Here’s a quick recap of Donald Trump’s low-key actions in the should-be slow month of August: rolling back childhood vaccine requirements, attacking mail-in voting, threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center and suggesting he would bomb American allies such as Oman, as well as all of Iran.
“God, it never ends with this dude Trump,” Stewart lamented. “I’ve never seen one person work so much and fix so little. It’s exhausting in a way that’s difficult to articulate,” which is why one of the stories from August stuck with Stewart.
That would be the plight of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the huge aircraft carrier carrying more than 5,000 US sailors and marines, which recently docked in Thailand, rusted and corroded by the elements, after 286 days at sea.
“This is what we look like as Americans inside after 18 months of this presidency,” Stewart joked next to a photo of the run-down ship. “I want you to think about the visible, tangible, actual, indisputable, factual signs of corrosion on this ship.” Trump, meanwhile, claimed the ship was “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of”.
“It’s not!” Stewart exclaimed. “The actual Abraham Lincoln is in better shape than this ship! A ‘beautifully maintained, beautifully taken care of’ ship doesn’t look like the abandoned bridge near my high school where we used to smoke weed.
“It’s this, the relentless denial of reality that is one of the elements eating away at the foundational load-bearing structures that hold this country together,” he added.
The other corrosive element? The memes. “Please make it stop,” a deeply fatigued Stewart pleaded before playing the clip, posted to official government accounts, of Trump crossing out the name “Lake Ontario” and writing “Lake America” in Sharpie amid escalating trade tensions with Canada. “You can’t! That’s not how things work!” Stewart shouted. “You don’t settle complicated international agreements by writing just a new name on the map and expecting everyone to just follow along.
“Why are we trolling them?” he wondered of the Trump administration’s needling of Canada. “Is that the plan? To troll them into submission?” —Jon Stewart
https://idiocracy23.blogspot.com/2022/08/1001-ways-to-make-america-great-and.html
“A combination of Bukowski’s Last Night of the Earth and Orwell’s 1984.”
