The Guaranteed Failure

Epstein Epstein Epstein

The Guaranteed Failure

We played our 11:00 p.m. show at Pikes Peak International Raceway last night after spending twelve arduous hours traversing the highways and byways between Sturgis and Colorado Springs. Twelve hours. Rain, traffic, fatigue, fast food, aching bodies and four musicians packed into a van with everything required to make a living doing what we do. Somehow, despite the weather and the rolling clusterfuck of interstate travel, we arrived in time to entertain the car enthusiasts for exactly one hour. We played, we packed up, and now I’m at the Radisson near the airport, grateful beyond words for a real mattress that doesn’t squeak, leak, deflate or gradually lower me toward the floor like the inflatable torture chamber I slept on all week in our little cabin on the prairie. I’m awake, obviously, because the after-show adrenaline is still coursing through my body, and because it took us another half hour to get here. Then I had to shower, having decided this morning that I simply wasn’t walking the 0.3 miles to the communal bathroom on the prairie. I had reached the point where personal hygiene had to take a back seat to physical survival. So after being freshly washed and lying on an actual mattress at nearly three in the morning, foolishly believing I might call it a night, or an early morning, I glance at my phone and see Donald Trump presiding over another cosplay law-and-order extravaganza at the Nassau County Police Academy.

There he was, the convicted felon masquerading as the patron saint of police officers, his administration staging another taxpayer-funded campaign rally disguised as official government business. The entire thing was a pageant of grandstanding, grievance, authoritarian foreplay and shameless ass-kissing, with Trump surrounded by law enforcement officers while speaking as though the rule of law were merely another gold-plated prop bearing his name. Then, in front of a room filled with cops, including many women, Grandpa Caligula became fixated on the “young, beautiful girls” in the White House. He repeated it over and over: young, beautiful girls, gorgeous girls, girls who supposedly approach him to thank him for keeping them safe. He even acknowledged that he probably wasn’t supposed to say it, which is Donald Trump’s way of demonstrating that somewhere inside the rancid tapioca pudding of his brain, a warning light briefly flickered before being smothered by narcissism, lust and the complete absence of shame.

An 80-year-old president, whose name has been reported among tens of thousands of references in the released Epstein material, stood before law enforcement officers and publicly marinated in his fascination with young women and girls. He knew how it sounded. He told everyone he knew how it sounded. Then he kept going because Donald Trump has never encountered an impulse vulgar enough, indecent enough or catastrophically stupid enough to resist. The Associated Press confirmed the bizarre tangent, although it remained unclear exactly whom he was talking about. Perhaps that is because there is no sensible explanation for an 80-year-old man repeatedly slobbering over “young, beautiful girls” at an official event supposedly devoted to public safety. Perhaps the explanation is exactly as revolting as it sounded. Either way, watching him attempt to climb out of the hole by continuing to dig was like watching a bloated possum perform its own autopsy.

What a craven, despicable fuck Donald Trump is.

His name is splattered throughout the Epstein files, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, the name he desperately wants the country to stop saying, and yet there he stood, surrounded by police officers, incapable of preventing himself from objectifying young women. You would think that even this pulsating hemorrhoid of a human being might possess enough primitive survival instinct to avoid repeatedly praising “young, beautiful girls” while the Epstein story hangs over his head like a chandelier in one of his tacky ballrooms. Apparently not. This was not locker-room banter, an offhand remark caught on a hot microphone or one of his diseased little Truth Social eruptions launched from a toilet at four in the morning. This was the president of the United States at a prepared public event, with cameras rolling and law enforcement officers arranged behind him like rented campaign foliage.

Trump’s relationship with Epstein and the precise meaning of every appearance in the files deserve responsible investigation, not careless conclusions, but the publicly documented history makes his fixation neither harmless nor remotely amusing. At the absolute minimum, any other politician with one functioning molecule of judgment would recognize the grotesque optics and change the subject. Donald Trump sees the optics, admires himself in them and asks whether they make his ass look powerful. He has spent his entire public life treating revulsion as applause delivered by people who simply haven’t learned to appreciate him yet. Disgust doesn’t restrain him. It excites him. Every decent person recoiling from his behavior merely confirms his belief that he remains the most important creature in the room.

