PJ Vogt

I only really like stories that invite lots of feelings, not knowing, complexity.

President uses taxpayer money to make personal slash fund is not a normal search engine story.

But it's where we are this week because it genuinely did grab my attention.

Genuinely forced me to feel things that I try not to feel because I think if you feel them too often, they do something bad to your brain.

I'm sure our next episode will be more normal.

But this week, I feel like I've huffed a can of MSNBC.

I solemnly apologize.

Jesse is different for me.

He routinely reports on stories that outrage him.

He tries to bring outrageous delight on behalf of the public interest.

But even for him, this is a story where, when he imagines its next act, his imagination offers some particularly bleak outcomes.

To Jesse, the possibility that Trump just pays his friends about $2 billion of taxpayer money so it'll somehow end up back in his pocket would actually be not as bad as another outcome.

The worst one he can imagine is this, that Trump has about $2 billion now and he fulfills his promise to pay the January 6th insurrectionists.

And now he has something that looks a little bit like a paramilitary group.

people who do violence at his command, who he then gets out of jail and pays.

What does he do with them next?

Is America flirting with something darker here than we flirted with before?

I don't know what to make of that.

You can make the mistake of driving yourself crazy imagining terrible futures.

You can make the mistake of summoning terrible futures by telling yourself they'll never arrive.