I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a psychic rockstar, my intuition sharp enough to cut through the noise of the universe. But lately? My crystal ball’s gone foggy, and my prized bingo card – once a dazzling map of what’s next – is now just a sad, blank sheet staring back at me.
Here’s the rub on what I never saw coming – what wasn’t on my bingo card:
I didn’t have on my bingo card that an American president would cherish a gifted photo of a hostile foreign leader – gazing with the warm affection of a KGB librarian – as though it were the last surviving Beatles autograph, and then hide it from his own staff like a teenager with a contraband magazine.
The White House getting a demolition-derby makeover, courtesy of a president with a bulldozer and zero chill, all while live-tweeting the structural damage.
That America would elect a president whose face bore the exact shade of a forgotten traffic cone or a particularly ambitious cheese puff.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that the most scrutinised medical report in the world would describe a leader’s health as “perfect,” “the best in history,” and somehow involve a mysterious cognitive test designed to identify dementia – a test he, by his own account, aced with flying colours, naming a whale, a giraffe, and the colour orange in record time.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that the National Weather Service would have to issue a public correction to the President of the United States over a hurricane forecast he’d “edited” with a Sharpie, as though meteorology were merely a polite suggestion.
I certainly didn’t have on my bingo card that a presidential press conference would be derailed not by a question about war or the economy, but by a prolonged, deeply considered defence of the president’s ability to drink a glass of water with one hand.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that a president would view the world map not as a document of diplomacy but as a Monopoly board, developing a sudden, voracious real-estate appetite for Greenland.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that the same president would gaze northward at Canada – a nation known for its peacekeeping and politeness – and muse about annexation with the casual deliberation of someone ordering extra cheese on their Big Mac.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that we’d one day receive a national security briefing, not on cyberterrorism, but on the apocalyptic menace of windmills. That these graceful, whirling sentinels of clean energy were secretly carcinogenic death machines – a “scientific discovery” apparently made not in a lab, but in a thought bubble.
I did not have on my bingo card that a president could rewrite the laws of mathematics by reducing the cost of medications by 1500%. Archimedes would have been impressed.
I didn’t have on my bingo card that the worst president in history would boast an approval rating of 97%. That’s not a polling number – it’s a statistical miracle on par with a rainstorm of frogs solving a quadratic equation.
And finally, I did not have on my bingo card that a president would post an AI-generated video of himself dropping faeces on his own citizens. I’m embarrassed I didn’t see that one coming – but who could have anticipated the specific digital alchemy required to weaponise a deepfake into a faecal bombardment? This wasn’t just a failure of intuition; it was a failure to comprehend that the highest office in the land would one day become a platform for a scatological drone strike, rendered in unsettling 4K resolution.
The bingo card is no longer a card – no longer a tool for prediction. It has become a tapestry of the unbelievable. We are not marking squares anymore; we are documenting a new reality where the absurd is the baseline.
Future generations will need it to understand that yes, it all really happened – and no, we still don’t know why.
My original card (boring, hey?)
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Karoline Leavitt:”Mr President, Mr President, the people say that they don’t want a King and that they didn’t vote for a King”
Trumper: “Tell the people we hear them and we will as their Emperor avoid the use of the term King”
It’s going to take a better comprehension of human nature, the major actors within it and the assessment of their positive and negative natures and tendencies, which is more than just the ‘known’ sciences.
https://eventi.unitn.it/en/thomas-kuhn-human-sciences-critique
There are also ‘other’ means of comprehending and understanding human nature which for many are not that mainstream.
Whilst we all contain aspects of positive and negative characteristics an example here would be Henry 8th, if you understand the tools and psychology of people, their DOB and many other aspects that make up their personal map, you can get an indication of what’s most likely.
T-Rump cannot loosen his grip as an influencer, nor the tiers of influencers he engages as his ‘flunkies’. It’s a relic of his survival under his father. He honed it, used it and abused it through the panderings of banks and financiers to his grandiose schemes of extraction and his innumerable bankruptcies. And so it goes on.
Then when weakened and faltering, along came The Apprentice, a fantasy type-cast to perfection, and appealing to an audience of wannabe Americans inculcated into survival brutality.
From that point on there would be no stopping him. Under the steely grip of mimesis as described by René Girard mimetic desire and the individual identity myth, his narcissism in its execution would know no bounds.
In a tango with American hubris, exceptionalism and xenophobia, his self-righteous bluster would invariably see his rise to POTUS, and by pressing harder via America’s second-to-none social media and propaganda machine, his second rise.
Under a fraught and dysfunctional Constitution and electoral regime, his cowing of the GOP along with his brutal executive excesses are crushing an already crumbling America. His ignorance and braggadocio have brought America global ill-repute, and sewn doubt in his constituents. And the scheming corporations relying on him and government devices are in a conga line falling like nine-pins.
Anathema to America’s idea of itself, T-Rump naming himself ‘King’ and now ‘Emperor’ marks his end, and with it, the end of his America, like all the ‘Western’ kingdoms and empires before.
How can he rise to visit God and reside in heaven, when a century or more ago America designed its own God and modeled itself as heaven in a self-destruct scheme that has clearly attained its apogee. For him, it’s all downhill from here, and for America as a whole unless it declares its pretense and ditches its hegemonic desire.