The event was ostensibly held to release the FBI’s 2025 crime statistics, which showed that violent crime fell 9.3 percent, murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell 18.1 percent, and robbery fell 18.5 percent. Those are genuinely encouraging numbers. They represent people who were not murdered, families that were not shattered and communities that became safer. Naturally, Trump treated every improvement as his personal achievement because, in the funhouse mirror of his narcissism, sunrise occurs only because he grants the sun permission to appear. He called it the largest single-year decline in violent crime since 1937 and then claimed that “every single number” was the lowest in recorded history, which is not what the FBI reported. The 2025 murder rate was 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956, while the broader decline in violence began in 2022 and continued through 2023 and 2024, before Trump returned to office. But why allow chronology to interrupt a perfectly good self-coronation? He is attempting to take sole ownership of a multiyear trend that began during the Biden administration because stealing credit is the only category of theft Donald Trump believes should be protected by presidential immunity.

This is the same Donald Trump who dismissed falling crime numbers during the 2024 campaign as lies, fake news, fraud and statistical fiction. When the numbers were politically inconvenient, they were cooked, fabricated and probably smuggled across the border by transgender Marxists carrying fentanyl. Now that he can drape himself in them, they are sacred scripture delivered from heaven on golden tablets bearing his face. There is no contradiction because Donald Trump does not possess convictions in the ordinary sense of the word. He has appetites, grudges and bowel movements. He says whatever feeds the appetite of the moment, and five minutes later he will say the exact opposite with the same swollen certainty. Most of us experience some physical discomfort when we lie. There is a knot in the stomach, a pang of conscience or at least an awareness that the truth exists independently of our convenience. Trump experiences none of that. His conscience apparently died of neglect decades ago and was buried beneath a golf course without a marker.

For Trump, truth is whatever sentence happens to be crawling out of his mouth. The previous sentence is dead to him. The next sentence owes no allegiance to reality, memory or basic sentence structure. The lie simply needs to remain upright long enough to collect applause. Then another lie is shoved onto the stage wearing the dead lie’s clothes. He lies with the casual confidence of a man ordering room service because he has spent his entire life surrounded by cowards, sycophants and paid employees whose continued livelihoods depend upon pretending that the emperor’s orange makeup is clothing.

That may be the most disorienting thing about watching him for those of us who spend our lives attempting, however imperfectly, to tell the truth. He lies so effortlessly that it can make a conscientious person dizzy. There is no pause, no embarrassment and no concern that someone in the room might know better. He lied directly to police officers about their own profession, attacking New York’s bail-reform law by claiming that a person can murder someone or rob a store and be immediately dumped back onto the street. The officers in that room know perfectly well that serious violent offenses are not treated that way. They understand the statutes, the charging process and the difference between pretrial release and Trump’s imaginary municipal shuttle service for murderers. Yet they stood there while he insulted their intelligence and made a mockery of their training. Apparently, admission into Donald Trump’s little uniformed fan club requires grown professionals to pretend they have forgotten how their own criminal-justice system works.

The officers performed their assigned roles beautifully. They laughed when Trump called Democrats “Dumocrats,” a joke operating at approximately the intellectual level of a third-grader who has recently discovered that words can rhyme. They booed Kamala Harris, booed the sitting governor of their own state and obediently redirected their hostility toward journalists when Trump pointed to the press and called them fake news. Pavlov had bells. Trump has grievances, racial resentment and a microphone. The response is every bit as conditioned.

This was not merely tacky political theater, although it was certainly tacky enough to make a casino lounge in Laughlin look like the Vienna State Opera. Uniformed law enforcement officers are supposed to serve the public without regard to party, ideology, race, religion or whether a citizen voted for the incontinent demagogue currently demanding applause. Police departments across America are constantly asking communities to trust that the badge represents public service rather than partisan power. In one afternoon, those officers reinforced one of the deepest fears many Americans already harbor: that some people wearing the uniform do not see themselves as guardians of the entire community but as the armed constituency of one political movement. When police officers boo half the country on command, they should not act mystified when half the country wonders whether those officers will protect them with equal commitment. Trust is difficult to build and remarkably easy to incinerate, especially when the match is being held by a convicted felon standing beneath a law-enforcement banner.

Then Trump offered them what sounded suspiciously like a bargain. “Would you like qualified immunity, everybody?” he asked, and they cheered. The question itself was obscene. He dangled legal protection before uniformed officers like a carnival barker offering free steak knives. He promised that he would always protect it, presenting a complex legal doctrine as though he were handing out presidential permission slips for impunity. Qualified immunity is supposed to shield government officials from certain civil claims under defined circumstances. It is not a personal gift from Donald Trump, and it is certainly not a blanket assurance that officers may do whatever the hell they want as long as they remain politically loyal to the Grand Yam.

