The Cat, the Deal, and the Delusion

Inside Elon’s earnings implosion, Trump’s make-believe trade war, and the MAGA mind’s descent into Epstein fan fiction

Every morning, between the usual friend requests from “Elon Musk Official 3” and “JasonStathamUSA.biz,” I’m treated to a cross-section of America’s rotting cerebellum. Some days it’s benign, just a “libtard” here or a “go eat bugs” there. But other mornings, like today, I get something special. Something batshit. And that’s how we’re opening today’s dispatch, because few things illustrate the state of our decaying democracy better than the fevered comment I received this morning. Here is an excerpt:

“The forged Epstein letter in the WSJ proves Trump is innocent and that Biden, the CIA, and the FBI planted fake evidence after failing with Russiagate, which I solved on Facebook in 2016. Also, Ghislaine Maxwell is going to reveal her affair with Bill Clinton and that’s the real cover-up. Be seeing you.”

This is real. Someone read a credible report on the Epstein cover-up, Trump being personally informed of his appearances in the sealed files by his own Attorney General, the DOJ halting release after that, and multiple Senate investigations into obstruction, and their takeaway was: “Ah, Clinton sex story + 4chan + deep state + fake letter = Trump innocent.” What better evidence could there be of an advanced case of epistemological rabies?

Let’s pause to note that the Wall Street Journal did not “forge” a letter. The letter was part of a court-reviewed document trove, and it bears the hallmarks of Trump’s usual preemptive PR tactics, cringeworthy and self-serving, yes, but not a clandestine op from Langley. The claim that the CIA, FBI, and DOJ simultaneously framed Trump for Russia and protected him from Epstein allegations would get laughed out of a conspiracy subreddit if logic still applied there.

But in MAGA-world, all timelines coexist. Trump is both a persecuted savior and a man so dangerous the deep state must shield him. Ghislaine Maxwell, long past the tabloid expiration date, is now the unlikely heroine poised to blow the lid off a Clinton sex affair “all of Europe already knows about.” And the Biden administration, somehow simultaneously senile and omnipotent, is accused of delaying Epstein disclosures because the evidence hadn’t been planted yet. This is like religion with comment sections.

Meanwhile, in the land of actual consequences, Elon Musk held his quarterly “techno-visionary smoke show” in the form of Tesla’s earnings call, and it was as embarrassing as it was unhinged. Revenue is down, margins are cratering, and free cash flow is in free fall, minus 89% year-over-year. Musk, undeterred by numbers or Earth logic, promised that robotaxis will be serving “half the U.S. population” by the end of the year. Not half the cities, not half the highways, half the population.

He then described Tesla’s self-driving system as a “cat that can sing and dance, but looks like a normal cat,” and lamented that no one seems to understand this miracle feline. It would be hilarious if it weren’t a trillion-dollar company vaporizing investor money while hyping an autonomy product that regulators won’t even approve for San Francisco.

As for the so-called Cybertruck? They’ve sold about 4,000 this quarter. Which is about as many as you’d expect if the truck were made from recycled toaster ovens and designed by someone whose only exposure to “truck culture” was a Robocop sequel. Musk also casually admitted that Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, won’t be scaling until 2030 if nothing goes wrong. The earnings call was less a report to shareholders than a late-stage Theranos investor pitch, rebranded for techno-libertarians and meme stock cultists.

And while Elon’s selling dancing cats to investors, Donald Trump is back on his usual scam tour, this time with a “strategic trade deal” with Japan that even Fox News couldn’t pretend to understand.

According to Trump and his economic pageboy Scott Bessent, Japan has agreed to invest $550 billion into the U.S., buy 100 Boeing jets, lift rice quotas, and open its entire market to American cars. Sounds amazing, right? Almost too amazing? That’s because it is. Japan’s own negotiators immediately refuted most of it. No, defense purchases weren’t on the table. No, rice quotas aren’t changing. No, they didn’t commit to buying 100 planes. And no, they aren’t guaranteeing $550 billion in investment, that’s a cap, not a commitment, and mostly tied to vague credit guarantees, not real spending.

In short: Trump jacked up tariffs, invented a crisis, then “solved” it by negotiating us back to where we started, but with new costs passed directly to American consumers. And then he declared it the “deal of the century.” If you’re getting déjà vu, it’s because this was also the plot of every single trade deal from his first term. Create chaos, claim victory when the fire smolders, and hand the ashes to Boeing.

And if the numbers don’t add up? That’s okay, Trump will Sharpie in a new version. Just ask Vietnam, where negotiators were stunned when Trump changed the tariff agreement at the signing table. Or ask South Korea, where high-level talks were abruptly canceled, presumably because Seoul forgot to pre-kiss the ring.

What all of this, the conspiracy mail, the Tesla implosion, the phantom trade deals has in common is the core MAGA operating principle: perception over reality. You don’t need real policy. You just need the appearance of dominance. You don’t need real financial performance. You just need Elon to say “AI” fifty times into a microphone. You don’t need coherent geopolitical strategy. You just need to slap a flag on it and scream “America First” while handing billions to Boeing and letting Japan walk away snickering.

So no, dear commenter, your fan fiction about Epstein cover-ups and Facebook-fueled dossier decryption isn’t helping you. But it is helping the rest of us understand the psychology of those clinging to the wreckage of a political movement that only ever offered one thing: the illusion of strength.

Be seeing you.