Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It’s becoming impossible to pretend that Donald—our sundowning, grievance-powered, Florida-retired-but-still-somehow-president emeritus of chaos—is aging with anything resembling grace. We keep hoping, in some delusional national fantasy, that he might mellow into a folksy elder statesman, telling long meandering stories about golf carts and overcooked steak. Instead, he’s morphing into the exact same person he’s always been: a man marinated for decades in entitlement, bigotry, and the kind of tantrum energy normally reserved for toddlers denied a second juice box.

Reporters get called stupid. Governors get slapped with outdated and offensive insults that should’ve died somewhere around the time rotary phones did. And we all know—we all know—that just beneath the thin eggshell of his self-control lies an entire subterranean warehouse of racist, sexist, homophobic, and just plain vile vocabulary he’s itching to unleash. If his mental dams ever crack, it won’t be a leak; it’ll be a Category 5 sewage spill.

One shudders to imagine what he’s rehearsing in the privacy of his brain—what he wants to call Barack Obama, or Jasmine Crockett, or Pete Buttigieg, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You can practically hear the gears grinding as he searches for the one slur he thinks will “own the libs,” unable to say the quiet part out loud only because his handlers are still quick enough to yank the mic.

And so here we sit. Watching this slow-motion demolition derby of ego, insecurity, and declining impulse control play out in real time. Observing a man who never learned to be decent become even less so. Witnessing a public meltdown that would be sad if it weren’t also dangerous—and exhausting—and utterly on brand.

It’s not a presidency anymore; it’s a live-streamed, unending shit show. And the worst part? None of us are surprised.