Somewhere in the midst of all the fireworks and monument upgrades, the competing nonpartisan and partisan 250th birthday celebrations, the gilding and ballroom-building, and the Octagon-style cage matches on the White House lawn, is a weakened, tired, mentally-challenged old man, tuning 80 and facing his mortality. Badly.
The defining feature of the second Trump administration so far has been the Retribution Comeback Tour, with Trump venting his rage on any and all who have ever opposed him, from prosecutors to pundits and politicians, many in his own Party. But providing the backbeat has been an increasingly obvious obsession with gold and gilding. As a metaphor for wealth generally, one of very few things Trump truly seems to care about, gold is certainly apt, but there’s a limit, and Trump doesn’t seem to have found it. From tacky scrollwork embellishments and knickknacks in the Oval Office, to a golden Marie Antoinette-style White House Ballroom, a proposed gold-accented massive Triumphal Arch near Arlington National Cemetery, regilding the equine statues by the Lincoln Memorial, even a larger-than-life gold statue of himself at his Doral golf club, Trump is cranking out more gold than Midas himself would know what to do with.
It’s been a head-spinning few weeks, with rising gas and energy prices, increased inflation, and the war with Iran, but somehow, America’s sweethearts, Donald and Melania Trump, have managed to keep us entertained.
After a fashion. From threatening genocide to profane tweets on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, ramshackle ceasefires and blaspheming memes, and vigorous denials of accusations of wrongdoing that haven’t been made, the Trumps have outdone themselves in this first half of April 2026. What follows is a barebones overview of the high jinks and shenanigans.
Donald Trump’s 2025 Retribution Tour kicked into hyperdrive on September 25th, with the two-count indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, a frequent Trump critic whom the thin-skinned president blames for the “Russia hoax” investigations in 2017. Out on the stump in 2024, Trump was fond of stating that retribution would come in the form of his success in office. Perhaps, with Americans’ cost of living on the rise, his tariffs adding to consumer burdens, and his failure to end, or even ameliorate, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, he figures, ‘Screw it, I’ll just do payback.’
Keeping up with the latest Trump-related mishigas is a fulltime job these days, as the Distractor-in-Chief writhes and squirms in the white-hot spotlight of the Epstein files debacle. Like vermin desperately crawling from beneath an overturned rock, stunned by their exposure to sunlight, Trump is throwing everything he has at the wall, hoping something – anything – will stick long enough to shift focus from the dumpster fire that is the MAGA rebellion to his Attorney General’s assertion that the Epstein case is closed, with no further revelations of elite pedophile wrongdoing to come.
One of the main pillars of the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement, and a major component of that coalition, has been conspiracy theories and theorists. From the JFK and MLKJ assassinations to the moon landing and Clinton-sponsored pedophile rings run out of pizza shops, conspiracy is the air many MAGA folks breathe. And one of the most popularized conspiracy theories involved Jeffrey Epstein, credibly accused of having sex with underage girls, and sharing this illicit activity with numerous well-heeled, famous friends and acquaintances. Epstein never came to trial, having died in prison of an apparent suicide, but was rumored to have a secret client list naming his cohorts; his manner of death was also judged suspicious in MAGA world.
