Folks, we had some fun with the eclipse, didn’t we? No matter what Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, it was a brief moment, at least in America, of national unity, in which we could all feel awed momentarily by the celestial clockwork of our solar system. There were beautiful images to share, not just of the moon’s shadow passing over the Earth but of glasses-wearing crowds gazing up in stunned silence. Even online, it provided a uniquely fertile ground for riffing, something too large to be atomized into partisan debate. Even Trump taking off his glasses to gaze directly in the sun was more a light-hearted source of riffing than the usual existential despair he inspires.




Well, all that’s over. Today, three days later, the president woke up and looked at his magical personal fulfillment machine, and came across this absolute knee-slapper:


Which he then decided to fire off to his 37 million followers, because it at once feeds into his obsession with his predecessor while placing his face in front of a black man’s, which is pretty much all Trump can ask for in a meme. He then went back to slap-fighting Republicans and talking about the fake news.

As is par for the course with a Trump retweet, the rhetoric withered beneath a minute’s scrutiny:


Which was followed by a quick, invigorating dive into the timeline of the person who the president has chosen to champion on this bright late-summer morning:




It is never too early to start drinking in Trump’s America.