Dwain Northey (Gen X)

What’s Next for This Administration? Maybe Fingerprinting Your Feelings, a Loyalty Oath to the Orange Monarch, and a Mandated MAGA Fitbit?

It’s worth noting—before we even get into the latest authoritarian fever dream—that it hasn’t even been twelve months since the Toddler-in-Chief re-entered the White House. Not a full year. Not even a respectable stretch of time where historians might say, “Well, at least he tried.” No, in under a year, he’s managed to treat the federal government like a Lego tower built by someone else and then kicked across the room mid-tantrum.

Like any seasoned preschooler who’s been told “no,” he immediately went for maximum destruction in record time. Norms? Shattered. Alliances? Torched. The economy? Tossed into the blender with tariffs and shaken violently while insisting it’s actually a “smoothie.” Immigration policy? Reduced to a combination of fear, detention, and the bureaucratic equivalent of screaming “You’re not the boss of me!”

And now—because chaos apparently wasn’t moving fast enough—we arrive at the newest demand:

If you want to visit the United States, please submit ten years of your social media history, every phone number you’ve ever had, and the addresses of your immediate family. Why? National security, of course. Or more accurately, to determine whether at any point in the last decade you committed the unforgivable sin of being mean online about the Orange Menace.

Because in under a year, this administration has made it crystal clear that the greatest threat to America is not climate change, not economic inequality, not pandemics or infrastructure collapse—but someone, somewhere, typing “LOL” under a picture of Dear Leader.

Picture a British tourist at JFK, clutching a passport, being interrogated over a 2016 tweet:

“He looks like he lost a fight with a tanning bed.”

And the agent sighs, slides the paper across the table, and asks solemnly, “Do you still stand by this statement?”

This is what governance looks like when a fragile ego is mistaken for a national priority. When policy is driven not by evidence or expertise, but by the emotional regulation skills of someone who responds to criticism the way toddlers respond to nap time—with rage, denial, and throwing things.

So what’s next for Dear King Donald?

An international loyalty registry? A mandatory apology tour for foreign leaders who didn’t clap enthusiastically enough? A full-scale US-against-the-world war, not over resources or ideology, but over vibes?

Because when you’re less than a year into your term and you’ve already tried to dismantle trade, immigration, diplomacy, civil liberties, and basic reality itself, escalation isn’t a possibility—it’s the brand.

And the truly astonishing part isn’t that this is happening.

It’s that we’re expected to pretend this is normal.