The state of the union is... busted

Musk and Trump are sabotaging America, and we must be the ones who save us.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A transcript of the L O L G O P response to the State of the Union address, as delivered by L O L G O P, LOLGOP-Mich., on March 4, 2025:

The state of the union is that I can’t stand it, and I know they planned it.

The wallet inspectors have taken over America

My fellow Americans, as our nation nervously sits or doesn’t sit for our annual performance review, I must give us all a solid “Needs Improvement.”

You’re all doing your good enough. Who’s to judge? You’re taking care of you and yours, I suppose. Haven’t melted down any nuclear reactors or flooded any cities permanently. Keep it up.

Collectively, however, we are getting our ass beat. An anti-democratic faction of billionaires and their lickspittles who have seized our government are succeeding in gutting everything that made this country the envy of the world.

First of all, the billionaire coup is kicking democracy’s ass at home. The undeniably illegal action of shutting down USAID and starving the organizations this wonder of modern society funds has now been hung up in the Supreme Court for almost a week, suggesting that the Republicans in the majority will effectively rule against Article 1 of the Constitution existing because strict construction.

And the billionaire coup is kicking democracy’s ass abroad. The coup is doing this by illegally impounding funds Congress approved to defend Ukraine and by attempting to hand that same country to the worst tyrant of our time. The coup also effectively kneecapped NATO, possibly forever, by continually threatening our allies over manufactured bullshit that even Trump wasn’t spouting before the election.

In a constant state of unnecessary narcissistic escalation, the Elonald Administration has launched a trade war against our closest trading partners. This trade war makes no sense unless your goal is to create mass economic “hardship” and put America’s auto industry on the life support that kept it alive in 2008. Or, worse, you intend to pull the plug on every car company except… one.

And that’s just the beginning.

Our social compact is crashing

A private citizen—a particularly lawless and exploitative private citizen—has illegally seized the taxpayers’ wallet.

He did this after marshaling $45 billion to buy a presidency, a crime against democracy committed thanks to the cracks jackhammered into our government by 50 years of conservative domination of the Supreme Court and the vulnerabilities slipped into society by Silicon Valley’s ruthless pursuit of scale over substance. The result of this unprovoked, unnecessary, and unfolding cyber attack on our country’s operating system is that for the first time in the history of the public, Social Security beneficiaries—in huge numbers, tens of millions perhaps—may not get the checks they spent their lives earning, for months.

In short, the Nerd Reich/Project 2025 plot to destroy American democracy for the almost exclusive pleasure of Silicon Valley billionaires and fascist fundamentalists is progressing almost without a hitch.

It’s purposely impossible to count all the ways our country is now being sabotaged by those who currently hold power. Marcy Wheeler, who inspired this speech, came up with at least five, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. isn’t even mentioned. Yet purposely gutting the vaccine scheduling that essentially created modern society presents the single most immediate risk, perhaps, of an all-out war on science that is strip-mining the most innovative and reliable scientific engine that has ever existed on earth. Don't forget that anyone who can get pregnant now lives as a second-class citizen, condemned to watch your body legislated to absolute submission or death. And trans people are being hounded in nearly the exact ways the Nazis went after trans people in the early 1930s.

The social compact between the people and our government has been severed at key arteries and risks rotting unless immediate action is taken.

The good news (not much)

The good news is that we are still alive and free to blather like this. The even better news is that the people are waking up. The best examples are the rousing welcome Republicans got at their town halls and the #TeslaTakedown,

America is dying of terminal right-wing brain

But, as David Roberts noted, the same piss poor information environment that allowed Elon Musk to buy the 2024 election persists. And if we’re going to be honest, we must admit that more people probably listened to Elon Musk’s slobbering interview with Joe Rogan last week than can in any way describe the coup that’s taking place inside of government right now.

The biggest communications problem we face right now is that our situation is unbelievable. It’s so unfathomable and unbearable that people refuse to understand that it’s happening, though the stock market has decided that, for now, it can no longer bluff.

Elon Musk could buy Trump the presidency by winning only a majority of one group—Americans who consume no news. He did pretty well with those who consume “a little” or a “moderate amount,” too.

Harris only won a majority of those who consume a great deal of news, like you. And me. We’re jacked. Not this jacked.

And we’re also a bit fried, both by the reality of our losses and the dominance of the Republican media machine that now includes Rogan, MMA, and everywhere dudes like to think porn and wrestling are real.

