I do not eat regular popcorn.
I want to be clear about that before we go any further. Plain popcorn – air popped, lightly salted, the kind people bring to movie theaters in a paper bag like they did not just pay fourteen dollars to sit in a recliner – does not interest me. It is fine. It is adequate. It requires no investment of thought or palate and produces no satisfaction of consequence.
I need Poppycock. The caramel and cashew situation that understands what snacking is supposed to accomplish. I need the West African milk powder and sugar popcorn – and before you make a face, I need you to sit down because that is one of the most transcendent things you will ever put in your mouth and I will not apologize for knowing that. I need the Cracker Jack situation where there is a prize at the bottom and the caramel is doing something intentional. I need my popcorn to have a point of view.
You know what else should have a point of view?
The American voting public.
But here we are. Eating plain popcorn. Watching the show.
The theatre.
What we are watching in American politics right now is not governance. It is not policy. It is not leadership in any form that word has ever been used correctly.
It is theatre. Loud, chaotic, deeply undignified theatre – the kind where the lead actor has forgotten half his lines, is visibly confused about what play he is in, what country he is in, and possibly what decade he is in – and the audience is so dazzled by the pyrotechnics that nobody has noticed the stagehands are stealing the furniture.
A former Johns Hopkins University Medical School professor and clinical psychologist described the President’s decline across four areas – thinking, verbal language, physical body, and behavior – noting these are the four main areas clinicians look for in dementia. On April 30, 2026, 36 physicians signed a public statement raising concerns. The president’s most recent physical, conducted at Walter Reed in May 2026, declared him in excellent health with a perfect score on a 10-minute cognitive screening – results the White House sat on for nearly three days before releasing on a Friday evening.
A perfect score on a 10-minute test. Released on a Friday evening. That is not transparency. That is a PR strategy in a lab coat, written by people afraid to lose their jobs and livelihood.
Meanwhile Rep. Jamie Raskin formally urged the White House physician to perform a full cognitive assessment, noting that experts had repeatedly warned the President was exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline, with public statements turning increasingly incoherent, volatile, and erratic.
The man has nuclear launch authority over more than 5,000 warheads. And the defense is a perfect score on a 10-minute quiz released on a Friday evening by a White House physician who apparently did not witness the same public appearances the rest of us did. The same man who loves money and adoration as much as he enjoys passing gas and doo-dooing free form in his pants during public outings. That man. That is the man with the nuclear codes.
I need more Poppycock for this part.
Now let us talk about the stagehands.
While the audience was busy watching the main act forget what country he was in and confuse world leaders with each other and deliver tangential speeches about buildings with his name on them – and tangential speech is, for the record, one of the established diagnostic criteria for dementia according to the clinical psychologists who have been sounding this alarm for two solid years while the rest of Washington looked the other way – while all of that was happening in the front of the stage, the stagehands were working.
Enter DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency. Headed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk – and some other fools – who arrived with a chainsaw at a conservative conference and promised to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget.
Two trillion.
When DOGE officially disbanded on July 4, 2026 – yes, July 4th, the symbolism apparently unironic and the audacity fully intact – it claimed $215 billion in savings. The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan federal watchdog, reviewed those claims and found multiple issues limiting the transparency and reliability of the reported savings. DOGE did not respond to the GAO’s requests for information and interviews.
Let me say that again. The people tasked with government accountability did not respond to the government accountants.
They cut two trillion dollars down to $215 billion, got caught inflating that number too, and then went silent when the auditors came knocking. A Partnership for Public Service analysis estimated the cost to fire, rehire, and put workers on paid leave cost American taxpayers roughly $135 billion. A Yale Budget Lab report projected that if 22,000 IRS employees left their roles, the agency would lose $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 due to fewer personnel available to conduct audits.
So DOGE spent money to save money, fired the people who collect the money, declared victory, and Musk went back to his companies.
The stagehands took the furniture. Left the receipt. And the receipt does not add up.
The audience problem.
Here is the part that keeps me reaching for the wine alongside the Poppycock.
A significant portion of the American public watched all of this happen and cheered. Not because they are bad people. Because they are under-informed people who were given a very shiny, very loud distraction and no context for what was happening behind it.
This is not an accident. This is the strategy.
Put the spectacle in front. Keep it loud. Keep it moving. Make sure there is always something outrageous happening on the main stage so that nobody looks too hard at what is happening in the back. The base does not need to know the details. The base needs to feel something – righteous, aggrieved, triumphant, afraid – and keep feeling it long enough to not ask questions.
The man in the highest office in this country loves money and adoration in equal measure. He is not governing. He is performing. And the performance is cover for the very real extraction happening in the background – federal jobs eliminated, programs dismantled, oversight mechanisms removed, and a man who was supposed to cut two trillion dollars walking away with the furniture and a story about how hard it all was.
They hate you, beloved. They just need you not to figure that out until it is over.
Plain popcorn people will not figure it out. They are too busy watching the show.
On the matter of specialty popcorn as political philosophy.
Regular popcorn accepts what it is given. It does not ask questions. It does not require anything of the experience beyond the bare minimum of being popped. It is satisfied with the least possible version of the thing. It will sit in a paper bag in the dark and call it a night.
I refuse to be regular popcorn.
My insistence on Poppycock – on the West African milk powder situation, on the Cracker Jack with a prize at the bottom, on caramel and cashews doing something intentional with their lives – is a statement about the quality of information I require before I form an opinion. I do not accept the plain version of the story. I do not eat the pre-packaged narrative without checking what is in it. I want the full picture, the sourced receipts, the thing that has actually been thought through and prepared with intention.
And upon discovering that the full picture is, in fact, complete and utter nonsense dressed up in a flag and a press release – I add a glass of wine to the equation.
Because some situations require both the clarity of understanding what is actually happening and the grace of knowing you cannot fix it tonight. Pour generously. Sip slowly. Keep watching.
What you can do that is not despair.
Pay attention past the headline. The headline is the plain popcorn. The actual reporting – the GAO findings, the clinical assessments, the voting record, the financial disclosures – that is the Poppycock. It requires more effort. It is significantly more rewarding. And it will ruin plain popcorn for you forever, which is the correct outcome.
Talk to people who are not already in your agreement circle. Not to convince them. To understand what version of the story they are eating and why. You cannot address the distraction if you do not understand what it is distracting from.
Vote like it is the only tool you have left – because increasingly it is. Show up for local elections. School boards. State legislatures. Judges. The boring ones that nobody photographs. That is where the furniture is actually kept and where the stagehands have not gotten to yet.
And when you have done what you can do for the day – pour the wine. Open the Poppycock. Sit with the understanding that you are one of the people who can see clearly, which is both a gift and a burden, and that keeping your clarity intact is itself a form of resistance.
The theatre will continue. The stagehands will keep working.
Make sure you are watching both.
What is your political popcorn equivalent – the thing you reach for when the news gets to be too much? Drop it in the comments. We could all use a recommendation right now.