But loyalty was the actual commodity being traded in that room. Stand with me. Cheer for me. Laugh when I ridicule my enemies. Boo the journalists documenting what I say. Pretend my lies are brilliant insights. In return, I will stand between you and accountability. That was not a celebration of professional policing. It was an aspiring authoritarian flirting with the coercive power of the state, promising protection to the men and women who carry badges and weapons if they will help protect him. Apparently, “back the blue” now means “scratch my back while I dismantle the Constitution, and I’ll make sure accountability never inconveniences yours.”

Trump repeatedly called himself a “common-sense guy,” which is a little like a tapeworm describing itself as a nutritionist. He claimed that he was guided more by common sense than conservatism. That phrase is not accidental. It is a cheap rhetorical narcotic designed to put the listener’s critical faculties to sleep. He does not want people to examine whether his assertions are accurate; he wants them to believe that accepting his assertions proves they are reasonable. If you agree with Trump, congratulations, you possess common sense. If you ask for evidence, question his authority or notice that he said the opposite two years ago, you must be irrational, radical or deranged. It flatters the audience into joining the exclusive club of people who supposedly “get it,” while facts become the irritating fixation of overeducated communists and other people burdened by functioning frontal lobes.

Once that frame is accepted, any cruelty can be marketed as common sense, any lie can be excused as plain speaking, and any unconstitutional seizure of power can be repackaged as the obvious thing any sensible president would do. Deport children? Common sense. Vilify immigrants? Common sense. Turn uniformed officers into partisan stage scenery? Common sense. Treat political opposition as treason? Common sense. Apparently, common sense now means agreeing with whatever Donald Trump’s lower intestine has communicated to his brain during the preceding thirty seconds.

Division remains his most dependable weapon because it is the only thing he has ever successfully built. He once again used “Palestinian” as a slur against Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, and talked about sending him Palestinian clothing. The remark was not a serious argument about Israel, Gaza or American foreign policy. Serious arguments require knowledge, curiosity and the ability to think beyond the next burst of applause, three qualities as foreign to Donald Trump as humility, fidelity and paying contractors. It was Trump doing what he always does: taking the identity of an entire people, stripping away its history and humanity, and turning it into a costume his followers are invited to ridicule.

He does it to immigrants when he calls them animals and invaders. He does it to women when he reduces them to faces, bodies and whether he considers them beautiful. He does it to disabled people when he mocks their physical movements, which is where my personal contempt for him began and where it will remain. He does it to Palestinians, Muslims, Black officials, journalists, political opponents and anyone else who can be shoved into the hate machine long enough to produce another round of applause. Donald Trump’s only authentic talent is identifying an existing wound, jamming his finger into it and telling the crowd that somebody else made the mess.

He called New York Attorney General Letitia James a “real slob” and “essentially a dirty cop,” insults so revealingly adolescent that one expects him to follow them by claiming she smells funny. He portrayed Democrats and communism as a threat greater than the world wars, Pearl Harbor and September 11. Think about the breathtaking stupidity and obscenity of that comparison. Millions died in the world wars. Americans were slaughtered at Pearl Harbor. Nearly three thousand people were murdered on September 11. Yet Trump treats these wounds as rhetorical confetti, tossing them into the air whenever he needs to portray domestic political opposition as an existential enemy. He does not honor history; he strips it for parts and pawns whatever he can carry. He does not unite Americans around shared sacrifice; he weaponizes that sacrifice against Americans who refuse to kiss his ring and compliment the smell.

Meanwhile, ordinary people are paying more for the war he continues to defend. With the national average for regular gasoline hovering above four dollars a gallon, Trump told Americans that paying “a tiny little bit more” was perfectly acceptable because of Iran and declared that he would never apologize. A tiny bit more. Spoken like a man who has never stood at a pump watching the total climb while mentally subtracting groceries, medicine or a utility bill. Spoken like a man whose experience with gasoline consists primarily of being transported past stations in an armored limousine while other people pick up the tab. Donald Trump’s contribution to household economics is to make life more expensive and then sneer that the sacrifice is tiny because he will never personally feel it. He plays dress-up commander in chief, working families absorb the cost, service members absorb the risk, and Donald Trump absorbs another round of applause for refusing to apologize.

He also repeated his ludicrous claim that America is the “hottest country” in the world, as though the United States were a nightclub and he were its geriatric owner standing behind a velvet rope, deciding who gets into the VIP room at the stroke rehabilitation center. But even his own company is beginning to resemble an evacuation. Monthly visits to Truth Social reportedly fell 36 percent in July compared with the previous year. Trump Media reported a second-quarter loss of $238.1 million against only $1.7 million in revenue. Its scheme to sell Wall Street firms advance access to Trump’s posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 a month reportedly attracted about ten customers. Ten. Somewhere, a lemonade stand operated by two six-year-olds and a Labrador is outperforming the alleged business genius of our time.

