Rescue Me!
Whatever happened to the reprieve of summer and that heavenly stasis of being missing in action? Mitch McConnell, I totally get it. Sit there in your pajamas and wave. It’s your God-given right to shut the fuck up for a bit. I don’t need to hear your measured monotone or see a close-up of your turtley visage in a FaceTime video. Back off with your proof-of life demands, Governor Beshear.
Book Busters
I just looked at the upcoming book list for September, which, if I have anything to say about any of these titles , means I should start reading them now. Have publishers gone mad? Do they have secret information that books will be banned after the mid -terms? Every single writer I have ever met or admired is publishing a non-fiction book in September: Michael Moritz, Jacob Weisberg, Sarah Longwell, Anand Giridharadas, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Robert Harris, Gloria Steinem, Gordon Brown, Anthony Scaramucci. My head is exploding with both a desire to read their books and the panic that I can’t. Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel about Roy Cohn? Bound to be bracingly relevant to the continued parsing of the Trump psychodrama, but this epic sucker is 528 pages in print and 17 and a half hours as an unabridged audiobook. The Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel’s memoir Roll the Calls? Sure to be a juicy, cultural noise machine requiring some knowing take, but what? And how am I supposed to produce deep, furrow-browed Freedom of the Press thoughts about the memoir of Evan Gershkovich, the WSJ Russia correspondent who was incarcerated for 16 months in a Putin prison? Writers always know when you are lying about reading their book.
The worst of all this is that I am supposed to be writing a book myself, the third in what I am now grandly calling “my royal trilogy.” I wrote The Palace Papers in 2022 during Covid, that vanished time of forced isolation and zero social obligations. I could stay at my desk in my oversized T-shirt for weeks, downloading info from some grandee trapped in Norfolk with no alibi to escape a zoom. But now, as well as being an author, I am, like everyone else these days, a “content creator,” which means a bottomless pit of favors to seek and pledges to return them. There is no such thing as a source anymore. Everyone is hoarding their insights for their own podcasts. (A mudslide of 14 million episodes released in 2026, so far.) A cocktail party has become a feral place with Influencers hunting prey for video chats and Instagram reels. I am hopeless at saying no when people wheedle in through the WhatsApp back door. As Lena Dunham wrote in her irresistible memoir Famesick, “Never mind that one coffee date beget another, one favor beget another, one check beget another. If you make yourself out to be a bottomless resource, people will frack. They can’t help it.”
Gimme a Break
The tyranny of Trump over our peace of mind is that he doesn’t live unless he’s talking – and he never sleeps (unless someone else is speaking. cf. the recurring meme of his drooping eyelids recently at Cabinet meetings, and Lindsey Graham’s memorial service today.) The joke on all the reporters who have his private cell number is that it’s an all-access pass to worthless logorrhea. When there’s no one to actually talk to, he thumb-fumes, posting his random brain bursts in the middle of the night.
There is no private zone to Trump’s life and he does not recognize that need in others (which might be why VP JD Vance was loath to take a paternity leave). “John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of,” Trump fulminated on Truth Social on Monday as an exhausted Congress prepares to wash up on the beach of August, like Odysseus after he’s escaped Circe’s pigs. Even the piously agreeable Speaker Mike Johnson is seriously fried. “I’m sick of this shit,” he snapped about his wayward caucus last Thursday, in front of the elementary-school-age son of a Colorado representative, before dropping to his knee to apologize for this poor civics lesson.
One of the late Lindsey Graham’s assets as a Trump whisperer was that his barren personal life made him always available to his master. In an interview after Graham’s death from an aortic dissection on July 11, Trump said the late senator “just didn’t stop…He was a total workaholic.” It was an index of Washington culture at its bleakest that when Graham felt he was having a heart attack, he called his scheduler for help.
Trump seems to be feeling his own mortality lately. The Iran war has done him in. He’s in so far over his head that all he can do is rage like a tired ox. None other than his own former Fox fan boy Bill O’Reilly told Trump last week that the president needs a breather and should take a month’s vacation. Imagine the bliss of turning the Trump sound off, like Mitch McConnell has.
Thank you for so artfully expressing what it is like to live in America right now. There is so much going on it is exhausting. No rest for the weary when the news is all about the chaos, the corruption, the cruelty, and the cluelessness of our Commander in Chief.
I am dying to read the third book in the Tina Brown Trilogy!!!