War of the Roses Meets Dr. Strangelove
Or: How I Learned to Stop Sleeping and Love the Collapse
It’s 2 a.m. on a Friday morning, and I can’t sleep. Again.
I’m a world-class insomniac. My brain has never found the off switch and, for reasons known only to Satan, tends to kick into overdrive exactly when I most need it to shut down. It’s exhausting.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, is more exhausting than life since Donald Trump slithered down that golden escalator in Trump Tower, still butt-hurt from the comedic beating Barack Obama gave him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was going to show everyone. He was going to run for president.
No one took him seriously. Hell, we still don’t. Not those of us with a functioning prefrontal cortex. He’s not a serious person. He’s not even a serious businessman.
And yet, that man has lived rent-free in my head since the night the glass ceiling held and democracy cracked instead.
The right mocks us for having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” like our concerns are just hysteria, irrational, exaggerated, detached from reality. But let’s be honest. What we have isn’t derangement. It’s pattern recognition. We’ve seen what he is, what he does, and what he’s capable of.
If anything, it’s the right that’s deranged, gaslighting themselves daily, pretending every tantrum is strategy, every lie is truth, every abuse of power is patriotism.
What we have, my friend, is Trump Exhaustion Syndrome.
I spent the better part of my day tweaking an article about the dissolution of the bromance of the century. No bromance has ever been this big or beautiful. It was huge. No one’s ever seen anything like it.
God, I really need to stop doing a Trump impression. It makes me want to throw up.
Anyway, every time I thought I had it locked in, another flaming arrow would come flying across my feed. A new post. A new headline. A fresh piece of absurdity that somehow made everything worse.
And I’d have to start over. Again.
Because with every tweet, the story shifts. The stakes morph. The surrealism deepens. And you’re left with that particular kind of dread that comes from being shocked, but not remotely surprised.
This has to be the most bizarre, exhausting Twilight Zone episode ever written.
Some days it feels like I’m trapped in an endless scroll. Doom on demand. Dread on autoplay.
I tell myself I’ll stop. I’ll unplug. I’ll go outside and touch grass or whatever the wellness people scream into their ring lights.
But five minutes later, I’m back. Thumb twitching like I’m refreshing the apocalypse.
The algorithm doesn’t care that I’m exhausted. It just wants me enraged.
And rage is profitable.
Being politically awake in this country is like having a second job with no benefits, no paycheck, and no days off. You clock in with every headline. You clock out when you’re too hoarse to scream anymore. And the HR department is just a gif of Mitch McConnell slowly glitching into the abyss.
I didn’t apply for this job. I was born into it. And quitting feels like surrender.
Somewhere in another timeline, I’m asleep right now. In that version of America, the president reads, the billionaires shut up, and democracy isn’t hanging by a thread made of memes and despair. But here in this timeline? We’ve got a rocket man with buyer’s remorse and a former president who’s functionally a walking subpoena. And somehow they’re the victims.
I laugh. Because what else is left?
But I’m so, so tired.
And it’s not funny anymore.
It used to feel like a bad political play. Now it’s just dinner theater at the end of the world. The actors are drunk, the set is on fire, and someone gave the villain the nuclear codes and a podcast. And we’re still clapping. Still pretending this is normal. Still sitting in the audience, too stunned, or too shattered, to get up and leave.
That’s the path. We laugh, we scroll, we cope, we collapse. And somewhere in between, we keep writing. Because maybe the only thing left more stubborn than hope… is exhaustion that refuses to give up.
