Hello there, and welcome to this very special Trash Report, which is all about elections! Listen, if shit goes south on election day and our constitutional rights to things like a free press are dissolved, then there will be no more cool newspapers like this one, so if you’re reading this in print, keep your copy—it could be a collector’s item some day!
It’s been such a wild and crazy election year, and what good is enduring trauma if we can’t laugh about it together? If the American electoral system and the discourse surrounding it are lemons, then please consider this column your complimentary lemonade.
National Trash
The race for our new King or Queen of Democracy is on the top of all our minds. Donald Trump recently stated that he would not run for president again in four years if he loses this time. Of course, Trump also says that he’s 6’4” and that he won’t sign a national abortion ban and that he loves his son, Don Jr. The man’s a liar.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have brought sunshine and rainbows into the Democratic ticket that had been sagging under Biden. It’s been great! Remember how depressed we were in late June? Man, what a dark time. Now, instead of being depressed about the likelihood of a Biden loss, we can be depressed about an otherwise promising ticket that won’t call for an end to Israel’s campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. I already used the lemonade metaphor, so let’s just say that sometimes life gives you yesterday’s coffee grounds, and you can use them to make iced coffee, because isn’t that how cold-brew is made, maybe?
One thing Harris and Walz have going for them is that not only are they more human-seeming than Trump, they’re also much less buzzard-seeming than RFK Jr. The latest WTF story about him is that he’d allegedly been having a “personal relationship” with New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi who is both 39 years his junior and not his wife. Part of me wonders if his campaign leaked this story because they want people to think about him getting handsy with a living human woman instead of some decaying animal carcass he found on a New England highway. Honestly, not a bad strategy.
