Really f**king typical of all you people: #Murica lost its collective bearings over Biden, sits back and does nothing as Trump loses whatever bearings he had left

There is something fundamentally wrong with a populace that, on the one hand, dissolved into a national tantrum in 2024 because the sitting president, a man whose principal defect was the inexorable march of age, appeared momentarily forgetful during a single debate; yet, on the other hand, by late 2025 greets with a shrug the daily unravelling of their self-anointed orange god-king, a visibly deteriorating elder whose lucidity flickers like a faulty bulb.

White, working-class America, by and large (obviously there are plenty of exceptions, just not enough), does not care about competence, mental sharpness, or even basic suitability for office; what they crave and revere is the licence to be as malicious as their hearts incline, unburdened by shame or civic duty. Until 2016, I would have dutifully dismissed the idea as so fantastical and childish that it could not possibly be that simple—but it actually is.

Looking back, so much of the appalling behaviour of so many random people I have been unfortunate enough to know over the years, and the vile ways I myself acted in trying to placate these swine, all makes sense—and yet I am no less staggered. For a bloody decade now, even during the blessed four years when Trump was in exile and a grown man held the helm (a thankless burden, as events made plain), I remain aghast—in a state of perpetual disgust—that so many of you are as wretched, as spiteful, as morally decayed as ever I feared. Nay—far worse.

This nightmare abateth not; it is metastasising. Trump’s devotees will kill—eagerly kill—to enthrone him as dictator-for-life, and nothing in the present climate suggests they will fail. When a nation’s institutions tremble before the phantom of a white, working-class uprising, justice becometh a theatre of cowardice. Were it otherwise, Donald Trump would already be serving a life sentence, accompanied by the entire cohort of witless acolytes who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. And, frankly, by many of those who have enabled, defended, financed, and propagandised this treasonous movement.

Let us not mince words: this sedition endures because the most heavily armed demographic in the country hath anointed Trump as their messiah and awaits only the signal to unleash wholesale bloodshed. Their hatred of the rest of America is so bottomless that what we have thus far witnessed is but the faintest overture.

The Trump regime will order the arrest of Joe Biden, and other high-profile figures deemed as political adversaries, within the coming year. And I expect the public response to be one of mute paralysis—and vigorous approval in many quarters. I likewise anticipate that many of our friends, colleagues, and family members shall begin to vanish, spirited away into the machinery of autocracy… and few will dare speak of it, publicly or privately. Yet through all this darkness, Americans will continue to thunderously proclaim themselves the ‘Land of the Free, Home of the Brave’.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Strip both names from it, for neither merits the honour: a reflection upon the ‘Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

{WP 19 December} ‘Kennedy Center adds Trump’s name to building, despite legal concerns’

The Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: I confess I indulged in no small measure of sentimental reverence for the Kennedy dynasty over many years, but it is time—well past time, in truth—for such nostalgia to be laid to rest. Howsoever towering John F. Kennedy may appear when set beside the present holder of the office—and I do freely acknowledge his true heroism in war—we must at last reckon with the full measure of the man: he was corrupt; his fumbling hand brought the United States perilously close to the brink of a third world war (albeit he was not the architect of that crisis); and he behaved appallingly toward Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, toward Marilyn Monroe, and toward Heaven knoweth how many other women.

The dynasty’s moral deficiencies did not begin nor end with him. Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, held an admiration for Hitler. Ted Kennedy, lionised by many, bore responsibility for a woman’s death. And today we behold Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dragging American public health discourse back unto the intellectual standard of the colonial age—an erstwhile advanced medical system now obliged to genuflect before a man whose understanding is, at best, mediæval.

For generations there hath existed an almost tribal fealty toward the Kennedys within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most especially among the predominantly Irish Catholic working class. Yet these have never been my people. As a nominal Protestant of largely English and German descent, I understood from childhood—keenly and unforgettably—that I did not belong, nor was I welcome, within my overwhelmingly Catholic community situated scarcely ten miles north of Boston. (Think somewhere in the vicinity of Spot Pond). It was no phantom of my imagination; I was told so in the plainest, most wounding terms on countless occasions—most vehemently by the Irish kids, and, to a lesser but still palpable degree, by the Italian ones. Why, then, have I spent so many years idealising the Kennedys, a clan whose mythology I was never invited to share? Only Jacqueline ever embodied genuine grace or dignity.

