Big Beautiful Bullshit, America’s Game-Show Government, and London Glee About Zelensky

So now Congress is so sloppy and moronic they don’t even pretend to read the bills they vote for. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted Tuesday that she regrets voting for the One Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill now that she knows it blocks states’ abilities to regulate AI. GOP Congressman Mike Flood is smiting his vanilla brow that, “unknown to me,” a provision had somehow magically appeared limiting judges’ power to hold people in contempt for violating court orders.

This must be a high-water mark in political absurdity–or is it just another example of the crap caliber of our so-called public servants? Was there anything more lame than House Speaker Mike Johnson recounting his puzzlement that the now off-stage ogre Elon Musk, after a spate of bro-friendly texts to Johnson, was suddenly calling the bill “a disgusting abomination”? Trump blasted that Musk always knew what was in the bill, to which Musk lobbed back, “False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!” How gratifying for TV ratings and social media memes that the always-anticipated ego clash between these two childlike ball clangers is now officially in full swing.

American politics is now the arena of performative, subservient clowns who regard legislation as the unsexy grunt work that even twenty-something interns are too busy running their representatives’ social media accounts to bother with. As Succession’s Logan Roy told his distracted, over-indulged adult children, “you are not serious people.”

The fact that the bill was supposed to be read and digested overnight in eight hours was in itself an index of a game-show government. Any bill that’s 1,037 pages long must still be an unsynthesized vomit draft (as we used to call such pieces at The New Yorker) of crammed-in afterthoughts and half-cocked Trump campaign promises. If DOGE was supposedly so brilliant at identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, it could have started with language. Instead of relying on armies of teenagers to slash the serious work and accomplishment of government agencies, Congress should have used AI to scrape the brains of out-of-work, middle-aged editors to whack the inflated prolixity that suffocates meaning and hides legislative time bombs. My husband Harry Evans’s last book Do I Make Myself Clear?, which itemized examples of “flesh-eater” phrases (cf. “at this point of time” instead of “now,” or “give consideration to” instead of “consider”) and “zombie” nouns that devour a simple verb (cf. “implementation” instead of “implement,” “authorization” instead of “authorize”), would be an excellent primer in how to cut 500 pages to 20. Except 20 pages is probably 19 more than Marjorie Taylor Greene has ever read in her life.

Running on Empty

When did America become a joke country? Perhaps when it first elected a joke president, a chief executive who can only absorb information when it's presented in pictures or learned from his own advisors appearing on Fox & Friends. It is now clear that Trump regards knowledge itself as the enemy. If you know things, it might make you pause before enacting legislation that will clearly be deleterious. And that seems to suit the majority of American people just fine. Trump’s kingly proclamations, from yo-yoing tariffs to travel bans, seem to be greeted with The Big Shrug.

By the end of Trump's second term, America’s mighty institutions of learning and civic responsibility will be reduced to a teetering national theme park. And ten years after he’s gone, when Trump’s feckless desecration of governmental and cultural gravitas has worked through the system, the hollowed-out institutions themselves may still have august names like the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, the National Institutes of Health, the Library of Congress, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, but like a movie set of a wild west town in the Arizona desert or the Bates Motel from Psycho on the Universal Studios lot, they will be pasteboard replicas with nothing behind them. Tourists and archeologists of the future, themselves impoverished by trying to pay off the compound interest on the multitrillion-dollar national debt, will tramp around the facades and wonder what it was like when real work, serious debate, and rigorous intellectual achievements created a mighty democracy that was the envy of the world.

Zelensky Shows His Cards

I've just come back from London, where it’s hard to underestimate the glee the Brits feel about Ukraine’s sneak attack on Russian airfields, effectively a cut-price Pearl Harbor, with smuggled-in $600 drones zooming off the backs of container trucks, obliterating, by Kyiv’s count, over 40 Russian warplanes and causing $7 billion in damage. It took the short, scrappy, rough-voiced leader of a war-weary Eastern European country to remind the free world what it looks like to stand up to two superpower bullies –Putin in Russia and his fanboy in the Oval Office. Among Brits, who are marinated in what it felt like to be alone in World War II, when they were so dependent on the soaring oratory of Winston Churchill to battle on against the advancing Nazi oppression of Europe, there is a particular affinity for the beleaguered Zelensky. The threat of Russian aggression feels much less notional in Europe than in the U.S. It is stunning to think that the hitherto neutral Sweden is full bore repurposing the old Cold War base and now tourist spot of Gotland island in the Baltic Sea into a key NATO military outpost as a first line of defense against Putin’s belligerence.

Three months after his disgraceful dissing in the White House, disgust still resounds in the UK over how the Ukrainian war hero was treated by the swaggering Trump and his boot-licking VP. Remember Trump’s sneer, “I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States”? Oh really? Zelensky pulled off a daring and nimble magic act without the U.S.’s mega-billion-dollar military hardware that will soon be trundling down Constitution Avenue in a parade supposedly in honor of the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, but now subsumed by Trump into his own 79th birthday celebration. Zelensky’s triumph may be short-lived but, at a minimum, his pride is avenged. Glory to Ukraine.

Live Chat on Friday

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