Screw It. Let’s Rename the Moon.
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Caligula
14 min read
The article explicitly compares Trump to Caligula, the infamous Roman emperor known for erratic behavior, ego-driven gestures, and abuse of power. Understanding Caligula's actual reign provides historical context for this political comparison.
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Coinage Act of 1873
19 min read
The article mentions breaking 'a century-old precedent against putting living presidents on U.S. currency.' This connects to the history of U.S. coinage laws and the tradition of only depicting deceased figures, providing educational context about monetary traditions.
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Coinage Act of 1965
13 min read
The article mentions breaking 'a century-old precedent against putting living presidents on U.S. currency.' This act and related coinage laws establish the legal framework for who can appear on U.S. coins, providing essential context for understanding the constitutional and historical norms Trump would be violating.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported a grim milestone this week: In Fiscal Year 2025, for the first time in history, the U.S. spent more than $1 trillion servicing the national debt. And the problem’s only getting worse: Given current spending trends, the group projects that annual interest payments will hit $1.5 trillion by 2032 and $1.8 trillion by 2035.
Now might be a good time for one of these parties—or hey, why not both?—to start treating this like the massive systemic problem that it is. Happy Friday.
District of Trumplumbia
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump arrived back in the White House with Caesarian aspirations, eager to bring the power of the entire government under his personal control. But lately, with his domestic political project on the rocks, he’s been acting more like Caligula—spending more and more time on a series of empty gestures intended to spite his enemies and feed his own ego.
Much of this is taking place at the White House itself, which Trump is busy tricking out as his own personal palace/man cave, paving over the Rose Garden to make himself a Mar-a-Lago-style patio and knocking down the East Wing to build himself a ballroom. This week, the president amused himself by installing trollish plaques beneath a row of presidential portraits at the residence, sketching out a brief narrative that reads all of U.S. history as mere prelude to the capstone project of his reign. (Sample text: President Andrew Jackson “was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.”)
But even the White House has not presented a sufficiently large playground for Trump’s ego. His lackeys are suddenly splashing his name everywhere around D.C. Yesterday, Trump’s hand-picked board of the Kennedy Center, which he himself chairs, announced it would rename the historic venue the Trump-Kennedy Center. Earlier this month, the State Department announced it had renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace—or what remains of it after its dismantling by DOGE earlier this year—the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. And in true Roman fashion, they’re scheming up plans to put him
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