So let us say it plainly: enough of the Kennedys, and curse the cult built around them. And as for Trump—his name, and that of his brood, deserveth no sanctified place in the public square. Strip both names from the façade. We are not the Soviet Union, and no civilised republic ought to plaster the monuments of its cultural life with the surnames of dubious dynasties.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), somewhere in the vicinity of the Middlesex Fells and severely pissed-off, 19 December 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The DOJ hath released a tranche of the Epstein files, though (predictably) ‘significant portions’ remain obscured beneath thick bars of redaction

image generated via ChatGPT

{The Guardian 19 December} ‘US justice department releases heavily redacted cache of Jeffrey Epstein files’

And against this darkling backdrop, the Trump regime continues its brazen campaign of gaslighting the American public: assuring citizens that prices have fallen when every household ledger says otherwise; indulging in puerile vandalism of official presidential plaques within the White House gallery; and conducting itself with a vindictive frivolity that a majority of Americans either greet with indifference or, worse, applaud as tokens of strength and leadership.

Given such moral torpor, why wouldn’t Trump and his inner coterie presume they can obfuscate even the gravest allegations—those touching upon the exploitation of children? And why wouldn’t vast swathes of the populace respond with a bored ‘eh’, or an enraged cry of ‘fake news’, as though this Pavlovian refrain were a sufficient answer to every horror?

The relative few who persist in clinging to reason and decency are now shouted down with ever-greater fury, perpetually accused of suffering from the fantastical malady dubbed ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. The truth is far simpler and far darker: most of America has no appetite whatsoever for resisting Donald J. Trump or the grotesquely contorted creature the ruling Republican Party hath become. Much like the common Germans who, though not always votaries of the creed, nevertheless shrank from opposing the Nazi dictatorship, so do today’s Americans avert their gaze, either desiring only to be left untroubled or to take this golden opportunity to gleefully hurt—even kill—other human beings.

Thus standeth a nation of some 330 million souls, too cowed, too exhausted, and/or too compromised to confront the appalling likelihood that their president may be implicated in crimes of the most abhorrent nature. It is, in every sense of the word, pathetic. And, evil.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

No more pretences: the majority of the American people either rejoice or shrug their shoulders as the POTUS justifies murder of anyone opposed to him

Imagine but for a moment, if Barack Obama had so much as hinted—let alone declared outright—that a notable conservative or Republican figure had been murdered because his or her deranged slayer had been driven to distraction by the victim’s anti-Obama rhetoric, irrespective of the actual motives or tragic circumstances involved. Imagine, further, one’s disbelief had greater than half the American public responded with a gleeful ‘amen’, or with a shrug of chilly indifference, whilst those who were justly outraged were mocked, dismissed, and threatened with violence. Even a decade ago, in what now feels a more sober age, such a spectacle would have been unthinkable: that an American president would exploit another’s private grief so nakedly in order to menace the roughly forty per cent of the population who oppose him.

We all know precisely what would have followed had this been Obama—or Biden, or Clinton, or even George W. Bush, who long ago fell from favour with the very voters who once rallied behind him in the aftermath of 9/11. But most of all, had it been the black guy. The same #MAGA partisans who now rush to defend Donald Trump’s grotesque exploitation of the deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner—using their passings as a blunt cudgel to chill political dissent—would be marching through the streets with torches and pitchforks, bellowing (rightly, in that hypothetical) of tyranny and persecution. They know it; we know it; the hypocrisy is so brazen it scarcely troubles itself to counterfeit disguise.

Nay, now it doth not hide at all. Beginning in earnest with the January 6 insurrection, accelerating through the 2024 presidential election and the rise of the ‘manosphere’ that presently poisoneth the hearts and minds of young men at scale, and culminating in Trump’s return to office, #MAGA hath cast off any remaining pretences. What remains is an unambiguous supremacist movement: racial, gendered, and theocratic in equal measure. Roughly sixty per cent of the population is being mobilised—a fair number actively, but more commonly by enforcing passivity and apathy—against the approximate forty per cent of us who resist this nation-killing and soul-killing frenzy. I should like to claim some residue of optimism, yet truthfully I cannot summon the least glimmer of it.

We inhabit a profoundly dark chapter of national life when a majority of the public either tolerates or actively revels in a president willing to rationalise the killing of individuals on account of their political persuasions (or, more to the point, that they hurt his little feelings). We are no longer poised at the brink of the abyss; we have passed within its gate. Trump and his coterie manipulate the American populace with the effortless virtuosity of a master fiddler, and mass bloodshed—spontaneous and orchestrated—is not hypothetical, but imminent.

