Hanging By a Thread

Kristi Noem lost her blanket. Somehow, she still has a job.

I saw a musical over the weekend about Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines. Here Lies Love blends the life of a brutal dictatorship with disco music provided by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Marcos is largely known for her extravagances during her husband’s twenty-one-year reign, particularly after the country was put under martial law in 1972. You may know her for her infamous three-thousand pair shoe collection.

Imelda Marcos’ greatest contribution to popular culture is likely her inspiration of the term “Edifice Complex.” An edifice complex refers to a regime’s preoccupation with building extravagant demonstrations of wealth and power, usually at exorbitant cost, at odds with the need for domestic spending. The term is a riff on the Oedipus Complex, namely the way the wealthy and powerful handle their penis envy by building large structures.

There are probably a few images you’re thinking of right now.

Here Lies Love was originally a concept album released in 2010, well before two major changes in global affairs that fundamentally changed the way audiences would receive the musical when it came to Broadway in 2023, and Los Angeles this year. The first is obviously the election of the Fanta Fuhrer, Temu Imelda. We now have our own Imelda, grifting our own tech billionaires.

The second is perhaps more inexplicable. The Philippines lived under the brutality of the Marcos regime for decades. Imelda and her husband Ferdinand are credited with the greatest state robbery in history, stealing over 10 billion from their people, back when that was an absurd amount of money (Trump is currently suing the Treasury Department for the same sum). The people of the Philippines are still trying to recoup that money, especially complicated by the 2022 election of Ferdinand “BongBong” Romualdez Marcos Jr., Imelda’s son, as President of the Philippines.

Imelda herself returned to a form of power after her family were exiled during the 1986 People Power Revolution. She was elected several times to the Philippines House of Representatives, holding office as recently as 2019. History repeated itself.

I hate to spoil the ending of a musical, but it’s a pretty wild experience to take in a musical about a brutal regime that ends with the return of the family that caused all the carnage. I know, I know, Jan 6: The Musical will probably have the same ending. America cast out our own authoritarian, only to bring him back.

I don’t know if I’ll be doing this newsletter in 20 years, but I have a feeling our own BongBong is going to make a run of his own.

He’s really talented, you know. Did you see how he turned on that laptop?

Imelda and Donald are two peas in a pod. Naturally, there’s a photograph.

Something tells me Donald didn’t take Imelda down to the Tiffany store in his dumbass tower. It must have really upset him to meet Imelda in the 90s, before he’d managed to steal billions from the government himself.

Donald and Imelda share something in common beyond their need for extravagant Edifice Complexes. Imelda Marcos came from poverty. She went to great lengths to hide it. Imelda had quite the chip on her shoulder. You’d probably need to if you were going to bankrupt your country to build grandiose architecture to celebrate your own greatness.

Donald did not grow up poor, but he’s still always carried this weird chip on his shoulder. Remember The Great Gatsby, particularly old money vs. new money? Donald is from Queens. His father made a lot of money, but Donald has always felt ostracized as an outsider among the Manhattan elites, many of whom have always had money. It’s a major reason why he only hangs out in buildings with his own name on it.

Imelda Marcos achieved very little for her people while her husband was in power. Instead, the people of the Philippines have the term “Imeldific,” referring to nouveau-riche bad taste. Mar-a-Lago is Imeldific. The ballroom is Imeldific. The Trump-Kennedy Center is Imeldific.

His fucking face is Imeldific.

A face not even his mother could love.

Project 2025 warned us of a new type of Trump administration. Trump’s first term was often defined by the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. They staffed much of the federal government with people who weren’t loyal to MAGA or Trumpism. Many on the far right look back on those days as a missed opportunity.

We’re about a year removed from Elon Musk’s attempt to correct this via chainsaw. Sinister behind-the-scenes actors like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought have a lot more power this time around. Between DHS, HHS, and the DOJ, major government entities are being radically transformed into Imeldific teats for Donald to suckle on.

There’s one key difference between Trump’s terms that I’m sure he’s pretty proud of. Between Pam Bondi’s infamous “The DOW is up 50,000” defense of her Epstein cover-ups and Kristi Noem’s latest bullshit, Trump is really testing his “no scalps” policy. It makes him really upset to think about all the Cabinet firings he made in his first administration.

But I mean, really, this Kristi Noem shit is getting fat beyond the point of parody. We’ve known for months that Kristi Noem is sleeping with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s very first campaign manager, who’s hung around his orbit since his firing nearly 10 years ago. Both are married, not to each other. Great traditional values, hard at work.

The Wall Street Journal is the most popular right-wing newspaper in the world. Last week, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship rag came out with perhaps the most pathetic story of the second Trump term. I know we joke about the ballroom as spoiled child behavior, something Veruca Salt would want.

Kristi Noem has far more modest prima donna ambitions when she’s not busy shooting puppies in the gravel pit. She doesn’t want a ballroom, just a luxury jet that she claims is saving the American people “tens of millions of dollars.” Trump was gifted a luxury plane from the Qataris. Why wouldn’t ICE Barbie get one from the American people?

The WSJ also reported on an utterly cartoonish instance of Noem firing a member of the Coast Guard for failing to transfer her weighted blanket when they had to switch planes due to mechanical difficulties. The woman who once executed a goat because it smelled fired a man because of her blankie. The incident waded further into sitcom territory when Lewandowski and Noem had to re-hire the pilot, because he was the only one available to fly the plane.

The right is fond of referring to people on the left as “snowflakes.” I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m gay, but I’ve always found that cute. I like snowflakes, but also, Democrats aren’t the ones segregating the Super Bowl Halftime Show because of a Puerto Rican performer. Democrats aren’t the ones making parents sign waivers so students can learn that some of their classmates have two moms or two dads (Kristi’s children certainly seem to have two daddies).

Noem loves to cosplay as a tough MAGA woman, with her cowboy hat, commando gear, and eight dump trucks worth of makeup.

But what is she, without her blankie, and her emotional support fuckboy? She already lost control of ICE. News broke yesterday that DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin is leaving her post. McLaughlin is a key ally of Noem, within a department rapidly ceding control to people like Miller and White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who was brought to Minneapolis to clean up Noem’s mess.

You’d think, being on thin ice, you’d want to cool off a bit. That WSJ report credits Noem with all the social media videos of DHS acting abusively in Minneapolis. Trump didn’t like that.

Noem’s blanket episode from last week is somehow not her most recent blowup with the Coast Guard. News broke yesterday that Kristi Noem diverted Coast Guard resources, aircraft, and personnel away from a search-and-rescue mission for a missing service member in order to carry out a deportation mission. There are a few layers of stupidity to unpack here.

First, it’s not really the Coast Guard’s job to deport people. Their job, as you might expect, lies mostly with maritime matters. We don’t have a lot of undocumented immigrants coming in from Atlantis.

The concept of Nemo resideo (Latin for no man left behind) traces its roots to the code of ancient warfare. The American military has been practicing Nemo resideo since the French & Indian War, longer than we’ve been a country. That’s basically rule number one of any competent military, anywhere, at any time. You don’t leave your people behind.

The Coast Guard is the only branch of the military under the control of DHS. Like many Republicans before her, Noem loves to drape herself in garb that evokes the military. But she doesn’t know the first thing about serving, which is, don’t leave missing service members floating in the ocean because you have a deportation plane to fly. What a joke.

If there’s one consolation from the blanket saga and its grosser sequel, it’s the Imeldification of DHS. It’s not really good that we have a batshit crazy woman running DHS from underneath her weighted blanket, her emotional support paramour lingering nearby to fire anyone who doesn’t treat the blanket with the same care as Linus from The Peanuts. But incompetence is its own resistance. The time they spend looking for the blanket could be used to find the missing service member, but that’s time that won’t be spent in service to additional deportations.

I wanted to return to the subject of the FCC, which we last covered extensively in September. You may have seen that Stephen Colbert was recently censored by CBS, who cancelled him, over an interview with a Texas Democrat currently seeking his party’s nomination for the upcoming Senate election. CBS is denying pulling the interview, but Colbert ripped his soon-to-be ex-bosses for their concern over an archaic FCC principle called the Equal Time Rule.

I’m going to try my best not to get too wonky about the mechanics of network television. Broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and ABC, along with radio, are still subject to FCC rules that have been in place for nearly a hundred years. Cable stations, like CNN, Fox News, and MS NOW (deadname: MSNBC) are not.

The Equal Time Rule essentially existed to prevent media companies from stacking the deck in favor of their preferred candidates, mostly with regard to their coverage, a key distinction. You see, this rule came about at a time when most Americans got their news from the evening news, or the radio, not a transgender Thomas the Tank Engine memer. Interviews, like the one Colbert conducted, or one you might see on a daytime show like The View, have never been considered part of the Equal Time Rule.

If you’re still a little confused, think back to 2015. Then-candidate Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live in November 2015. There were seventeen major candidates seeking the Republican nomination, the presidential equivalent of the position Colbert’s guest, James Talarico, is currently in.

Remember all these clowns?

There weren’t the only Republican candidates. They had an undercard debate too, that same night. There were so many candidates, they had to have a kids’ table. I don’t have many regrets in life, but I really wish I had this newsletter when there was the undercard Republican debate. It was one of the most pathetic events in American political history.

You can count them if you want. All seventeen are there. Even Lindsey Graham made a run that cycle, vying to become the first gay man to hold the office of the presidency since James Buchanan.

Donald Trump hosted SNL on November 7, 2015, when all seventeen major candidates were still in the race. The first to leave the race, former Governor Bobby Jindal (seen in the kids’ table picture, next to Lady G) didn’t leave until November 17th, 2015. Now, you probably remember a thing or two about Donald sucking up all the political oxygen.

If equal time was such a big deal, why didn’t we have seventeen Republican hosts of Saturday Night Live during the 2016 election? Where was George Pataki’s episode? Why didn’t we have Carly Fiorina in the middle of Celebrity Jeopardy! We’re not even counting the Democratic candidates. Remember Lincoln Chafee?

Who could forget Lincoln Chafee?

You see, nobody cares about the Equal Time Rule. There are some sources that say that FCC chair Brendan Carr is weaponizing the rules of the agency, but this would be a pretty stupid place to enforce the rules. James Talarico is seeking the Democratic nomination for a senate seat in Texas, hardly a blue stronghold. He is currently a member of the Texas House of Representatives, not exactly a big name.

Making a big stink about James Talarico is basically the textbook definition of the Streisand Effect. It’s the kind of stupidity that only an administration who fires, and rehires, service members over a blanket might attempt. Nothing good can come of causing such a self-inflicted wound.

This story is so stupid, even CBS is trying to deny it. Unlike the new leadership at CBS (one of these days, we’ll do a deep wonky dive on Bari Weiss and all her awfulness) and their Republican sycophants, Colbert has a lot of credibility. Colbert has no reason to lie. Colbert will need another job soon.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May, a move that everyone understands is political. CBS tried to keep After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson, its second late-night show on the air, only ending after Tomlinson decided to return to her stand-up career. Nobody believes the bullshit that Colbert was some money-suck, not when CBS was literally just trying to keep both its late-night shows on TV.

Colbert isn’t going down without a fight.

Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper announced his departure from CBS. The destruction of 60 Minutes is a deeply sickening casualty of Trump’s second term. We’ve talked a lot about legacy media over the past few weeks, but 60 Minutes was the gold standard for television journalism. Our country is a less-informed electorate without its vital work.

Which is basically the existential struggle that so many hardworking people have found themselves in, both in journalism and the government at large. Do you stay, and try to do some good, or do you leave, denying the oppressors the ability to taint your name? Cooper chose wisely.

I don’t think Donald Trump or Imelda Marcos has the emotional capacity to realize how stupid their Edifice Complexes look to the outside world. Kristi Noem has been under fire for months, and somehow still manages to create a new embarrassing fuck-up each and every week. You have to have some sort of gift to be this pathetic at grifting. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the world has found a way to reward the Trumps and the Marcoses of the world, constantly failing upward.

One thought crossed my mind repeatedly throughout Here Lies Love. Are we really this stupid? As a film critic, I’ve always had a soft spot for world cinema. Maybe ten years ago, I could watch a movie about a banana republic in some faraway land with some distance, as if that could never happen here.

It’s happening right now. It’s not terribly complex. The people plundering our government are not geniuses. They can’t even properly scapegoat someone for losing their blanket. I left the theater thinking President Barron Trump was eventually inevitable, our country having put his idiot father back in power once before.

I hope I’m wrong. Barron isn’t eligible to run for president for another sixteen years. Plenty of time to misplace a few more blankets, some relief for those of us hanging by a thread.