I’d like to offer an alternate doomer scenario—that happens to be the timeline we’re in: A messianic narcissist conman is the US president. He has dementia which has destroyed what remained of his inhibitions. He knows he’s dying and wants to take the world with him. He lives in an alternate reality created by his own delusions, reinforced by Natalie Harp. The president of the United States is psychotic. This is the most dangerous conceivable combination of psychopathologies and neurodegenerative disorders. With this man as Commander in Chief, we are now facing a converging set of crises that has the potential to be a kind of black swan event far too complex to model the outcome. Trump has demolished our ability to project power in the Middle East. Our bases are destroyed or damaged. Our former allies in the region are being abandoned. Our ability to fight a war anywhere else has been drastically diminished. Iran, once a rogue terrorist gas station, has out-maneuvered Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to the point that it is now a regional hegemon—with control of the world’s carotid artery. Trump has emptied the strategic oil reserves—and the ammunition stockpile. He and Scott Bessent have abused every federal trick in the book to pump up stock prices and keep the absurd AI bubble inflated. Bonds are rocketing higher. The economy is teetering. The population is weak, getting sick from diarrhea lettuce and measles, and weary of the unrelenting displays of racism, sadism, and open corruption from our own government. The oil shock that so many have warned about has arrived, with absolutely no plan to end it. Donald Trump could not care less about the horrific damage it’s already done. Millions of people will die from lack of fertilizer to crops. Economies around the world will fall into recession—just to start. On top of this we have an unprecedented Godzilla El Niño event that has not been seen in recorded history. Ecologies and agricultures are already weak and battered. The lack of fertilizer on top of this event has the potential to spark a famine of historic proportions. This regime will do nothing to help. And what is the president focused on right now? Destroying the Kennedy Center because he can’t put his name on it. That is definitionally psychotic behavior. We are less than two months from an election that has the potential to slow down Trump’s reign of terror. But the Director of the FBI is going to meet the FSB in Moscow three weeks before election day. The president’s son allowed his “good friend” and Putin’s confidante to surveil his wedding for a few hundred grand. This election will not be about who wins the election but about whether we can still hold elections at all. But instead of focusing on any of this, the media and political class is freaking out because ChatGPT might be organizing to murder everyone or whatever. Just stop. No, AI will not kill us, but it may cause a great depression. But in a risk analysis, even that pales to the fact a desperate, demented, paranoid Donald Trump HAS THE NUCLEAR CODES. He is in a war he can’t win, with no plan to get out. He is an existential danger to the planet. This is the timeline right here and right now. So please, people. Focus. Do not let them hijack your attention with futuristic apocalypse scenarios when we’re living in one in the present.