Most disquieting of all is the truth that remains largely unspoken—though I shall articulate it plainly: many of you reading this are not dreading what comes next. NO… you eagerly await it! For forty-eight humiliating years upon this benighted planet I have sensed, however dimly, that most of you are, at your core, rotten and malign; yet I lacked the vocabulary, the conceptual framework, to name the malignancy. Now I can. And I know, with no small measure of grim consolation, that many others have come to the same conclusion regarding people in general… yet I am entirely alone in my recognition and pain.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Trump post making himself the subject of the tragic murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner tells us all we need to know: he urgently must depart office

As matters stand, the millions of bullies, partisans, and sundry miscreants who idolise Donald Trump will not permit him to be removed from office, and the opposition remains far too cowed by their wrath to act decisively. The four years of Merrick Garland’s diffident stewardship of the Department of Justice demonstrated plainly enough that even the US government, law enforcement, and military are scared of a mass uprising of the coalition of the ‘unwashed’ that enabled Trump to come to power. Yet the necessity of casting him from power could not be more urgent. Were Melania anything other than a spent and useless trophy wife, or had any power over anything whatsoever, she would be seeking immediate and appropriate care for her visibly ailing, elderly husband. Instead, the nation is left in the hands of an unstable, deranged figure who leadeth us, step by step, towards the very pits of Hades.

The millions of my fellow Americans who voted for him—especially those of you who did so a second time in 2020 in the middle of COVID, and most tellingly a third time in 2024 (granted, the opposition’s betrayal of President Biden yielded a wretched and pitiful alternative)—ought to have both their heads and hearts examined. FULL STOP! Folk must grow a spine and demand, en masse, that this man resign for the good of whatever remains of the country. They must also call upon the legions who still profess loyalty to him to relinquish the fantasy at last: they backed a loser; they encouraged cruelty; they have erred grievously; and they cannot forever lay blame upon others for their (largely) self-inflicted miseries and myriad failures.

Whatsoever the cost, the rest of us must take a true and resolute stand against those among us who have enabled this degeneration—at the very least since his grotesque mishandling of the most severe public-health crisis in over a century, which he then compounded by fomenting a coup attempt when the election did not go his way. Nay, the reckoning ought to have begun in 2016, when he mocked a disabled reporter on national television. That moment told us all we needed to know about his character, yet millions revealed the poverty of their own by embracing him nonetheless.

And even now—after the passage of a number of years, after the catastrophic failures, after the felonious convictions, after all said and done (or not done)—they double down repeatedly, not from conviction but from spite, for to afflict the rest of us hath become their only animating purpose. The rest of us must, urgently and collectively, cultivate a backbone and cease tolerating this madness: whether from the president himself or from every soul that hath aided him across this ill-starred decade.

Enough.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

A classic entry from the dictator’s playbook: the Trump regime seeks to restrict tourism from forty-two countries. Wider prohibitions will follow in due course in the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’

image generated via Google Gemini

{Reuters 11 December} ‘US travel group, foreign tourists leery of Trump plan to vet social media’

The Trump regime doth now prepare to demand of visitors from forty-two nations a dossier of their private selves—social media histories, phone records, and sundry other proofs that are almost impossible to assemble—before permitting entry into the former United States. It is an act of bureaucratic derangement, economically suicidal and morally shrivelled, yet far from without precedent: for every tyranny, when it begins to tremble, first builds walls—about its borders, about its people, and even about their very thoughts. One can already see the next stages materialising with grim predictability: internal passports, digital censorship, and the slow suffocation of contact with the wider world.

Mad as it is, tourism—once the nation’s great soft power and a pillar of her prosperity—shall be sacrificed without much hesitation. Trump’s rural, nationalist faithful will greet the ruin as virtue, imagining it a purgation of alien influence. ‘Purity’, in their lexicon, means exclusion: a fantasy of whiteness and dominion wherein only certain sorts of foreigners—white Afrikaners, perhaps, or those who can afford a $5 million platinum visa; rich folks will largely be exempt, of course—may pass through the gates.

But this, too, follows the pattern. Who complains more about tourists than those who greatly rely on their spending? Who wounds themselves more eagerly than the zealot who mistakes his own suffering for righteousness? We are merely witnessing the culmination of a pathology long in gestation: a civilisation so devoured by spite that it would rather collapse upon itself than concede the humanity of others.

