By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
The Dumb of the Week Desk has been dormant the past few editions — not for the lack of Dumb to cover in the world. Far from it, in fact. At this point, it’s like trying to bail out a boat that’s already sitting on the bottom of the lake. Regardless, we shall proceed.
A couple of weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance’s quote about Watergate wasn’t quite the flex he thought it would be. Speaking at the Richard Nixon presidential library in California on June 25, Vance said, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. … The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. … If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first administration. There is a parallel.”
There sure is, JD. The parallel is that both Nixon and Trump were and are crooks. Nixon’s downfall was of his own making. It wasn’t the “deep state” that took him down, it was his criminal actions resulting from an insatiable lust for power and control. Sound familiar? Nixon resigned during his second term to avoid almost certain impeachment and removal from office. Trump’s sycophants can attempt to rewrite history on this topic, but facts are stubborn. They don’t submit to the will of egocentric windsock politicians like JD Vance.
The thing that elicited a sharp guffaw from the Dumb of the Week Desk was how Vance’s statement seemed to be engineered to make Nixon out as some type of victim. He wasn’t.
To quote the late-great Hunter S. Thompson on Nixon: “For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”
I wonder what the good doctor would’ve written about Trump if he’d lived long enough to experience our current national depravity.
Let me explain it for the people in the back of the room: The belief that a Watergate-type scandal in 2026 would go away after a 12-hour news cycle is testament to the fact that we are a broken government and society. When fraud going to the top of the food chain doesn’t elicit more than a few news stories before being quickly subsumed by the next shiny obscenity or declaration of war means that the Trump years have severely damaged our national psyche.
Meanwhile, the slow transformation of the United States into a dictatorship continues, as Trump’s face will now be added to $1 coins. The U.S. joins the following countries who have added living leaders to their currency:
• The Philippines (Marcos)
• Uganda (Idi Amin)
• Malawi (Banda)
• Iran (Shah Pahlavi)
• Iraq (Saddam Hussein)
• Libya (Gaddafi)
• Syria (Bashar al-Assad)
• North Korea (Kim Jong Un)
• China (Mao)
Now we’re keeping some quite distinguished company.
Trump — an adjudicated rapist and 34-time felon — should by all rights be serving time in jail, yet here we are putting him on coins.
In other Dumb news, on July 15, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., questioned Jay Clayton — Trump’s pick to serve as director of National Intelligence — on who he believed won the 2020 election. Clayton repeatedly declined to answer the question, saying, “I’m not going to do this with you.”
“You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election, but you ask to lead America’s intelligence community?” Ossoff asked Clayton. “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge in the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to this question. Why can you not give it?”
In sports news, Spain won the World Cup, but they unfortunately had to deal with attention-whore Trump lingering on the stage with them while they hoisted the trophy. No worries, though; both FIFA and the Spanish national football team officially cropped the photobomber-in-chief out of their World Cup snaps. If only it were that easy in real life.
Finally, Trump weighed in on the Canadian wildfire smoke blowing into the U.S., writing yet another nuanced take: “Maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.” Sigh.
Instead of addressing yet another one of Trump’s ragebait complaints, I’ll end by honoring Canadian firefighter pilot Nicholas Dale, who lost his life earlier this month while battling a wildfire in Colorado. Dale is a hero who died fighting a fire in our country, and this is the thanks our president gives?
