The Dumbest Timeline

An Obvious Explanation For What's Happening In American Politics

These days, if you're someone who listens to a lot of sports podcasts, you might be familiar with the idea of "the brightest timeline." This is shorthand for talking about the possibility that everything that could go right will go right, as in The brightest timeline for this year is that all our rookies develop into incredible players, none of our aging veterans gets injured, the whole team coalesces into a unit capable of playing beautifully together, and we destroy every other team on our way to the championship!

As far as I can tell (from doing minimal research), the idea of a "timeline" in pop culture comes from a 2011 episode of the sitcom Community, in which one of the characters (Abed) speculates that if the theory of multiverses is true (the idea that there is an infinite number of universes out there, one for each of the infinite different possible ways that everything could turn out) someone has to be living in "the darkest timeline," aka the worst multiverse.

Now, I don't know about any of that, and I can't even remember if I've seen that episode of Community, but I've begun to fear that we may in fact be living in the dumbest timeline.

As we embark on an exploration of this timeline, it's important to remember that the vast majority of people are not stupid. They are smart, and they are adept, and most of them are extremely competent at operating in the spheres of their lives to which they choose to devote their attention.

But human behavior writ large? This ­– as novelists and playwrights and filmmakers have long felt it's vital to point out – is a different matter.

In human behavior writ large, as a wise man once put it, there's a fine line between clever and stupid. As groups, as societies, we walk a razor's edge between joyous, broad-minded humanity and absolute base idiocy.

And recently, we in America have stumbled fully into the latter. We are in a moment of radical decadence, unhinged stupidity, stultifying nincompoopery, a moment at which the cruel gods of the cosmos are pointing at us as they howl with laughter.

Why would I say such things?

To help you understand, let's start with that strange mania that runs through our national thought like a skewer through a kabob: efficiency. If you come from someplace other than America, you may not be aware of the details of our approach to this mania, but in general, the line of thought foisted on us by a long line of conservative "intellectuals" who claim to believe in it goes like this: The government is inefficient. What kind of organizations are good at being efficient? Businesses! Therefore, we should run the government like a business and put the businessmen in charge.

Now, I'm sure there's a slightly smarter timeline out there in which people chuckle at the basic silliness of this idea, but in ours – the dumbest timeline out of an infinity of them – they instead nod wisely and say things like, Yup, makes good sense to me.

In actuality, however, this argument is like saying that because horses are faster than humans, if we really want to win the Indy 500 we should hire a horse to drive our car.

In one of those other, less moronic, timelines out there, when people hear this argument, they nod patiently, smile, and point out that governments and businesses are actually nothing alike.

The point of governments (at least democratic governments, of which we used to have a pretty good example here in America) is to do things like protect their citizens, keep order, provide for the common good, and promote freedom, which is, as the historian Timothy Snyder has put it, is the value that makes all other values possible.

The point of businesses, on the other hand, is to make money, because any business that does not turn a profit (or successfully con its investors) will soon find itself out of business.

On top of this, it is not axiomatic that people who make it to the top of the business world are good at anything, or at least not anything productive.

Up until he was arrested for fraud, Bernie Madoff was seen as a brilliant prince of finance. Before his arrest, the horrifically monstrous Harvey Weinstein was regarded as a business wunderkind in Hollywood. Elizabeth Holmes talked herself into several billion dollars by convincing people that the medical science that had existed before the dawn of her particular genius was all stupid nonsense…and then she too was arrested and convicted.

In the smarter timelines, people see examples like these and understand that perhaps climbing to the top of the slippery pyramid of money isn't the best qualification for someone who wants to run the government. But in our dumbass timeline, people see all of this and say, Yup, what we need to do is find us a right-dandy businessman to come in and save our bacon. Hey, what about electing that Donald Trump feller?!

And we did!

So what has Trump, in his infinite wisdom, done to transform America into a business, as all those folks reading the Wall St. Journal (which wrote that "Mr Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on message much less stage a coup"…in their article laying out the case for him to be elected President) have been clamoring for since their grandpappies got the first family seat on the New York Stock Exchange?

Trump has made the single largest government contractor in America, Elon Musk, his closest advisor and shadow president; this is also known as putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

On Friday last, Herr Trumpf fired at least 17 Inspectors General, whose jobs are to monitor various government agencies for fraud and abuse.

He has announced that he has the imperious power to suspend whatever governmental funding he doesn't like, and has tried to buy out federal workers, by sending them a note plagiarized from one Musk used to buy out the workers at Twitter, a move of breathtaking and inarguable business genius that caused that company to lose some 80% of its value.

Folks, I have some sad news for you. Over in the smarter timelines, people are laughing their asses off at us.

But they're not just laughing. In those other timelines, people are actually confused about why any of us over here in dunceland find any of this surprising. You see, in those timelines, people know strange and magical things, like how to fucking read. Over here, though, that's a lost art, like using an adze or being courteous to strangers in public.

You see, it was clear that all of this was going to happen. Many people wrote about it. None of it was secret. And beyond this – because memory itself seems to have been another casualty of descending into our dimwitted timeline – Trump has done it all before.

This is, after all, the guy whose entire career is based on fraud – he founded a fake university, for the love of god, and was forced to pay $25 million to the students he defrauded in the process – so of course he would turn the government into a golden shower of money for himself and his friends and fire all the people, like Inspectors General, who are supposed to prevent him from being able to do that.

