You know what keeps me up at night: At what point does a sitting president's cognitive decline become so severe that we have to acknowledge that he's no longer operating the office—someone else is, and that someone is a ideological ghoul who makes Machiavelli look like a fucking kindergarten teacher?

The Slow Cremation of Executive Function: A President Hollowed Out
There's a particular kind of horror that settles into your chest when you watch something—someone—slowly lose the capacity to operate in the world. Not suddenly, like a stroke or a traumatic event, but incrementally, day by day, each erosion so small that everyone around you keeps insisting that everything is fine, that this is normal, that you're just being paranoid about the erosion of presidential competence. Except it's not fine. It's a slow-motion catastrophe we're all watching unfold with the kind of detached horror usually reserved for watching a building collapse in real-time on the evening news.
Steven Miller exists in the periphery of this collapse—or rather, he doesn't exist in the periphery at all. He's dead center, hand buried up inside the presidential puppet, working the strings like a deranged puppeteer in a fever dream scripted by Sartre at his most nihilistic. The man has the haunted eyes of someone who genuinely believes that every policy emanating from his brain is a sacred mandate handed down by some vengeful god. Those aren't the eyes of an ideologue—those are the eyes of someone who has transcended ideology into pure, unfiltered obsession with power and its application.
Consider the mechanics of this thing. The absolute shitfuckery required to manufacture reality so completely that a sitting president can't distinguish between actual images and deep fakes, between decades-old photographs and fresh fabrications. We're not talking about someone with occasional confusion—we're talking about someone so completely disconnected from baseline reality that sophisticated manipulation becomes nearly indistinguishable from truth. That's not decline. That's not normal aging. That's someone whose grip on consensus reality has become so tenuous that it barely registers as human cognition anymore.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does"—but what happens when the man in charge isn't actually responsible for what he does? When he's so compromised cognitively that he's essentially operating as a biological interface for someone else's will? Does Sartre's framework even apply when we're dealing with a presidency that's been hollowed out and repurposed as a delivery mechanism for one man's ideological fever dreams?
"In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - Incorrectly attributed to George Orwell, but capturing the essence of what happens when consensus reality itself becomes a contested territory, when information becomes a weapon, and when truth becomes just another policy option to be selected or discarded based on ideological convenience.
The Theory That Writes Itself: Deep Fakes, Teen Interns, and the Complete Abandonment of Reality
Here's the thing that keeps circulating in the darker corners of political discourse, and it's plausible enough that it deserves serious examination: Miller has some kid—probably some ideologically-committed teenager with a workstation and knowledge of consumer-grade AI software—creating fake videos designed specifically to feed Trump's increasingly fractured understanding of current events. Sounds insane? Absolutely. Sounds impossible? Not in the fucking slightest.
The barrier to entry for this kind of manipulation has evaporated. You don't need military-grade technology. You don't need access to classified production facilities. You need a laptop, an internet connection, and software that's available for free download. Some kid could be sitting in a coffee shop somewhere pumping out convincing deep fakes specifically calibrated to trigger Trump's particular brand of cognitive vulnerability. The dumbass-faced efficiency of such a scheme is almost beautiful in its simplicity.
Consider the evidence. Trump gets visibly angry and confused by a simple label on an image—something that any cognitively intact person would immediately recognize as a text overlay, a caption, something added in post-production. But Trump? He treats it like it's a mysterious tattoo that suddenly appeared, something requiring explanation and investigation. His brain can't compute the basic visual literacy that a six-year-old could manage. He's sitting there confused by what amounts to fucking WordArt, and nobody in the room has the spine to say "Sir, that's just text someone added. It's not real."

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