Afterword
Concluding the First Hundred Days of Ruin
A $70 million Super Hornet, assigned to the once-proud USS Harry S. Truman, simply rolled off the deck and sank into the Atlantic.
No battle.
No enemy.
No purpose.
Only exhaustion, neglect, and rot.
The ship sailed on, adrift under tattered flags,
unaware or unwilling to notice its own terminal drift.
Thus ended the Republic:
not with a roar, but with a slow, stupid splash,
as a once-mighty war machine slipped beneath the waves, forgotten even by those who built it.
One hundred days into the second coming of this distinctly American calamity, the wreckage is no longer theoretical. It is real. It is quantified. It is, in many cases, televised.
Grocery prices climb with the enthusiasm of a con artist on commission. Tariffs strangle trade routes while claiming to liberate them. Public trust, already emaciated, now resembles a carnival mirror reflection of itself—distorted, hollow, and vaguely wet.
Allies have gone to voicemail. The Fed stares into the abyss and sees a mirror. Corporate America churns out optimism reports as their legal departments quietly update their risk disclosures. Meanwhile, pundits cheerfully compare this to “other disruptive periods in history,” which is a polite euphemism for national ulcer.
* * *
There is no plan—only posture. No compass—only vibes. The chaos is not a byproduct; it is the point. We are governed by a man who cannot finish a sentence and advised by those who cannot start one without consulting a focus group of lobbyists.
And still the question echoes in beltway ballrooms and cable news command centers: “How did this happen again?”
The answer, as ever, is a reflection—dark, cracked, and disappointingly familiar. The lesson, if there is one, is not to await deliverance from above, but to cease handing the matches to the man shouting “Fire cleanses all!”
One hundred days down. Two hundred more to go. If there's anything left to go back to.
Thus concludes the opening chapter of our long, unraveling.
Apologia
We did not wish to write this.
Truly, there are better uses for ink than chronicling collapse. One might draw maps or annotate recipes or sketch the faces of those we hope will still be here when the smoke clears. And yet, here we are—inking despair in serialized format, binding absurdity in chapters, whispering into the parchment before the next act begins.
If this read more like prophecy than reporting, that is only because the cycle has become a spiral, and the spiral a drain. We take no joy in the accuracy of our dread.
But history demands record-keepers. Even when the emperor is nude and the jesters are in charge of procurement.
We do not claim to be impartial. We claim only to be awake.
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