Roger Miller.

1   “How a Secret Right-Wing Network Spread Sexual Smears About Harris”, The New Republic, published 9 September 2024

2   “Republicans outraged over possible assassination attempt: ‘They are going to keep trying to kill Trump’”, Politico, published 15 September, 2024 (NB: Here, elected GOPers mostly point to Biden/Harris ‘rhetoric’ to blame, I didn’t feel like fishing out of Twitter the numerous vague accusations that operated more directly, but here’s a video from ABC of Speaker Johnson trying to dance around Eric Trump, apparently, directly and explicitly saying Democrats, “they”, tried to kill Trump twice.

3  “ Trump Suggesting He'd Use Military Against 'Enemy From Within' Sparks Alarm”, Newsweek, published 13 October. 2024

4   “The Alien Enemies Act, last used in WWII internments, is part of Trump's immigration plan”, USA Today, published 14 OCtober 2024

5   “Trump condemned for suggesting ‘one really violent day’ to combat crime”, The Guardian, published 30 September 2024

6   538 Polls topline aggregate, national popular vote. Retrieved 14 October 2024

7  “Why Republicans lie about their own terrible policies”, The Week, opinion by Ryan Cooper, 15 October 2020