Heeey, happy Affirm Your Patriotism or Be Called a Terrorist Day! Seventeen years since we collectively agreed that any privacy means The Terrorists Win. Sure, the roots go down further, but what a relief we can now call anyone with a skin tone that doesn’t complement our prejudices a threat to national security, rather than the olden days when they had to form unions and political parties first. We’ve come so far; who would’ve thought back in Jr. Bushwacker’s early days we’d be staring down the barrel of fascism? There’s a glittery all-caps NEVER FORGET on every T-shirt and bumper sticker I see, but I can’t find anyone who remembers in the first place.

Co-signed.

I can’t wait until November 8th.

I can’t wait for 2020.

I can’t wait for all these old white men to die.

Fuck the police.

I decided it would be fun to break down today’s incendiary New York Times Opinion Piece. I’ve gunned it through my finely tuned bullshit detector and translated it line-by-line from its original Republican. Here are the results:

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
The ship is going down, folks.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
We know he’s guilty. We know you hate him. We know we’re about to get our asses kicked.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I just thought everyone (including our foreign adversaries) should know that the Executive Branch of the Federal Government is in a perpetual state of low-grade coup d’etat, and the President of the United States is literally too stupid to recognize it.

I would know. I am one of them.
I’m a rat in a room full of ass-covering cowards.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
To be clear, we’re still a bunch of craven assholes. We want nothing more than the rich to get richer, and we’re totally cool with ripping babies from the arms of mothers if it means racist old white people will keep voting for us.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
Even ass-covering cowards need a sense of purpose, and we’ve found ours in continually preventing a narcissistic half-wit from accidentally starting World War III.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
Don’t you see? By being traitorous and disloyal to the worst human being to ever hold the office of President, that somehow makes us the good guys.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
The President of the United States is a psychopath. No, really. He’s an actual psychopath, and we don’t know if it’s better or worse that he’s also easily manipulated and painfully fucking stupid.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
I am either completely full of shit, or I have a childlike grasp of contemporary Republicanism and such crippling levels of cognitive dissonance that I refuse to recognize how Donald Trump epitomizes the ideals long practiced by conservatives: closed minds, rigged markets, and selfish people.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
We’re absolutely terrified that he’s gonna fuck up the economy and we’ll end up like the rest of the poors.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
Again, we’re totally cool with his dumbfuck military parades, as long as we get our blank check to fuck up the environment and those sweet, sweet tax cuts for the wealthy.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
Honestly, we’re amazed we got those tax cuts, because the boss can’t even tie his shoelaces.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
All of the narcissistic underlings that play golf with me will privately admit that even they aren’t as bad as the President. Most are working hard to protect their fiefdoms from the impending collapse of the administration.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
Oh, did I mention the President has an undiagnosed major neurocognitive disorder with paranoid features?

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
While I’m at it, here is further evidence effectively demonstrating to everyone (including our foreign adversaries) that the President of the United States is suffering from significant cognitive decline.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
Thank god we’re here to save you all from this man. Don’t you see we’re the good guys? Why are you all so mean to us? We’ve gone to such great lengths to mop up after a paranoid psychopath with dementia who happens to hold the most powerful elected office in the world. We want a cookie. Can we have a cookie?

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
We believe that we’re the adults in the room, which totally confirms that we also believe the President is non compos mentis.

The result is a two-track presidency.
The result is a shadow government.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
If you think Trump tickles Putin’s balls in public, you should see the kneepads he breaks out in private. It’s downright treasonous!

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
I am very likely either the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Attorney General.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
*twirls evil mustache* Then again, maybe I’m the Director of National Intelligence.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Whoever I may be, I am also a gaping asshole of such infinite magnitude that I would describe this shit show as the work of the “steady state.”

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
Oh yeah, I totally buried the lede. We had super secret cabinet-level meetings about removing the President of the United States from office, but then we figured, nah, let’s get those tax cuts.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
We’re not gaslighting you. You’re gaslighting yourselves!

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
We hereby nominate Senator McCain for Republican Sainthood — and let’s use the word “lodestar” for no particular reason, because that seems totally fine and not at all a thing that closeted Republicans wish could be their porn name.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit: ‘Murica.

When you are ready, will you share with us what happened with the last guy you were seeing? So sorry to be nosy, but I care for you, I’m curious and I feel like I could learn from it.

I still don’t know what happened. Not really. I thought that for the first time in my life I had found a human being worth making my actual husband. We were one of those disgustingly happy couples from day one. We were a team, and we made it look easy.

We traveled the world together. We moved in together. We started planning our lives together. There was a ring. We saved a date and picked a wedding venue. Things between us were wonderful for a solid year, and then suddenly they weren’t.

It was him, not me. He just fell out of love. Hard. In a matter of weeks, his feelings for me changed, and I still don’t know how or why. In the final days, I knew something was wrong, and I tried talking to him, but he was reassuring and highly skilled at avoiding conflict. In other words, he was very good at lying to my face about his feelings and intentions.

The end came without warning. He simply moved out one afternoon while I was at work. He conspired for weeks to end the relationship while resisting even one single conversation about his change of heart, and he gave me literally one hour’s notice before the moving truck arrived.

The last time I saw him, it was as if I was speaking with a stranger. He was all business, zero compassion. His ability to cut off his emotions so completely kind of scared me a little, and we have not spoken since the breakup.

Of course, I miss him, but the person I miss no longer exists if he ever existed in the first place. The person capable of that level of conspiracy and emotional cutoff is not the same person I thought I loved, and the manner in which he ended the relationship precludes any possibility that I might let him back into my life.

I recently learned that he left his previous ex in a similar manner, though throughout our relationship he’d led me to believe that his previous ex was the one who had left him. Who knows? If I had to guess, I’d say his family also may have played a role. I never quite felt like his mother approved of us. Again, who knows?

I’m not sure what, if anything, you hope to learn from this. The only lesson in it for me is that life ain’t fair and you don’t often get any answers as to why. Naturally, I already knew that shit.

I am dating again, though only half-heartedly. The single men here are mostly religious and/or Republican, and there’s not a craft cocktail in the world artisanal enough for me to put up with that kind of conversation.

Still, life is grand. I love what I do for a living, and I love my new place in the world. I am ever hopeful. Not that I’m hoping for anything in particular, but I am broadly optimistic about the future and unabashedly good at savoring the human condition regardless of whether I exist in a state of singlehood, couplehood, or some creative variation of the two.

Okay, so I may be totally off-base here. But am I the only one who’s suspicious of the consequences of impeaching Trump? Like, maybe that’s exactly what Russia wants us to do?

I don’t know. I admit I know jack about politics and I’m not very smart. It’s just that Russia has always been weirdly out there with their tactics (shit more nuanced and fiction-crazy than some of the shit the U.S. has done — thinking of the Cold War Georgi Markov ricin assassination here). It seems odd that a country with such a complex history of clever subversion would want a cartoon villain for U.S. President, and nothing more. Think about it. All our attention is on Trump right now. Even quite a few Republicans are galvanized to move against him, and we’re all converging on him without really thinking about anything else because, at the moment, his existence in politics is the worst thing anyone can think of. What if that’s exactly what Russia wants? We finally impeach him and we’re so up our own asses with heady victory that we don’t even see whatever it is they have planned next for us until it’s too late.

Am I an idiot for entertaining this idea? Should I hang up my tinfoil hat?

Russia is not a person. It’s a country. It has national interests, but not “wants” in the way you’re using the term. Vladimir Putin is a person, and he definitely has wants, but he’s also not a secret evil genius. I mean sure, he keeps plenty of secrets, he is cartoonishly evil, and he has a certain kind of Machiavellian genius, but we also tend to give him way too much credit. At the end of the day, he’s just a crime boss with nuclear codes. His interests are transparent and predictable.

It’s true, one of Putin’s overarching foreign interests is the slow and steady destabilization of Western Democracy, but we all know that. (Well, everyone but the President knows that.) Still, there’s no strategic mystery here, and to the extent that Putin has control over the Russian government, he will use state power to play his zero-sum spy-game of fucking with the United States and other NATO countries.

Now, no one — not even Putin — really believed that Trump was gonna win the Presidency. Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election was an effort to destabilize and delegitimize what everyone expected was going to be a Clinton administration, but Putin fucked up and accidentally got Trump elected. You’d think a Trump victory is what Putin would have wanted, but it isn’t. Putin was playing the long game, a low-key death-by-a-thousand-cuts style attack on the West. With the election of Trump, Putin got his hand caught in the cookie jar, and the Russian interference in our election provoked a massive immune response within the institutions of the US government that will likely culminate in impeachment proceedings against Trump.

If this massive institutional immune response ends up inoculating our government against further cyber and psychological warfare, then Putin overplayed his hand. If Democrats win back Congress in November, I think we’ll all see the fever break. There will finally be legitimate hearings into the 2016 election. There will be election reform. There may even be impeachment proceedings. Then again, maybe not. Democrats may not win back Congress. Trump could end up serving out his term, nominating another Supreme Court justice, and maybe even winning reelection. It’s possible, but none of that would be due to any nefarious Russian subversion. It would be due entirely to American stupidity.

So yeah, long story short: Don’t be afraid of Russian subversion. Be afraid of American stupidity and the institutions that foster it. (I’m looking at you, Fox News.) That’s the real enemy. An unsophisticated domestic electorate is infinitely more dangerous than a sophisticated foreign adversary.

In other words, educate yourself, get involved, and GET OUT THERE AND FUCKING VOTE.

The past couple of posts that you have written, I have found a resonance with them. Your replies, though less frequent, are very fulfilling for me. There was a cheekiness early on that I LOVED very much from you. But, what you give me now is more adult, less sweet or lurid, it’s deeper. Your words are more important now; they hold more weight. You always seem to write, right when I begin to miss you the most.

I mean this,

I love you very much.

But I still miss you (or the idea of you, or the fun version of you I had in my mind, or the no bullshit cokehead 25-year-old you)

But I like this you. It’s lovely.

Thank you. I don’t miss the 25-year-old cokehead me, but it’s nice to know that crazy bitch left an indelible mark on something other than my liver. A decade ago someone asked me how I maintained, and I remember acknowledging the fact that I would eventually have to move the party up the hill. That’s what I’ve done, emotionally, spiritually, and professionally. When I left Los Angeles, I cashed in my youth for a greater sense of purpose, and it was worth every ounce of cheekiness.

I have officially moved into the dinner party phase of life, and as you say, it’s more adult, less lurid, and much, much deeper. The fun part is recognizing that there’s a grand inevitability to it all. I see that in another ten years, I’ll be discovered by the teenage offspring of my original readers and looked upon as some decadent subcultural artifact from the aught years, an era of naiveté when we gave away our privacy for free and still believed that having a bumbling cowboy as President was the worst thing in the entire world.

In the meantime, I get to speak in my adult voice. You find resonance in that voice because we’re all adults now and we’re terrified to discover that not only are we the ones in charge, but that we’re all still faking it, our parents were all faking it, and every generation before us was faking it too. None of us have ever had any fucking idea how any of this works, and at any moment it could all end in thermonuclear war, or worse, because we were texting while driving.

The nihilist in me appreciates how little control we have over our own fate. My inner child has always been the type to let go of the handlebars, so I don’t mind one bit that we’re all hurtling rudderless into the void. I like this part. I’m really good at being the adult in the room, not because I have some special wisdom that comes with age, but because I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that as a species, we are totally and completely full of shit.

Are you the person you have led us to believe you are? Some part of me feels that this was some weird social experiment that blew up beyond your wildest expectations and now you’ve outgrown the gimmick. I don’t ask this in any judgmental way. I’ve grown with you too, perhaps a generation or two apart. I am not the same person as I was when you were still “Dear Coke.”

I’ve been completely open about the fact that this was a weird social experiment that blew up beyond my wildest expectations. Anyone who’s come along for the ride also knows that I’ve outgrown several gimmicks. I’m certainly not the same person I was a mere two years ago, much less a decade when all of this ridiculousness started. Hell, we’ve all grown up. It’s what we do.

What you’re sensing is real, though. My life is much less frivolous now, and the world is a much more sinister place. I’m still living a relatively comfortable life, but after changing careers and changing cities, my day-to-day has taken on a much more serious tone. People depend on me, and I’ve taken on very real responsibilities that would have terrified my former self.

I’ve been making all of this up as I go along, and the question as to what happens next has never had an answer that extended beyond the next six months. That’s still the case. I’m not going anywhere, but I have no idea what this will become in 2018 and beyond. We’ll see. All I can say for sure is that this place will always reflect my true character, and the only promise I can make is that even if I end up having kids one day, Dear Coquette will never devolve into some craft-sharing cutesy-ass mommy blog.

I just came back from spending the weekend at Coachella. I had an all-access artist’s wristband, gifted to me from the hot drummer I’m currently fucking whose band was playing the festival. It was my first time at Coachella and easily the best weekend of my life.

It’s funny, when I woke up in the late afternoon on Monday, I immediately thought of you. I proceeded to sift through your archives, first reading every post you had written about Coachella, then scrolling through all your old musings. (I still am.)

I started reading your blog when I was a 14-year-old attending Palisades High School, dazzled by your style and dreaming of a time where I would be old enough to experience the LA playground the way you had. I’m 22 now, and ever since I left my parents house at 20, life has been a constant flow of wild and introspective events. I know my Los Angeles and yours are different. But I’m so excited for this one, and I can’t help but feel like you had something to do with this feeling.

Thank you for your steady influence through all these years. Thank you for answering a question I sent you when I was 15 and had just lost my virginity. Thank you for involuntarily being the super cool big sister I never had. You’re amazing, and I hope you’re well.

This made me smile. I’m so happy for you. I’m also a little bit envious at the thought of being twenty-two and backstage at my first Coachella. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it, but you’re right — what I miss and what you’re experiencing aren’t the same thing. That’s why I know better than to go back. I’d be looking for something that doesn’t exist, and I’d find something that belongs to someone else now.

That’s okay, though. My time was mine and your time is yours, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I’m just honored that you thought of me. Really. That feeling you’ve got, I know exactly what it’s like. It’s so pure and beautiful, and for you to feel like I had something to do with it means the fucking world to me.

This past year has been one of the most difficult and transformative of my life. I haven’t been able to share myself like I used to, and I haven’t been able to give your questions the attention that they deserve. I’m sorry about that. I appreciate that you’ve all been patient with me, and I want you to know that I still read as many submissions as I can. I plan on coming back. I know I keep saying that, but bear with me.

In the meantime, thanks for scrolling through my old stuff. Thanks for sending me new questions to answer. Thanks for thinking of me every once in a while, and thanks for sharing it with me.

Stay wild.

We are not all capitalists. The vast, vast, vast majority of us are labor. We work for a living. Why are you lying to these people? Kellyanne, is that you?

When I say we’re all capitalists, I mean it in the same way that we’re all 60% water. If you are alive in America today, then you are a product of late-stage capitalism. Your personal beliefs are irrelevant. Your socio-economic status is irrelevant. Your politics are irrelevant — you are a tiny little piece of capitalism, and you don’t have a choice.

This isn’t about your freshmen level Marxism or your anarchy tattoo or anything else you’ve built into your identity that you think separates you from the system. If you’ve got access to the internet and the occasional cheeseburger, then calling yourself labor is just a distinction without a difference.

That’s not me being pro-capitalism or fiscally conservative or anything else so grotesque as to be worthy of the name Kellyanne. Fuck that. I’m all for infusing the American experiment with as much socialism as possible, but I also have a grip on reality, and I recognize that a deliberate refusal to accept the fundamentals of our economic system is just a left wing version of willful ignorance, and I fucking detest willful ignorance.

Sorry, kid. I’m with Nancy Pelosi on this one: “We’re capitalists. That’s just the way it is.”