The Poolish - Aftermath Edition, 18 November 2024
All news from now until the sun explodes is Election 2024 news, sorry
Right. So, that happened.
The election didn’t go the way I or anybody else who subscribes to this wanted, but apparently it was what over half of America wanted, so the upside of all of this is that being against fascist totalitarianism is now a niche opinion, which makes all of us interesting again.
So let’s squeeze another roundup in this month, highlighting in equal measure the bad stuff that happened to good people, and the good stuff that happened to bad people, with a tiny bit of bad stuff that happened to bad people, you know, for a treat.
Pennsylvania Sees Its Shadow, Declares Four More Years of Winter
Well, it happened again.
The United States prides itself on a presidential electoral system that’s much more fair than that of other countries. Instead of a lame “popular democracy” which just hands the trophy to the popular kid every time (unfair!) the Founding Fathers established the Electoral College, which is a much more complex system in which the trophy goes to whichever kid impresses Pennsylvania the most.
The reason for Pennsylvania winning the tough job of being the only state that actually matters in a presidential election is lost to the sands of time, especially given that the only thing it’s actually known for culturally is being the setting of the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, in which an average American is cursed to relive the worst day of his life again and again. And again and again, and over again, and over again, and then again, and then again.
And then again, and again, and again, and then again, and again.
And so America, once again, sat and watched from home for the most part of the past grueling twelve months as the presidential candidates just spent the year tag-teaming this one poor state of the union in increasingly comical and desperate bids for its approval.
Elon Musk, somehow the least charismatic billionaire in a world in which Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg also exist, was put in charge of Donald Trump’s “impress Pennsylvania” campaign, which started out with him mostly skipping around a stage like your five year old nephew, but once the drugs wore off and he remembered he’s a trillionaire immune to all laws, he just ended up bribing people instead.
Then America untimately spent the day living through the farce of pretending that the whole six-hours-in-hell horse race thing was real and having to feign shock about who goddamn Kentucky voted for as if it mattered and everyone didn’t just have their eyes glued to that shitty rectangle between New York and Ohio waiting for it to change color.
Nothing else truly mattered. Nobody understands the electoral college anyway—if you live in Kansas or something your one vote outweighs the entire Mets including the coach. After one of Trump’s people called Puerto Rico garbage there was almost a whole week of controversy before everyone remembered they can’t even vote at all.
In the end, of course, Trump won the national popular vote by a phenomenal margin and he’ll make a big deal of that even though in 2016 he lost the popular vote by a phenomenal margin and in both cases the only reason he gets to tell everyone what to do for the next four years is the unpredictable whimsy of, like, two dozen dudes in the home of the world famous… “Duquesne Incline,” apparently.
Weird Nazi Frogman Has a Bad Week
Nick Fuentes, America’s preeminent frog-themed neo-Nazi, who looks and sounds permanently 14 in a way that somehow got even worse when he tried to grow a David Duke mustache, has played a mysterious and shifting role in this election cycle.
A hardcore Trumper back in 2016, and a January 6 insurgent, Fuentes began his 2024 journey as the head of Kanye West’s presidential campaign, a real thing that you’ve forgotten about, that nevertheless resulted in a few historically notable events if you’re way too online for your own good, such as the return of Milo Yiannopolous, Kanye’s notorious dinner with Trump, his bizarre appearance on Alex Jones during which he exclaimed “I love Hitler,” and then the merciful un-return of Milo Yiannopolous.
Fuentes then re-attached himself to the Trump movement, then denounced Trump and declared frog war against him because he went woke or didn’t hate Jews enough or something. Then his war failed because Fuentes only has like 12 fans remaining since the rest of them grew up and got jobs and/or meth addictions through the course of this past decade. Then Trump won anyway so he decided, fuck it, he’s back on the Orange Man Good wagon.
So he gets on Twitter and exclaims “Your body, our choice” as a new slogan for the amphibian incel movement in an apparent attempt to intimidate the grown women of America.
Not only were women not intimidated by the Nazi version of 2005 Zac Efron, but they have taken to countering his proposal in person at his hideous checkerboard brick house in Illinois. The reason we know that it’s an ugly house is because his purchase of this house is public information that is extremely easy to Google.
He’s one step ahead of us, though—he had it blurred out of the Maps app.
That’s right, the one guy in America who you’d think would be the most concerned about staying under the radar done goofed himself into a corner. The bad news, if you’re an Illinois resident, is that your taxes now contribute to the round-the-clock police presence required to make this technically-first-amendment-protected childman feel relatively safe-ish. Of course, if you have an issue with that, you can write him a letter—you know where he lives.
Trump and Musk Announce Plans to Reduce the Size of Government by Adding Departments to It
So then, Donald Trump (who Elon Musk swears up and down did not offer him any kind of quid pro quo for the tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions he offered as well as algorithmic control over his huge captive social media community) has just declared that he’s giving Musk a job in his government.
That job will necessitate the creation of an entire new government department that Musk insists be called the Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E. because he has fetal alcohol syndrome.
If all goes to plan, D.O.G.E. will serve as some sort of task force for eliminating government regulations that Musk deems counterproductive or wasteful. This would presumably also mean Musk will have power over the regulatory agencies that enforce regulations over all the many companies that Musk himself owns and will not be required to divest from because, three months short of even gaining power, this is already the most comically and brazenly corrupt administration in American history.
Trump has also anounced that Vivek Ramaswamy, the man who puts the “sick” in “sycophant,” will co-chair the department. This is a compromise from Musk’s own suggested choice of co-chair, Ron Paul, because again, this is all just a stupid meme dreamed up by apparent adults.
Actual political scholars will note that the Executive of the US Government doesn’t actually have the power to create government departments—that’s more a Congress thing—but this detail is likely irrelevant as America in its wisdom has also voted to give total control of both houses of Congress to Donald Trump, and if that seems problematic then rest assured that two thirds of the Supreme Court are also fiercely loyal to Trump and he is expected to upgrade this number to three thirds during his term.
Ironically, if the Trump administration has any intention of even remotely adhering to the laws of the land, then the D.O.G.E. can’t really possess much actual power, since the President can’t just unilaterally deputize a random South African billionaire in a made up government department. This means, if it happens at all, then the D.O.G.E. will exist as little more than an advisory group, whose advice would be non-binding and ultimately meaningless.
In other words, taxpayer money will be spent on the development of an entirely new and overstaffed department that lacks any actual purpose but to funnel public funds directly into the bank accounts of its billionaire chairmen and generate reams of dead and redundant paperwork. But the memes are 🔥🔥🔥
Young Upstart Easily Kicks Aging Legend's Ass Because This is Real Life
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