Once again, we have the classic Trump business model: staggering losses, pitiful revenue, shameless monetization of political office and a dwindling audience listening to him insist that everything is tremendous. He could bankrupt a machine that prints money, blame the machine for being woke and then sell his followers commemorative pieces of the broken printer. This man has spent decades falling upward through an American culture that routinely mistakes shamelessness for strength and wealth for intelligence. He is not a brilliant businessman. He is a carnival midway game that has somehow convinced the suckers that losing proves the game is rigged in their favor.

Trump concluded by saying that New York was headed toward “guaranteed failure.” As is so often the case, he was describing himself. His presidency is the guaranteed failure: morally bankrupt, intellectually hollow, economically reckless and sustained by an endless search for someone weaker to blame. Then he performed that awkward little dance of his, the physical equivalent of a malfunctioning animatronic lounge singer trying to shake loose a kidney stone, and waddled off the stage, leaving the officers behind him to contemplate whether they had just participated in an official law-enforcement event or auditioned for the security detail of a collapsing cult.

As I lie here at nearly three in the morning after twelve hours on the road, an hour behind the drums and a long-overdue shower, I keep thinking about how profoundly unlike Donald Trump most Americans really are. Most of us want uncomplicated things. We want to do right by our neighbors. We want our families to be safe, our children to attend good schools and our paychecks to cover the mortgage, groceries, gasoline and medical bills. We want to go to work, come home and believe that if catastrophe arrives, the people around us will still possess enough humanity to care. We do not awaken every morning wondering which minority group we can publicly humiliate before breakfast or which national tragedy can be repurposed as an insult before lunch.

There are certainly people who enjoy Trump’s cruelty because it entertains them and gives them temporary permission to feel superior to somebody else. There are people who hear an 80-year-old man babbling about “young, beautiful girls” and somehow conclude that the real problem is liberal sensitivity. There are people who will defend absolutely anything he does because admitting they were wrong would require a degree of courage they would rather spend waving flags and purchasing merchandise. But I refuse to believe sadism is the natural condition of most Americans. Somewhere beneath the propaganda, fear and tribal rage are human beings who once loved people they have now been instructed to hate.

I do not write these essays because I harbor some delusion that Trump’s most committed disciples will suddenly slap their foreheads and announce that the convicted felon, habitual liar, sexual predator and aspiring autocrat they have worshiped for a decade might not be a particularly good man. That enlightenment train left the station years ago, crashed through the guardrail and is currently selling commemorative hats at the bottom of the ravine. I write for those of us who see what is happening and sometimes feel exhausted, angry, frustrated and profoundly alone. I write because silence is participation, and because I need the reminder as much as anyone that truth remains truth even when the most powerful liar in the world has an entire room of uniformed officers applauding him.

Facts do not become false because Trump ridicules them. Lies do not become true because frightened politicians repeat them. Cruelty does not become common sense because an authoritarian says the phrase often enough. And a room full of adults does not become patriotic simply because everyone stands at attention while a malignant narcissist wipes his feet on the Constitution.

In two and a half months, we decide what kind of country we are willing to become. Lies will not keep us safe. Turning against our neighbors will not make groceries affordable or put gasoline back under three dollars. Surrendering our judgment to an authoritarian will not produce the freedom he promises. It will only make us accomplices in whatever he destroys next. History eventually catches up with the people who insist they were only going along, that they did not really mean it, that they were merely following orders, laughing with the crowd or protecting their careers. We are remembered not only for what we believed we were building but for what we were willing to help tear down while pretending not to notice the wreckage.

That is why November we must vote as if our lives the lives of our kids and grandkids depends on it. We cannot control what Donald Trump says tomorrow, which group he dehumanizes next or what fresh obscenity slithers out of the septic tank he calls a mouth. But we can slow the destruction. We can strip power from his congressional enablers. We can remind every uniformed officer who cheered partisan hatred that their oath is to the Constitution and the public, not to Donald fucking Trump. He wants us staring across the street at our neighbors and seeing enemies while he and his accomplices accumulate power and pick our pockets. We do not have to participate. We can look up. We can choose one another. We can refuse to be dragged into the moral sewer merely because the president has built himself a throne there.

Donald Trump is the guaranteed failure. America does not have to be.

Michael Jochum

Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Music, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition