By middle age, most of us have known friends who removed themselves from the group. Whether college buds or the work happy-hour crew, someone has proved ruinously unreliable or an unpleasant drunk, and wound up giving themselves the Reverse “Good Will Hunting”: They’re still at home, but you’re not stopping by anymore. Donald Trump has been that friend to basically everyone on Earth except Jeffrey Epstein. While no one will outpace the Big Man, who has already threatened 1 out of every 13 countries on Earth , the Trump administration is staffed exclusively by That Friend, each of whom is in a race to get the United States disinvited from the globe. And this week, Markwayne Mullin pulled ahead.
On Tuesday, the secretary of homeland security delivered a very masculine, splenetic whine to the roughnecks at Fox News about how hard his job is, before threatening a virile tantrum if it doesn’t get easier. The problem, you see, is that American citizens, as well as autonomous local government entities in a federal system, are slowing down DHS’ ethnic cleansing of the United States (for now). If they persist, Mullin averred, manfully, “We shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities, either.”
Yes, this astonishingly stupid threat is largely theater. We are, after all, in the midst of a manly renaissance in this country that is also largely theater, led by Heritage Foundation interns who look like the result of AI prompts to “make tuberculosis a person.” The situation calls for someone who can wear a cowboy hat on Capitol Hill and shirts tailored to prompt physique-related comments that force him to admit that, yeah, he used to do MMA and was kinda-sorta an operator . Mullin managed to stand out for not doing his job, then trying to monetize the nothing. Mullin arrived at DHS with two responsibilities: get confirmed, and be less of an embarrassing pain in the ass than the dog murderer who made Corey Lewandowski her boyfriend, turned $220 million into a self-dealing horseback ad campaign and flew around the country in a $70 million taxpayer-funded fuckpad. Given that the assignment was “do not be this person,” it was natural to assume that Mullin understood it, and that he would occupy his sinecure with a dignity befitting the Trump administration: periodically channeling and praising the president on TV, and otherwise making money somehow.
Yet, even for an administration stuffed with no-show jobs, Mullin managed to stand out for not doing his, then trying to monetize the nothing. According to the Daily Mail, Mullin’s not only been a no-show within DHS leadership, but also bolted from the attempt on Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and flew back to Tulsa on the Noem Lewandowski Gulfstream G700 “Bordello Edition.” But he was probably doing it to spend time with his wife, who he only sees for a 3.5-day weekend every week. He needs to maximize the quality time, which is probably why he’s trying to get his wife designated a DHS contractor. Her free airfare and $70/hour consultant rate can help make the beautiful reunion of these twinned souls an everyday miracle.
To be sure, some of Mullins Masterpiece Theater is just the system functioning as the leader intends. The president’s underlings speak to him through the television, and in the Trump White House’s cult of personality, the way to get ahead is to outflank your colleagues with more intense or extreme on-air displays of fealty and utility. As in the case with the Third Reich — what many in the administration consider The Greatest Generation — this produces apocalyptically stupid brainstorms from resentful dullards, each working toward the Führer by theatrically proposing punishment for things he dislikes that enter his line of sight. There is a reason why no one has proposed a system of government based on the dimmest hooting children trying to win points with Dad by ratting out the neighbors. In practice, this communications strategy becomes a game of yelling louder about something even worse, while government response devolves into irritable paternal violence thinly extruded to resemble something shaped like a horribly stupid idea.
It is not clear, for example, how cutting off international air travel to blue cities would work. There are blue cities in red states with international airports. There are red voters in blue states and cities who use airports for work or have work that relies on other people who do. If the economy is a car, this would be the Trump administration finding a way to engage a third emergency brake on it while in motion. But you can see how Markwayne must have thought of it: Dad is mad at me. Dad likes tariffs. Tariffs block something. You want to punish something you don’t like. I am going to go on Fox News and announce that I have invented a “people tariff,” and the first “people tariff” going up is on bad people and the Marxist States of America.
For Markwayne and Trump, this is probably fine. Neither can conceptualize those who must absorb the consequences of vassals trying to please their lord by outrunning each other in a race to civilizational suicide. It is not clear from their behavior that they understand there are any people involved at all, and it shows. It’s already hard to get into the country and work here, and it’s harder now to do that without being harassed. Now maybe the flight is canceled. Or maybe the flight can’t go there. Or it can, but you can’t. Or the business dependent on you is being choked to death at the same rate you are. It all adds up. Tariffs can go up or down, the Strait of Hormuz can be opened or closed, and the president can threaten to bomb another nation. The clear and unintended message each time will be that someone will make a fortune betting on each, and it is not going to stop being like this. Not even if every relationship that makes up your version of the economy is ground into dust.
It doesn’t take an explosive moment to walk away from a doomed relationship. Sometimes it is enough to see, finally, that it will never be anything other than a worsened version of what it already is. Someone no-shows something important (again), and you finally lose their number. You get a call from a friend who always asks for favors and returns none, and the call goes unreturned. A party vibe turns to drunken belligerence or suicidal ideation, or both, and you realize you don’t have to feel this way, and you don’t owe your witnessing to this behavior. The citizens of the rest of the world are free to feel that, and are daily encouraged to by Mullin and Trump’s chaotic and imploding hostility. We’ll still be here, but no one’s stopping by.
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