The first 45 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a bloodshot fever dream—wild, erratic, and laced with the kind of incoherent bravado that only a man utterly convinced of his own infallibility can summon. The air reeks of bad decisions and cheap cologne, as if the entire White House has been transformed into a Las Vegas casino floor at 3 a.m., where every lever pulled is another desperate gamble.
Right out of the gate, he’s swinging—gutting agencies, torching alliances, and rearranging the machinery of government like a drunk mechanic throwing parts over his shoulder. Trade wars are back in fashion, with Canada, Mexico, and China finding themselves in the crosshairs of a tariff spree so reckless it could crash the global economy before anyone even has time to hedge their bets. The stock market quivers like a frazzled junkie, jittery and uncertain, waiting for the next absurd decree to send it into cardiac arrest.
Meanwhile, the bureaucratic corpse of Washington is being filleted in broad daylight. Enter the Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, because why not let Elon Musk slap his name on a shiny new dystopian experiment? The idea, apparently, is to streamline federal operations, but in practice, it’s more like setting a bonfire and then wondering why everything smells like smoke. Entire agencies are being gutted, policies ripped up, and long-serving officials tossed out like empty beer cans at a frat party.
And if that wasn’t enough chaos for you, the executive orders are rolling in like biblical plagues. Immigration, education, environmental policy—no sacred cow is safe. It’s deregulation at the speed of madness, a full-scale blitzkrieg on anything resembling continuity or restraint. The international community watches in horror. The American people barely know which way is up. And Trump? He’s loving every second of it.
This isn’t just a bumpy start. It’s a fireball streaking toward the horizon, a terrible augur of what’s to come. The center did not hold, the adults in the room were exiled, and now, we are left with a government running on adrenaline and delusions. Buckle up, America—this ride is only getting started.
Who knew that making things catastrophically worse would be the perfect way to highlight just how bad they were all along? Thanks, no thanks.
And now, with the wreckage still smoldering, the managers of decline are scrambling—dusting themselves off, straightening their ties, and desperately trying to convince everyone that the system can be patched up and put back together. As if the last eight years were just an unfortunate detour, a brief flirtation with chaos, and now—finally—we can all get back to “normal.”
But normal is what got us here. Normal was the quiet, polite corruption of the political class, the bipartisan consensus that funneled wealth upward while working people were told to be patient. Normal was the endless wars, the hollowing out of public services, the steady decay of democratic institutions that everyone swore would hold—right up until the moment they didn’t.
Running a Zombie: The Democratic Party’s Grand Necromantic Ritual
They wheeled out the corpse, dressed it up, pumped it full of enough stimulants to keep the eyelids from drooping, and called it a candidate. Joe Biden, the political equivalent of a reanimated cadaver, dragged his feet across the stage, grinning that strange, vacant grin—the kind you see on a man who doesn’t quite know where he is but trusts that someone, somewhere, will point him in the right direction.
This was the best they could do? After years of watching the system crack and rot, after watching populist rage explode in every direction, the Democratic brain trust decided that what America needed wasn’t a reckoning, not a redesign, but a Weekend at Bernie’s routine with a half-conscious relic of the old order. It wasn’t a campaign so much as a séance. “We summon thee, Joe, spirit of a bygone era! Rise and walk among us once more!”
The tragedy, of course, was that the people running this charade weren’t actually stupid. They knew Biden was a zombie, but that was the point. He wasn’t supposed to lead a movement or shake the foundation of power—he was there to assure the donor class that nothing would really change, to convince the desperate masses that normalcy was just one election away. The plan was simple: prop him up, let him shuffle through the motions, and hope nobody noticed the stench of decay.
But you can’t run a country on muscle memory. The old system had already collapsed under its own weight, and the people clinging to it were just trying to slow the fall. Biden wasn’t the answer to the crisis; he was just the last, sad joke of an establishment that had run out of ideas. And now, as the wheels come off, as the same problems fester and mutate, the same architects of decline are standing around looking confused, wondering how it all went so wrong.
Because in the end, the problem wasn’t that they tried to run a zombie. The problem was that they thought they could keep pretending he wasn’t one.
And the best part? These people—the ones who swore up and down that the system was fundamentally sound—still don’t know how to build anything new. They were trained to manage, not to create. They shuffle papers, hold committee meetings, issue vague statements about “restoring faith in our institutions.” But institutions don’t run on faith—they run on power. And the power they once wielded is slipping, fracturing, slipping into the hands of people who understand how to use it far better than they ever did.
That’s the irony of managerial inertia: it doesn’t preserve stability, it accelerates collapse. By refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem—by treating each crisis as an aberration instead of a symptom—they all but guarantee that when the system finally crumbles, it will do so in a spectacular, uncontrollable fashion. And they will stand there, blinking in the rubble, wondering how it all went wrong.
So what now? What comes next, when the people in opposition are incapable of adaptation and the people in charge are a chaotic swarm of grifters, fanatics, and true believers? That’s the real question. Because at some point, the choices narrow: either the system redesigns itself to serve the people, or it collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Either something genuinely new emerges, or we get something far worse than Trump—a version of the same rot, but sharper, smarter, and with none of his clownish incompetence to dull the edge.
And if history is any guide, the people who ignored the warning signs last time will be just as clueless when it happens again.
The System Failed Long Before Trump—Now What?
By the time Trump swaggered in, flanked by his huckster pals and the rancid stench of betrayal, the system had already crumbled into a sad heap of half-dreams and empty promises. Not cracked. Not teetering. Flat-out broken. This wasn’t some accidental slip-up of the political machinery—it was a cataclysm, a slow-motion train wreck you could see coming for years. And yet, the so-called centrists—the beige, bland bureaucrats in their starched shirts and their insipid conference calls—insisted it wasn’t so bad. Hell, they still insist on it. But let’s be real here: they couldn’t put it back together. Maybe they don’t even want to.
The failure had been obvious for a long time—hell, it was screaming at us during the Obama years, and before that, if you were paying attention, if you had any clue what the hell was going on beneath the surface. But no, we were told to trust the process, to believe in the institutions, to hang on while the ship slowly sunk beneath us. The economic order demanded sacrifice, the political game demanded patience, and all the while, the middle class shriveled and the poverty line became an invisible mark no one cared to cross. And if you couldn’t make it? If you were drowning in medical debt, living in a cardboard box with a shitty job and no future? Well, the problem wasn’t the system—it was you. Work harder, they said. Be smarter. Adapt. And if you’re still choking on the dust? Too bad.
That’s not a system, my friends. That’s a fucking trap. A nasty, greedy, soul-crushing trap that keeps you running in circles for scraps, all while the guys in charge sit back, fat and smug, counting the money they took from your back. And guess what? No amount of managerial band-aids, no amount of “reform” from the people who are supposed to manage the wreckage will fix it. They’re part of the problem, not the solution.
So the question isn’t whether we “restore” this hollow, decrepit system. No, that’s the cop-out, the con game. The real question is: What comes next? Will we finally, for the first time in God knows how long, redesign this system to serve the people—not the rich, not the powerful, not the institutions that protect the status quo? Will we tear down the bureaucratic walls and start building something that doesn’t bleed the middle class dry? That means rejecting the slow, painful managed decline that’s been masquerading as governance for decades. It means we stop accepting a future where we’re offered only a slightly slower collapse and start demanding a world built on justice, not just stability.
The old system failed, folks. Not in 2016. Not in 2008. It failed long before that. The real question now is: Will the next system be designed for the people, or will we get stuck in some twisted remake of the same old shit? Because if we’re not careful, we’ll be asked to survive in another version of the same nightmare, and by then, it’ll be too late to fix anything.