PIECES OF WORK: First, the president dropped a bomb!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025

Then he tore into the White House: We’re forced to admit to a secret belief:

We’re forced to admit to the secret belief that our nation, such as it ever was, has already ceased to exist—has already come to a secret end.

“And the war came,” the astonishing President Lincoln said. To our secret eye, to our hidden ear, we almost think we can see and hear an end of days in these two images this morning:

First image: The videotape of President Trump’s brown bomb dropped from the sky

Second image: The photos of the facade of the East Wing of the White House being torn to the ground.

Let's start with the president's bomb:

When we the people voted last fall, did anyone know that a President Trump, in a second term, was going to issue that insult to those who voted the other way? That he would be posting a vivid image of he himself, the American president, dropping human waste on their heads?

(Why on earth—why in the world—would an American president do that?)

Also this:

When we the people voted last fall, did we know that he would take it upon himself, absent consultation or wider consent, to revamp one of the world's most famous public buildings?

Did anyone know that he was going to do those things? Also, is anything actually wrong with either piece of behavior?

With respect to the commander’s brown bomb, Michelle Goldberg saw it a certain way. In full, the startling headline says this:

Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It's a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.

That's what the full headline says. As she starts, Goldberg starts to explain what she thinks she saw in the videotape the sitting president posted: 

Trump Posted a Video of Himself...

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

Before we’re done, we’ll walk you through Goldberg's account of the way that video looked to her. For ourselves, that image conjured renewed intimations of madness, not necessarily in the colloquial sense.

For ourselves, that videotape seemed to suggest that the sitting president was perhaps in the grip of some form of (significant) mental illness (whatever that might secretly mean). As she continues her column, Goldberg takes it a good deal farther than that, in a productive way.

Still and all, let the world go forth to the nations! If the word of others can be believed, quite a few other citizens didn’t see the president's videotape in the way Goldberg did.

Shermichael Singleton, age 35, is a “Republican strategist” and a CNN contributor. In his appearances on CNN, he is routinely MAGA-friendly without being obnoxious or deranged in the Scott Jennings way.

We appreciate Singleton’s dignity—and yes, there’s plenty that Blue America has done, including during the Biden years, that would help explain why tens of millions of potential voters continue to walk the MAGA way.

We Blues have been very slow to come to terms with that fact. Meanwhile, if Shermichael Singleton can be believed, the videotape that the president posted didn’t look weird to him.

For Singleton, the tape seemed funny. It seemed like satire to him.

Yesterday afternoon, Singleton spoke with Jake Tapper. With respect to the bombardier in chief, this is what he said:

TAPPER (10/20/25): The point that he's making, Shermichael, is that he wishes he could drop feces on his fellow Americans.

SINGLETON: Look, this is what I think. I think a lot of Republicans look at this. And I've texted a lot of folks about it. They thought it was hilarious. They thought it was funny. Some of my Democratic friends thought it was a little over the top. But even they acknowledged to me, "You know, I got to give it to Trump. He is good at sort of goading our side with some of these sort of satirical videos" and other memes that he typically would post on social media. It makes him more relatable to the average person.

Even the Democrats saw it as satire! A bit later, responding to a Democratic strategist, Singleton described what he saw at the No Kings rallies themselves:

SINGLETON: Look, I spent about an hour over the weekend looking at some of the images and videos of people who were protesting at the No Kings rally. And it was mostly white people. I didn't see any men. You guys are struggling with that. I didn't see men of color. You guys are struggling with that. I didn't see a whole lot of black people, didn't see a whole lot of Hispanic people. I saw mostly white people. So if I— So as a Republican, I feel pretty confident about midterms next year based on what I saw over the weekend.

He didn’t see any men at all? That almost sounds like what he said!

Singleton omitted one part of the mantra which has been recited on the Fox News Channel whenever No Kings is discussed. He failed to say how old the rally-goers were—failed to say that, based on their advanced age, the rally-goers represent a dying generation which will soon be out of MAGA’s hair.

Saturday, on The Big Weekend Show, it fell to Kayleigh McGhee White, age 25, to recite that mantra. We've seen it said a thousand times since White introduced it:

WHITE (10/18/25): I don’t have a problem with people peacefully protesting, but one thing I noticed was what the group was made up of. I saw very few young people my age, which I thought was very interesting. This was mostly older liberal adults. And that tells me that this movement on behalf of the Democratic Party is really a dying movement. We’re sort of seeing the last gasp of liberalism as a functioning political party here.

It was mostly older people? We’ll guess that White may have noticed that in her production notes more than in any of her personal observations. From there, she went on to recite the talking point recited all over the Fox News Channel:

She said that President Trump must be “the worst king ever,” given the fact that the protest rallies had been allowed to occur.

White offered that recitation at 5:04 p.m. Three minutes earlier, Johnny Joey Jones had dropped a verbal bomb on millions of people who are still, at least technically, his fellow American citizens:

JONES: Good evening, everybody. I’m Joey Jones, along with Kayleigh McGhee White, Lydia Hu and Dr. Marc Siegel. And welcome to this Big Weekend Show.

We’ve got a big story tonight. It’s a Fox News Alert. Millions of far-left protestors are at anti-American rallies tonight across the country, and President Trump closes out his most successful week ever.

Reading from prompter, Jones said those aging liberals were actually “far left.” Then, he hit those millions with his own bomb:

The rallies they attended were “anti-American,” he said.

So said Jones, age 39, and movin' on up at the channel. We thought we might be seeing him selling his Dalton, Georgia soul as he opened The Big Weekend Show with that remarkable comment.

In the process, we wondered if we were seeing Jones agree to become the latest “piece of work" as a major well-known nation continues to fall apart.

Our impression could always be wrong, of course. Could it simply be that Jones was seeing things in precisely the way he said?

That said:

Could it be that Singleton’s conservative friends really did see the president's bomb as funny, a form of satire? We don’t really believe what Singleton said, but could we perhaps be wrong?

Simply put, we the humans aren't all just alike. Yevtushenko started People (in translation) by asserting this:

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
And planet is dissimilar from planet.

Planet is dissimilar from planet? Yevtushenko had never seen a Fox News Channel panel at work, of that we can feel sure!

At any rate, the sitting president had pictured himself dropping fecal matter on his fellow citizens' heads. After that, the walls of the East Wing came a-tumblin’ down.

At one point, Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. Also, Samson pulled a set of pillars down.

As the headline on her column suggests, Goldberg thought she saw the sitting president revealing his deepest impulses—and doing something disordered. For ourselves, we went looking, once again, for possible glimpses of recognition in the DSM.

Is something wrong with President Trump? What could possibly explain his decision to post that astonishing videotape? Also, what exactly may be going on as the walls of the East Wing come tumblin' down?

Trump supporters thought the video was funny, MAGA adherents have said. Was something more primal being expressed? 

With the nation having already reached its end, we're going to take some time this week. We're going to walk you through what Goldberg thought she saw—and we're also going to walk you through what we saw inside the DSM. 

We've already told you our secret belief. Will the government ever open again? 

We can't honestly say that we're completely certain.

Tomorrow: We landed on "Conduct Disorder"—but what could that possibly mean?

With apologies: The transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 has us in a formatting mess. 

It arrived at a very bad time—near the end of a famous republic.