On Monday, we reached all-time-high levels of being 12 years old when several government social media accounts shared a deluge of Trump-themed Halo memes. Unfortunately, today those in the halls of power have raised the bar again, making their past selves look downright 13 in comparison.
Now we’ve got White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai and the Department of Homeland Security weighing in, both of whom provided comments on the memes to freelance journalist and Aftermath pal Alyssa Mercante. Desai centered his response around the supposed end of the console wars, which should only matter to you if you died in the 90s while arguing about who’d win in a fight between Mario and Sonic and now haunt the playground you were crawling around on to this day:
“Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch—only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers."
(With loud reactionaries, maybe, but with normal people caught in a tornado of tariffs, almost certainly not.)
The Department of Homeland Security’s media team decided to go the openly racist and xenophobic route, because of course they did:
"We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, or any other medium. DHS remains laser focused on bringing awareness to the flood of crime that criminal illegal aliens have inflicted on our country. We aren't slowing down."
Then we have the crown jewel in today’s gold-embossed propeller hat: Vice President JD Vance casually referencing the dumbest, most disingenuous Twitch drama yet during an appearance on New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast. Speaking about his own dog, Atlas, Vance voiced his opinion on CollarGate:
“I kind of obsessively trained him,” Vance said of Atlas. “You could see this: He sits on command, he stays on command. He has this command, place, which is basically if I snap my finger and point, he will run to that place and lay down."
"You don't have to zap him like Hasan [Piker]?" asked the show’s host, Miranda Devine.
"Not like Hasan Piker?” Vance replied in a voice that anyone should be disqualified from running for public office simply for possessing. “ No. No electrocution of dogs here."
"How disgusting is that? What does that tell you about a person?" said Devine, whose unquenchable appetite for boot needs to be studied.
"Well, I think that tells you that they're bad people,” said Vance, 12, who nonetheless possesses the baby brain of someone who was born yesterday. “If you can actually cause suffering to an innocent animal, you're probably the kind of person who doesn't worry about suffering in people as well. And that's been my experience: If you mistreat dogs, that's almost 100 percent a sign that you're gonna be a really terrible person."
Tell that to the 40 million low-income Americans about to lose SNAP benefits. I’m sure they’ll agree with you that the truest measure of a man is his dog, rather than his proclivity for aiding and abetting mass immiseration. Also, I bet JD Vance’s dog hates him, too.
On the upside, while we’ve never been more 12 years old than we are today, we could not possibly become even more 12 tomorrow. I’m sure this is it, and soon everyone will be grownups again.