Nick Fuentes, the twenty-something anti-Semitic, weaselly-voiced agitator who visited Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s exile, tells Piers Morgan he is ‘tired of pretending’ Hitler was not ‘really f**king cool’, despite also declaring him ‘a paedophile and kind of a pagan’. {Mediate 8 December}

Trump may move to direct federal agencies to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III substance, in spite of opposition from Republicans and the usual procession of prudes, worrywarts, and meddlesome busybodies. {WP 11 December}

Disney has acquired a $1 billion stake in OpenAI and is poised to become the first major media conglomerate to license its characters for use in video-generation technologies. {NYT 11 December}

New England’s climate is warming faster than nearly anywhere on earth. {The Guardian 4 December} 

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Trump insists he is ‘FIXING’ the affordability crisis, despite all available evidence indicating quite the opposite

image generated via ChatGPT

{The Hill 6 December} ‘Trump says Biden to blame for affordability crisis: “I’M FIXING IT”’

Such an egregious falsehood—one that anyone who has set foot in a grocery store or gas station knows to be demonstrably untrue—nonetheless passes unchallenged within his circle, for his supporters will dutifully echo any absurdity, however brazen, so long as it serves the puerile objective of ‘owning the libs’. Neither he nor they exhibit the slightest concern for the welfare of the broader citizenry.

Trumpism has long since metastasised into a Christian-nationalist, predominantly white supremacist movement, determined to subject the entirety of the American populace to its tyrannical will. If Trump declares that two plus two equals three, one is expected—indeed compelled—to affirm that it is three. That is the trajectory upon which the former republic now finds itself.

And the millions who cast their ballots for this orange demagogue are receiving exactly what they sought: the persecution and marginalisation of all who fall outside their narrow, exclusionary tribe.

“The grocery checkout line will now be a battleground where state officials control what millions of Americans on SNAP can buy… directly from a playbook written by white plantation owners in the South.” {Baptist News 25 November}

Employers in the former US have cut over 1.1 million jobs in 2025, 54% higher than 2024; tech sector haemorrhaging fastest. {CBS News 4 December}

Elon Musk in hiding, claims he is the most vulnerable in the former US for assassination behind his former partner-in-crime. {IBT 4 December}

Ex-British PM Liz Truss resurfaces as a YouTube grifter, her new series pitched in earnest to American right-wing populists. {The Guardian 5 December}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Optimism hath little soil: a large and ever-growing plurality of Trump 2024 voters express extremist, hard-right leanings in poll

image generated via Google Gemini

{Manhattan Institute 1 December} ‘The New GOP Survey Analysis of Americans Overall, Today’s Republican Coalition, and the Minorities of MAGA’

A disquieting proportion of GOP voters are willing to embrace conceits that had long been relegated to the feverish margins of our public life—averring that the Holocaust was but a hoax, that the moon-landing was but a cunning masque, that the attacks of 9/11 were ‘an inside job’, and that vaccines be the very fountain of autism. More than half do yet maintain that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulently contrived against Donald Trump, a belief impervious to evidence and judicial review alike.

Yet more grievous still, some seventeen per cent of Republicans and Trump-aligned voters are reckoned to harbour devoutly anti-Semitic notions, a vice most sharply found among the younger cohort. Alas, among Democrats the figure rises to twenty per cent, and in both camps these numbers are growing: the future estate of Jewish safety and dignity within the former United States standeth, by any sober measure, in most ominous and perilous uncertainty.

And let us not forget: there is every reason to assume that a certain proportion of those surveyed were not wholly candid about the extremity of their convictions. This is invariably the case—in polling, in public discourse, and in the unguarded corners of daily life. Always. The past decade or so, during which so many individuals’ true colours have bled through with startling clarity, hath rendered this truth almost painfully obvious; only now, instead of recoiling from the rot thus exposed, most appear content to embrace it.

Nihilism rules the day, and we stand a long, long way from any conceivable moment—if such a moment will ever come—when the tide may turn back toward the relative sanity and civic composure once enjoyed in the America of earlier decades. One might say this equilibrium reached its apogee in the 1980s and 1990s; and though I freely concede that my judgement may be coloured by the fact that I grew up in those years, it remains, by any rational assessment, a period in which the nation was stronger, its people more resilient, and American power at its undisputed zenith. My instincts tell me that we now inhabit the terminal stages of the republic, and that optimism hath little remaining soil in which to grow.

And what, then, is to become of this fractured multitude, all these bloody people, when the edifice finally collapses outright? A nation whose citizens despise one another is singularly ill-equipped to weather a total societal unravelling; indeed, even the most harmonious civilisation would struggle to withstand the gathering HELL into which the former United States is, day by day, further descending. 

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.