Prioritized Appointment Scheduling System for Madness

Trump’s latest press conference offered equal parts delusion, deflection, and accidental self-parody.

Somewhere between FIFA and fever, Donald Trump hosted what began as a World Cup announcement and ended as a sprawling hallucination about tariffs, Venezuela, Epstein, and divine personal greatness. It was billed as a briefing on America’s preparations for the 2026 tournament, but what unfolded was a 90-minute linguistic dribble where syntax went to die.

“Thank you very much and good afternoon,” he began solemnly, before introducing “an amazing man”, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who became “Johnny” in Trump’s reality. “He’s setting records for the World Cup. We love having you back at the White House, Johnny. Fantastic.”

Within seconds, Trump’s “Johnny” had apparently sold out the entire event, “No one’s ever seen numbers like we’re doing! Much of it is sold out!”, while Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary Rubio, and a cast of other hallucinated Cabinet members nodded like animatronics in a Florida theme park where the rides are fueled by delusion.

The main announcement, if you can call it that, was a new “prioritized appointment scheduling system” for international ticketholders, which Trump touted as a breakthrough in government efficiency, even as he struggled to pronounce it.

“That’s a hard one for most people to remember,” he chuckled, unaware that he’d just named his next book.

Marco Rubio chimed in to explain that visa processing times were down to 60 days, which Trump repeated four times as if chanting would make it real. “Think of that! Eighty percent of the world! Sixty days or less!”

Gianni, sorry, Johnny , beamed beside him, speaking in the polite monotone of a man trapped in a hostage video. “America welcomes the world,” he declared, promising six million tickets sold and one billion viewers for the draw. Trump interjected: “That’s a beautiful trophy right there. A big part of it too.” The crowd applauded, unsure whether they were supposed to.

Midway through, a reporter noted Trump’s voice sounded hoarse.

“I feel great,” he insisted. “I was shouting at people because they were stupid. Having to do with trade.”

Which country had earned his presidential wrath? No one knows, because when a reporter followed up, asking which nation had so offended him, Trump smirked and said, “Why would I say that to you?”

He wouldn’t, of course. Naming the country would’ve made it far too easy to fact-check. Better to leave it floating in the ether, an imagined affront to the great man’s invisible empire. It was the perfect encapsulation of Trumpist diplomacy: scream first, conceal later, and claim victory regardless of whether a single person knows what the hell happened.

This, remarkably, was not the day’s strangest moment.

Asked about Venezuela, Trump launched into a grotesque tangent about crime and deportations. “They’re worse than MS-13,” he said. “They cut them up into pieces and leave them in the communities. Horrible people.”

A remarkable statement from a man currently bragging about blowing up fishing boats because they “might” have drugs on them, as if vaporizing a dinghy in the Caribbean were the height of drug policy sophistication.

He claimed Venezuela had “sent them like we are dumping grounds,” insisting that “hundreds of thousands of people in our country, in our prisons, came from Venezuela.” He described it as a deliberate act by a hostile regime, as if Nicolás Maduro were running a penal export business to spite him personally.

Within thirty seconds, he’d promised that he “doesn’t rule out troops on the ground” and mused about personally bombing cocaine factories in Colombia. “Would I knock out those factories? I’d be proud to do that personally.”

Asked about tariffs, Trump declared, “Hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff money! We will issue dividends later on. Not with the B, not with the B, but trillions!”

The math, like his syntax, lived in a quantum realm beyond mortal comprehension. He assured reporters that America was “rich again,” that Apple was “up to $700 billion, Nvidia $600 billion,” and that chip manufacturing had “almost 100% returned from Taiwan.”

None of that is true, but then, truth has always been just another unpaid intern in Trump’s White House.

Then came the Epstein detour.

When a reporter asked whether he would sign the bill compelling full release of Epstein documents, Trump snapped, “We have nothing to do with Epstein. The Democrats do. Epstein, the Democrats do. All of his friends were Democrats!”

Of course, the House bill wouldn’t even be necessary if Trump’s own Department of Justice would simply release the files, a detail he conveniently omitted while flailing through his revisionist monologue.

He claimed his administration had already released “50,000 pages” and compared the case to JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., a line that somehow managed to trivialize both assassinations and the word “page.”

“It’s a hoax,” he concluded. “The whole thing’s a hoax. And I don’t want Epstein to take away from the greatness of what the Republican Party has accomplished.”

Translation: please stop asking about my friends’ prison meetings.

By the closing act, Trump was threatening to move the World Cup out of Los Angeles if “the liberal/communist mayor” didn’t “behave.” He reminisced about sending federal troops to California during wildfires and hinted that “if we think there’s going to be trouble, we will move the event somewhere it will be appreciated and safe.”

Moments later, he was musing aloud about “launching strikes in Mexico” to stop drug trafficking. “What do we have to do to stop drugs? Mexico... Mexico City has some big problems over there. We know every route, every address of every drug lord.”

He closed by declaring, “I’m not happy with Mexico,” then thanked everyone and walked offstage, leaving the press to wonder if the entire event had been a Mad Lib written by artificial stupidity.

In the end, Trump’s “World Cup press conference” wasn’t about the World Cup at all. It was about projection, a pageant of self-mythology in which Trump cast himself as both the savior of soccer and the avenger of drug wars, the bringer of tariffs and the victim of Epstein.

He promised jobs, wars, and “dividends from tariffs,” and left the podium drenched in the sweat of his own applause.

If there was a trophy for incoherence, the man would have lifted it right then, gilded, gaudy, and shaped like the world he’s still convinced revolves around him.