By Executive Dysfunction Weekly

Good morning, Doomscrollers.

I’m sitting outside in the rarest of things: a summer rain in southeastern Washington. It’s not a real storm yet. Just a flirt. The clouds are trying. Dribbling. Teasing. The land is begging for it. The asphalt’s still dry in places. You can see where the raindrops hit but don’t stay. The air smells like dust and disappointment, just dirty enough to stir up the scent of longing, not clean enough to feel renewed.

God, I want it to pour. I want one of those rare daytime showers that fall like a curtain (no thunder, no warning), just water from the sky, washing over you. I want to stand in it, arms stretched wide, eyes up, drenched. I want the rain to feel like grace.

But instead, it dances and retreats. A few drops, then nothing. A promise half-kept.

While I sit here, I’m thinking about this country, about all the shit we’ve been tracking, writing, screaming into the void at EDW. The Trump administration, the power grabs, the fake emergencies, the cancellation of Colbert’s show, which critics suspect was politically motivated and CBS says was financial, the FCC thuggery, the militarized responses to problems that do not justify them. It’s all happening. Exactly how we said it would.

I hate that we were right.

It’s not even about policy anymore. This is about raw power. Abuse of it. Hoarding it. Using it not for protection or justice, but for vengeance and obedience. The law twisted into a leash. The military deployed not to defend the nation, but to pacify its citizens.

Here’s what guts me: Where is everybody? There was a time, hell, not that long ago, when any president who pulled half this shit would’ve been roasted across the aisle. Conservatives, liberals, independents: we would have joined together and run them out of office on a rail.

But now? Now we don’t act like Americans. We act like opposing sports teams. Like brands. Like cults.

We’ve been made to hate each other so deeply that we stopped noticing we’re bleeding from the same wound.

We should be pissed. We should be marching. We should be united in saying: No more. No more federalizing police forces for political optics. No more media censorship. No more weaponizing the FCC. No more “emergencies” that exist only in one man’s head.

But we’re not. We’re stuck in our silos. Screaming at shadows. Pretending it’s just business as usual.

It’s not.

The road is dry, but the storm is coming. You can smell it. Feel it in your bones. And if we don’t come together soon, really come together, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, it’s going to wash away a lot more than the dust.

We are Americans.

We should fucking act like it.

EDW•