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.
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.’
In his new royal biography, “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,” released 14 August 2025, author Andrew Lownie thoroughly exposes and consistently trashes HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son. Andrew is mercilessly depicted as arrogant, self-serving and in denial about his links to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2021, one of Epstein’s many victims, Virginia Guiffre, brought a civil suit against Andrew, to whom she alleged Epstein had trafficked her at age 17. The suit was settled out of court in March 2022 for a reported $16 million, with a substantial portion of the award to go to Giuffre’s sex trafficking charity.
Nobody elected him to anything, he is ineligible for the high office he apparently holds, his work in restructuring government is unsanctioned, unofficial, and unconstitutional. But Elon Musk has apparently effected a successful takeover of the US government, hostile or otherwise. The head of Donald Trump’s bogus DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk is behaving like a classic Doge, the medieval, autocratic rulers of Venice, arbitrarily cutting staff, stopping funding, and eliminating entire departments at whim.
Donald Trump’s post-electoral Retribution Tour hit a snag on November 21st, when Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz suddenly withdrew from consideration in the wake of some GOP-generated heat in defiance of his candidacy. Withdrawal is something Gaetz knows a bit about, with the primary scandal in which he’s embroiled involving his attendance at drug-fueled sex parties with underage partners.
Trump nominated Gaetz, himself a subject of a years-long federal criminal investigation and a House Ethics Committee report, on November 13th, along with a spate of controversial nominees, such as Fox & Friends weekend anchor Pete Hegseth for Defense; Bashar Al-Assad and Vladimir Putin apologist Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; and vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Robert F. Kennedy Jr to head Health and Human Services. If these choices seem “out-of-the-box,” consider that asteroid Troemper 2813 at 11 Leo (our celestial referent for The Donald) is currently travelling arm-in-arm with asteroid Pandora 55 at 10 Leo, noted mythically as the hapless naif who, against good advice, opened a box containing all the evils of the world, thus releasing them. Archetypally, there are no cosmic accidents.