But in this timeline, in which we can apparently neither read nor remember anything that happened before that last stertorous commercial for a football game – Playoffs! Yeah! I'm going to wear a fake jersey with someone else's name on it and scream at my television while our President takes a quick break from grabbing women by the pussy to halt all federally funded cancer research because I'm virile! – the fact that this is all happening appears to have come like a bolt out of the blue onto the head of a caveman.

As an example, take the response of perhaps the dumbest people in this, the dumbest timeline, to Trump's entirely predictable behavior.

I'm speaking, of course, of Republican Senators.

When asked about Trump (illegally, by the way, but what's another crime for this guy?) firing the Inspectors General, here was the response of the Honorable Shitforbrains Mike Rounds of South Dakota: "I heard it, I have not looked at it and I don’t know what it all entails. Honestly, I would just be guessing at this point about what that actually entails. I’ll wait and find out what that means in terms of other people stepping in."

One might think this single quote would make Rounds the Michael Jordan of simpletons, but one would be underestimating the competition. Because here comes the Honorable Asshat Susan Collins of Maine, charging forward with the even more stupendously moronic “I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission it is to root out waste, fraud and abuse. This leaves a gap in what I know is a priority for President Trump. So I don’t understand it."

You fucking idiots! You cretins! You have one fucking job, for which WE PAY YOU $174,000 a year! To help run the government! And you've decided that the best possible way to do that is to pretend you have no idea what's going on?!

I have it on good authority that over in one of the smarter timelines – and we're not talking about a bunch of Nobel laureates over there, just a teensy bit smarter than us ­– Slightly Smarter Mike Rounds said, Yes, I'm aware of it, and it seems clear that the President has overstepped his Constitutional authority, and Slightly Smarter Susan Collins said, Actually, I know exactly why the President did that – because he wants to remove anyone who can prevent him from using the federal government as a piggybank for him and his oligarchic friends. We'll be convening hearings on the matter tomorrow.

But not us. We get the dumb Rounds and Collins because we live in the dumbest timeline.

And what about that erupting pustule J.D. Vance?

Not only is our J.D. Vance the stupidest of every possible J.D. Vance that has ever existed, he is somehow even stupider than the host of Republican politicians he leads farting and belching into the august buildings of our republic every day to defile another piece of our history and tradition.

Here is Vance a week before the inauguration, opining on whether or not Trump would pardon felons who did things like use tasers on cops or beat them in the head with fire extinguishers on January 6^th: "if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Only in our timeline could this paragon of intelligence not have seen what was really coming.

And only in our timeline would the dumbest Trump of all the dumb Trumps in the multiverse have come to his decision to pardon his fellow fellons with the wise and temperate words: "Fuck it. Release 'em all."

This, folks, is how Trump decided what to do with the 1,600 convicted January 6^th insurrectionists here in the dumbest timeline. "Fuck it."

Here's one for all you sportsbook types: what's the over/under on how long it is before Trump declares that since the Constitution is too long and boring to actually read, he's replaced it with that single pithy phrase: "Fuck it."? Five weeks, perhaps six?

In response to Trump's magnanimous decision to release the rioters, Slobbering J.D. Vance released this beauty: "What the president said consistently on the campaign is that he was going to look at a case-by-case basis, and that's exactly what we did." And then, after some feebleminded palaver about how the insurrectionists were politically prosecuted, despite being convicted in every case by a jury of their peers: "The pardon power is not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect. And of course, we love our law enforcement and want people to be peaceful, with everybody, but especially with our good cops."

So not only did this dim little bulb of a Vice President not have the brains to see that his boss was obviously going to do, he wasn't bright enough to come up with anything better by way of an excuse than: Even though we pardoned all 1,600 of them on the first day of the presidency, we actually went through each case really carefully, and, uh, like, sure, holding down a cop so other people could beat him with a pipe isn't angelic behavior, but who's perfect anyway? And we love cops! And people should be nice to them. But just the ones that vote for us.

I could go on, of course. And I'm sure I will in the future. This timeline offers no end of amusements.

But for now, I will close by noting that the dumbest and most inescapable fact in this dumb timeline of ours is that all of this idiocy will have consequences.

Stupidity is dangerous. And in the coming weeks and months, it's not inconceivable that we stupid ourselves into some very, very dark places.

Because down beneath it all, Trump and his fellow boobies know exactly what they're doing. They have a plan, and they're sticking to it.

And they have shown already that they do not mean to be deterred.

So don't be one of those people who announces that you're just too tired to pay attention anymore. Don't be one of those people who devotes more time to scrolling through amusing videos than you do to being informed about what's going on.

Because that, my friends, is the dumbest choice there is. It's beneath you, and you will regret it.

Summon the You from a smarter timeline. Do the small things that make our culture survive. Stay awake. Stay aware.

Call your Senators and Congresspeople and demand to know what the fuck they're doing about all this.

Find the places in your life where you can fight for intelligence, and decency, and humanity…and then fight for them.

Some useful tools to staying informed:

The Bulwark Podcast featuring the inimitable Tim Miller – indispensable daily roundup and commentary: https://www.thebulwark.com/s/bulwarkpodcast

Various other Substacks written by smart, informed people: