238: Delirious

Trump’s speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly was less diplomacy than delirium. He spoke not as a statesman but as a showman, circling back on his obsessions, snapping at imagined rivals, drifting from menace to mockery without tether to reality. It was a performance that reflected the moment: incoherent, paranoid, lashing out, and yet delivered with all the pomp of global authority. The delirium has become the message.

This is the same delirium that animates his administration’s obsession with autism, and the grotesque plan to centralize health data under the guise of research and care. What begins as paternalistic concern quickly mutates into surveillance, categorization, and control. The fantasy of protecting children masks the machinery of social sorting. The more data they collect, the more they know about you, the more power they wield. To call it delirious is both literal and metaphor: a fevered mind pursuing control over the body politic.

@unoriginal_sinsThe amish are now peer-reviewed science apparently #neurodivergent #dataanalytics

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Around this spectacle, gossip swirls like a second government. Charlie Kirk’s widow, Epstein’s ghost, the endless loop of scandal and innuendo. These rumors are the connective tissue of contemporary politics, where narrative matters more than truth, and distraction is governance by other means. The delirium of distraction ensures that while we fixate on scandal, authoritarian consolidation proceeds unchecked. The more absurd the rumor, the more oxygen it consumes, and the less attention remains for what actually matters.

And what does matter? Apparently, UFC on the White House lawn. A cage fight in the gardens of power, staged as the pinnacle of entertainment, becomes the administration’s governing philosophy made flesh. Dana White sells the tickets, Trump plays the promoter, and the crowd roars with delight. Bread and circuses, but bloodier. Politics as cage match. Authority as spectacle. If it weren’t true, it would be parody. But the delirium of our time is that parody and reality have fused into the same event.

Meanwhile, many hope and whisper that the President himself is sick, that his end is near. This is another delirium, a collective deathwatch that substitutes morbidity for strategy. The fixation on his body—whether he is fading, whether the clock is running out—betrays a desperation that cannot find another outlet. Delirium as coping mechanism, the fantasy that illness will succeed where politics has failed.

And beneath it all, the ground itself is unstable. The climate crisis accelerates: heat waves break records, floods overwhelm cities, crops wither and die. This is delirium in its purest form: the world collapsing in slow motion while leaders stage a fight card on the lawn. The delirium is not just in Trump’s speech, not just in Kirk’s scandal, not just in the crowd’s morbid fascination. It is in the refusal to face what is real.

Eddie Murphy once strutted on stage in a red leather suit and called his show Delirious. It was a performance of excess, laughter at the edge of taboo, jokes that landed because they were too sharp to ignore. Politics today feels like the same act dragged out too long, the suit still sweaty under the lights, the jokes thinner with each repetition, the audience laughing not from humor but from the contagious fever of delirium itself.

The punchline is that the real cage match isn’t on the White House lawn or inside the UN chamber. It is between humanity and collapse. Trump is not the delirium; he is its symptom, its embodiment, its master of ceremonies. The delirium belongs to us all, the world spinning faster, the laughter louder, the spectacle brighter, even as the foundations crack beneath our feet.

@brettforte#FrugalForte vol 87. The power of a lanyard in Austin, Texas. #TravelHack #hotels

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