The purchase of Twitter has proven to be the final blow of the half-century-long effort to destroy the sort of consensus that existed during the rise and reign of television. In an era of the Fairness Doctrine and a loose commitment to actually “objective” news, television created a media that was as left-leaning as educated voters. The right first sought to destroy and then replace that consensus. It has now succeeded.

Everything we see online orbits around reacting to a Republican interpretation of the news. And much of it is consumed in right-wing methods: bad memes, bro podcasts, and dunks. The idea that every news thing needed a screaming Republican has now been usurped by the notion that screaming Republicans are the protagonists of the news who only require theater criticism. Meanwhile, the only people who have any agency are Democrats who must answer for other people on a vast spectrum of the left and non-cis-white-fundamentalist America, who likely hate said Democrats and/or vice versa. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership in Congress often seems to be communicating from a hostage situation only they know about.

The Republican capture of our imagination created the baffling paralysis where the most mockable and loathsome human beings—orange carnies and pale nerds acting the jocks in 80s movies—are hardly ever mocked in a piercing way by mainstream culture. Instead, bro comedy has been optimized for billionaires’ pleasure, like an LLM that spits out one joke that would be impressively bad even for a weaker pack of third-grade bullies.

The result is that the Democratic Party's brand is shit. It’s so bad that almost no one wants to think of themselves as one of “them.” The party is roiling with posts and PowerPoints about how to get rid of key coalition members. The multifarious existential crises have barely softened the divisions. Instead, many keep arguing that the way to win back the people is to offer plain-brand, heartless interpretations of Republican bigotry masquerading as policy. This strategy is completely at odds with the base of the party, which is progressive and inclusive, like the vast majority of America. And that majority would be far bigger if anyone spent a fraction of the billions being firehosed to rot our brains with uncut fascism.

But the people will decide

The question that will be decided by our Semiquincentennial is whether or not we can keep the “We” in “We the people.”

Things are likely to get extremely bad, extremely quickly.

“Expect more suffering, more fear, less security and less happiness,” Thomas B. Edsall wrote. “In other words, expect the worst.”

We know that’s inevitable when Trump—or any Republican rich kid baby man—is president. Whatever it is will be worse than hunting neighbors for toilet paper or snorting horse paste.

But the question is, can we break through the right-wing rot? Can we inform our neighbors, our loved ones, and ourselves enough to take the right actions?

You can do one thing now.

You can be the person who makes sure that everyone understands what is happening on our dime in our government for no particular reason other than two father-starved dudes who want to be Son and Daddy Kings to force us to endure them spit-roasting the Constitution indefinitely. In the shadows, their doctors and handlers jack them up more and more, then stuff them in their costumes and make-up for another freak show where you wear a child like a bulletproof vest and feed your addiction to humiliation—feeling it and dishing it out. Anyway, tell Elon he sucks at Quake if he’s listening.

We have to set it straight, this Watergate

In this moment that we all hoped to prevent, we gotta accept the advice Mr. Lamar tried to give Mr. Drake. We must be humble.

No one has all the answers, though Kelly Hayes probably links to them all.

I’ve been very critical of my Senator, Elissa Slotkin, who is giving the official Democratic Party response to the State of the Union. But I will admit that she knows how to win. I sensed it when I spoke to her on a podcast in 2017. She won one of the closest, if not the closest, swing districts in the nation, three times. Not easy. You do that by running a bit against the party, focusing on your national security credentials, and making bad votes occasionally, I guess.

She also won when Kamala Harris lost Michigan, but with fewer votes than Harris. She keeps pointing out that she won on the “same ballot as Trump,” but she seems to miss the fact that she won because the Harris campaign delivered every possible Democratic vote. Harris lost because Elon hit a group of unlikely voters, a population Democrats have never adequately invested in.

We must immediately adapt to Elon's warping of the game. This is not the time to divide the party. Now is the time to preach to our choir the story we all must tell America to save America.

That has to be a story that unites the left and speaks to every American who wants democracy to continue. Its appeal has to reach out and grab non-voters in way that at least matches Muck’s fuckery.

I’m going to stop being humble now.

The question to ask

We must find our way into people’s brains to activate survival instincts. Start with your wise or smart loved ones who just seem numb to the crisis.

Many people don’t want to be told anything, even people who aren’t die-hard Trumpsicles. But you can always ask a question into the air.

You could ask, “Who do you think Elon Musk is working for?”

The only correct answer is “We the people.” And the proper follow-up is, “What if he doesn’t leave?”

And then maybe you can remind your stepdad that the only reason America exists is because the people of this land need no king.

No one else can do this for us

The state of the union is busted. Now we must decide whether to surrender what the best of us have built or rise to put it all back together.