DEMISE: "I tremble for my country," he said!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2026

He managed to get that one right: Does President Xi believe that our nation is in decline? As he huddles in his Moscow safe rooms, does President Putin believe the same thing?   

As we noted yesterday, President Trump explained Xi's suggestion away during his recent sleepover. But are we merely in decline? Might we already be a "failed state?"   

Are we still a functioning nation state? Pew has started to wonder about that! As of last October 1, Pew had long since noticed such oddities as this:

Congress has long struggled to pass spending bills on time  

Large chunks of the federal government, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the National Archives, are shut down because there’s no money to keep them open, and federal workers are facing possible mass layoffs. The new federal fiscal year began on Oct. 1, but Congress didn’t pass any of the dozen annual appropriations bills it’s supposed to enact. Nor did lawmakers pass a stopgap spending law to buy themselves more time.   

Congress’ chronic inability to follow its own appropriations process is hardly new. In the nearly five decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in place, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 1995 and 1997. And even those last three times, Congress was late in passing the budget blueprint that, in theory at least, precedes the actual spending bills.  

Say what? Congress hasn't managed to pass a budget in time since 1997? But then again, whatever! And then again, also this, from a different source:

 It is an attack by white people against the very concept of Black representation. It is Jim Crow 2.0.

That was Elie Mystal, appearing on Velshi, speaking about that recent court decision. Mystal went to say this:

Unless white people get over themselves, unless they reverse themselves and their ancestors and their voting habits since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they will get exactly the racist country that they have long desired.

These White People Today! They need to get over themselves, he said, and then again they also need to reverse their ancestors.

On the Fox News Channel, they luv/luv/loved those remarks! When you wonder how the sitting president's approvals can possibly stay in the mid-30s (or may be even higher than that), we'd advise you to think about many possible explanations, not excluding the vague but deliciously righteous suggestion that it may be 1892 all over again.  

Full disclosure:  

It isn't 1892, and we haven't exactly found our way back to Jim Crow again. That doesn't mean that we haven't already become a failed state, because it may be that we have.   

With respect to that possibility, a question must be asked:

Does anyone think that our current rolling collapse is going to end right here? Does anyone think that it's going to end with the $1.8 billion "compensation fund," or with the agreement by the Justice Department that the sitting president—with all his peculiar financial behaviors—will of course never be audited?  

("No Kings?" That's what millions of protesters perfectly sensibly said.)

Stumblebums, please! Is anyone sure that we're going to have a normal set of elections this fall? Why would anyone doubt the possibility that schemes might already be in place—schemes which flow from ancient human desires, ugly schemes which have been designed to undermine our normal election procedures?  

Are we already in a state of demise, but we just don't know it yet? Is it possible that we just can't see or possibly say it yet? 

In this Best Picture-nominated 1999 film, Bruce Willis plays a character who doesn't know that he has already died. Might it be that way with us, in our state of demise or decline? 

In Camus' famous novel, The Plague, that's pretty much the way it was for the good and decent citizens of the fictional sun-splashed seaside city, Oran. As a plague invaded their city, here's how they didn't respond:

Camus, La Peste (The Plague)

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves. In other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

Is that the way it is with us? Are we forgetting that ancient dreams of conquest and overthrow still lurk in the hearts of some modern women and men?

Is that the way it is with us when we rant and yell about Jim Crow 2.0? Or when a couple of white guys sittin' around talking, while getting drunk or getting stoned, come up with a groaner like this:  

‘Couch Money’: Bill Maher and John Fetterman Defend the Cost of Trump’s Ballroom   

Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) took turns defending the White House ballroom that President Donald Trump is building, with Maher saying it doesn’t make sense to get angry about it when the project will cost the equivalent of “couch money” to taxpayers.

The comic and senator talked about the ballroom at the start of Monday’s latest episode of Club Random.

“This thing won’t even be finished by the time he’s done!” Fetterman said. He then quipped Trump wasn’t building a “Dave and Buster[s],” which Maher got a kick out of.   

“Meanwhile the money is like one angstrom unit of a percentage point of what our budget is. So it doesn’t matter anyway,” Maher said. “It’s couch money.”

He added the price tag for the ballroom doesn’t sound outlandish to him. “$330 million is about what a ballroom costs,” Maher said. 

Bill has been pricing ballrooms! What in the world have they done with the highly perceptive Bill Maher?  

Motherfrumpers, please! Building a ballroom may (or may not) have been a good idea. Beyond that, the original (stated) cost of the ballroom may (or may not) have been completely OK.  

The warning signal in this event was not the idea-in-itself! It was the lunatic way the sitting president went about his treasured project—demolishing the East Wing of the White House on a series of weekday afternoons, after swearing that he'd do no such thing and after checking with no one.  

The pair of randos sat around saying a ballroom might be nice—but like many such denizens of our own Oran, they'd blown right past the main point. It was the remarkably peculiar way our president chose to blow the house down—the disturbing way he'd elected to do so without notice and no questions asked!

Ladies and gentlemen, might we speak? The sitting president seems to be mentally ill, and that's a dangerous state of affairs.

The sitting president is mentally ill? Like so many other savants, the stoners blew right past it! It's very hard to miss that fact, and yet the thought leaders of our declining society all seem to be eager to do it! 

Test scores are falling in our own Oran, but we the humans were never built to perform the task of spotting such things in the first place.   

The sitting president is mentally ill? We won't attempt to count the ways, but let us say this about that: 

People who are (severely) mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill.

People who are (severely) mentally ill quite often don't know that they are. Also, a mental illness is an actual illness, much as a physical illness is.   

In fact, a mental illness often is a physical illness, linked to genetics and to human physiology.

A mental illness frequently is a physical illness? As we've noted, the leading authority on this matter limns it as shown:

Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder," while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from the brain or body.

And so on from there. We should also mention this:

Mental illness ("mental disorder") should not be cause for insult. But our American journalistic culture is quite underdeveloped with respect to this complex topic, and insult is where we typically go when mental illness is colloquially implied.

"I tremble for my country," a president once said.

He seemed to think that a just God wouldn't tolerate our nation's misconduct forever. In our view, he pretty much got the ethics of that one right, adjusting for religious belief and for historical context.

No one living today engaged in the conduct to which he referred. But isn't there ample reason to tremble for our country today? To tremble for the fate of a nation which may already be a failed state? Which may already be The United States of the Bruce Willis Character?

Citoyens, a very important figure seems to be mentally ill—and that is always a personal tragedy. 

We'll guess that President Xi is aware of that fact—that he has factored it in.

Tomorrow: The late Barney Frank's lament?