A Unified Theory of Fuckery

From the reflecting pool to the rainforest: what is happening, what it costs, and the correct word for it

Fuckery, as a concept, requires a specific set of conditions. It requires, first, that someone is doing something wrong. It requires, second, that the person doing it knows it is wrong. It requires, third, that the person doing it has constructed an elaborate architecture of justification, denial, deflection, and outright fabrication to avoid accountability for the wrong thing they are doing while knowing it is wrong. Without all three conditions, you have merely incompetence or error. With all three, you have fuckery, and fuckery is what we have, at a scale and density that the word has not previously been asked to accommodate.

The man at the center of the current fuckery is Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, serial bankrupt, and the only president in American history to be impeached twice, acquitted twice by senators who privately agreed with the charges, and returned to office by a country that had watched all of it happen. He is, by any serious measure, the largest single source of fuckery in the recorded history of the American republic, and the fuckery is not incidental to his character. It is the character. The fuckery is load-bearing.

Consider the reflecting pool.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been reflecting things competently since 1922 including the March on Washington and every presidential inauguration since Eisenhower, was recently improved by the Trump administration. The improvement consisted of paying $14.6 million to a contractor with golf club ties to the executive branch to drain a working pool and paint it blue, a color the president selected personally, which caused the pool to turn green with algae in twelve days because dark paint absorbs heat and heat grows algae, a fact available to any person who has owned a garden pond or taken a biology class or simply looked at the 2016 Rio Olympics, when the diving pool turned green for exactly the same reason after a contractor added hydrogen peroxide to the water. The administration then added hydrogen peroxide to the pool. The paint peeled. A 67-year-old former Olympic cyclist touched a piece of paint that was already floating free in the water. He was arrested. The president demanded years in jail. He called it vandalism. He called it an antifa attack. He misspelled Reflecting Pool as Reflecting Poll, deleted the post, reposted it, and described the whole situation as a success.

This is fuckery of the purest kind. It is not incompetence alone, though incompetence is present. It is the specific fuckery of a man who ruined a thing, blamed someone else for the ruination, arrested a bystander, and called the result beautiful. It is the same fuckery he applies to everything, from the JCPOA he tore up because Obama made it, to the pandemic infrastructure he dismantled before the pandemic, to the Iran deal he started a war to replace and then replaced with something worse than what he destroyed, to the classified documents he took home because wanting them was the same as owning them, to the women who have described what he did and whom he has continued to defame after a jury confirmed what they described.

Decent Americans, by which I mean the majority of Americans who did not vote for this and do not endorse it and are watching it happen with the specific helplessness of people who went to work and paid taxes and assumed the guardrails were load-bearing, are fucking exhausted. Not angry in a productive way. Exhausted in the way you get exhausted when you have been correct about something terrible for years and the something terrible keeps happening and being correct about it has not made it stop. They are tired of being right. They would prefer to have been wrong. Being right, in this context, means watching a man who called Epstein a terrific guy and liked them on the younger side manage the release of documents about that relationship from the Situation Room of the White House while his former defense attorney runs the Department of Justice. Being right is not a comfort. Being right is just the view from the room where the guardrails used to be.

The rest of the world is watching this with an expression that has no single English word but that most languages have some version of, which combines horror, pity, disbelief, and the specific dread of a person watching someone they care about make a catastrophic decision in slow motion from across a room too large to cross in time. The European Union has adjusted its trade framework to reduce dependency on American predictability. Canada has rerouted supply chains. Australia has deepened its regional partnerships. Germany, France, and the UK have maintained their climate commitments independently of American participation, because American participation is no longer a variable they can plan around. The NATO alliance has not collapsed, but it has begun the institutional equivalent of quietly checking the exits, which is what alliances do when the largest member starts describing the collective security arrangement as a protection racket.

This is not anti-Americanism. This is the rational response of democratic governments to the behavior of an administration that has made unpredictability its foreign policy and cruelty its domestic one.

The planet is not watching. The planet does not watch. The planet simply responds, with the same indifference it has always shown to the preferences of the primates running it, to the carbon being released into the atmosphere at the rate being released because the administration that withdrew from every international climate framework and packed every regulatory agency with former fossil fuel lobbyists has been accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. Europe had its hottest spring on record this year, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees Celsius above normal, and Paris told its residents to cool off in canals. The Amazon lost a record area of forest cover in 2025. The Great Salt Lake has shrunk to 16 percent of its historic size. The Florida coral reef system, the third largest in the world, recorded its second mass bleaching event in three years. The administration’s response to these developments has been to remove the scientists who measure them, defund the agencies that study them, and withdraw from the international bodies that coordinate responses to them, which is the fucking definition of making things worse on purpose.

The national parks remain open, technically, because closing them would be politically inconvenient. They are being opened to mining and drilling at a rate that has not been seen since the McKinley administration. The trees the Trump administration is not cutting down itself are being cut down by the logging permits it is approving. The water the administration is not polluting directly is being polluted by the regulations it is removing. The wildlife it is not shooting is being shot under the hunting rules it is relaxing. The systematic dismantling of the environmental infrastructure of the United States is not a side effect of the administration’s energy policy. It is the energy policy.

The word for all of this, the correct clinical term for a government that systematically uses public power for private benefit, that dismantles the oversight mechanisms designed to prevent that use, that weaponizes the justice system against its critics while protecting its allies, that concentrates authority in ways the constitutional architecture was specifically designed to prevent, that eliminates the independence of institutions whose independence is their only value, is fascism. Not as a rhetorical escalation. Not as a hyperbole. As a description.

The people doing it know it is wrong. They know it in the Situation Room meetings they hold in secret from their own colleagues. They know it in the loyalty oaths they require. They know it in the phone calls the president made to news executives trying to kill stories about him. They know it in the files they are redacting and the scientists they are firing and the prosecutors they are replacing with personal defense attorneys and the judges they are attacking for ruling against them. They know.

That is the third condition. That is the fuckery.

Moral and decent people in this country and in every allied democracy that is watching, which is all of them, are not confused about what they are seeing. They are not uncertain about the category it belongs to. They are watching, with the full weight of historical literacy, a thing they were told could not happen here, happening here, at a pace that makes the normal tools of democratic correction feel inadequate to the correction required.

The prognosis is not hopeless. The fuckery is extensive but it is not yet total. Courts are still ruling. Journalists are still publishing. Scientists are still counting. People are still organizing. The democratic immune system is degraded but not dead, and immune systems, properly supported, can recover from serious insults.

But the pool is still green. The parks are still being drilled. The files are still redacted. The scientists are still being fired. The planet is still warming. The pretzels are still smiling. The convicted felon is still in the Oval Office, surrounded by gold fixtures and the lingering scent of fast food, posting about Dumocrats at two in the morning, and the fuckery continues, and the word for it is the right word, and it is time we all used it.

Fucking hell.