When I rule the world, here’s who we’re sending to the guillotines:

Jeff Zucker
Mark Burnett
Sheldon Adelson
Roger Ailes
Rupert Murdoch

That’s just the beginning of the list. I know Ailes is dead and Adelson and Murdock will likely follow him before too long, but we’ll dig up their corpses and decapitate whatever is left of them. In cases of cremation, we’ll accept a close family member.

But Burnett — that guy really rankles, especially after reading the Apprentice part of the NYT tax package:

Mark Burnett, a British television producer best known for the hit series “Survivor,” approached him with an idea for a different reality show, this one based in a boardroom. In Mr. Burnett’s vision, a cast of wannabe entrepreneurs would come to New York and compete for the approval of the Donald, with the winner to work on a Trump project. Mr. Trump eagerly agreed to host “The Apprentice” and went on to ham it up as the billionaire kingmaker, yelling “You’re fired” each week until one contestant was left.

Some of Mr. Burnett’s staff members wondered how a wealthy businessman supposedly running a real estate empire could spare the time, but they soon discovered that not everything in Mr. Trump’s world was as it appeared.

“We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture,” Bill Pruitt, one of the producers, told The New Yorker in 2018. “We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

Mr. Burnett wasted no time spinning the illusion of a successful and high-minded Mr. Trump, telling The Times in October 2003 that the new show was all about “Donald Trump giving back” by educating the public on how his can-do spirit had provided jobs and economic security.

“What makes the world a safe place right now?” Mr. Burnett said. “I think it’s American dollars, which come from taxes, which come because of Donald Trump.”

And that led to the licensing, the multilevel marketing schemes, and the full unleashing of hucksterism. Although I found this paragraph amusing:

Bayrock proposed to bring the Trump brand to hotels around the country and overseas, where Mr. Trump’s flamboyant taste for gold and glitz played well among wealthy foreigners with a caricatured notion of American success.

So sorry, Mark. No appeal for you. Cigarette while we wait for the tumbrel?

That was honestly one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I’m going to sit back and wait for my absentee ballot to arrive. You can read something I wrote for yesterday’s Deadline, if you like. But now I have to get to work.

To answer the question on everyone’s lips: Yes. Yes, the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere paid more than $750 in federal income taxes last year. I think our daughter, the penniless struggling musician, paid more than that. Virtually everyone did.

Which is, of course, not going to make an immediate, titanic difference in the polls or anything else. Because this is the stupidest country.

But it is instructive, if you have seventh-grade reading skills:

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

I can’t fucking stand it. But maybe we don’t have to stand it forever. Or even much longer.

Census-ing tonight was more of the same: Lots of dead-ender cases, with occasional glimpses of joy. One such case: I knock on the front door. After a few moments, the side door flies open with a loud WHO’S HERE, but not with a question mark. I peeked around the side, and there was a massive man, the size of a bison, advancing with an angry expression. I told him why I was there. WHAT’S THAT, he demanded. I explained the census and he immediately chilled. OK, we can talk about that, and we had a very productive survey.

I’ve enjoyed this interlude, but I’m looking forward to the end. I need to clean some bathrooms.

Tomorrow, more election training. Let’s get the week underway.

Stems and seeds and census: We’re down to the dregs these days, the houses where the case notes are likely to have four versions of subject said he wouldn’t participate or subject said he doesn’t care who gets counted or subject slammed the door in my face. All of these are, obviously, proxy cases. But even these proxy cases are long shots, in neighborhoods where all the nearby properties are vacant or boarded or have That Look that says, eh, you’re not going to luck out here.

Kate had a couple drug houses in one day last week. There was a sign on the door that read I DO NOT ACCEPT COINS OR SHORTS and she took that for a turn-around-and-head-back-to-the-car. Can’t say I blame her.

Yes, Kate is also working as an enumerator. Good money while she waits for her world to reopen. We’re all still waiting.

Two pieces of bloggage today. First, a thoughtful piece in Slate on why women, especially young women, are the new QAnon evangelists, gathered mostly via Instagram:

These accounts are growing quickly, even as Instagram tries to shut down some of the bigger players. The appeal is morally unambiguous, simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and perfectly crafted to draw in a certain slice of suburban women. There’s the psychology of the approach: Leftist discourse on these platforms can have a preacherly aspect that asserts moral truths without giving the listener the option of disagreeing. This can strike the not-yet-persuaded as condescending, bossy, or dismissive of their right to form independent judgments. Q-proselytizing folks err in the opposite direction: They tell tantalizing stories about their heartfelt conversions that are extremely light on detail and almost invariably conclude by saying, “Do your own research.” Of course this has power. It has the frisson of secrecy—find out what they’re not telling you. Most of all, it’s flattering: It expresses full faith in the reader’s abilities to discover the truth, promises a light at the end of the tunnel, and appears to invite independent verification and free inquiry. In practice, searching those hashtags tends to lead people into closed information ecosystems (and, yes, lectures) that are every bit as didactic as any “woke” explainer. The key is this: The new recruits feel that they have discovered these things.

Interesting theory. But this is dwarfed, of course, by the Barton Gellman doomscroll scare-a-thon in the Atlantic, i.e. What if Trump refuses to concede? It’s terrifying and infuriating and I can’t take out a few paragraphs to summarize. It’s all in the URL.

For a palate-cleanser, enjoy the video with this clip.

Into the weekend, the last of September. How’d that happen?

The census is coming down to the last 10 days, and the cases are getting harder. The way it works is: Most people respond to the form that went out in the spring. The ones who don’t get a home visit from someone like me, who, if they don’t answer the door, leaves behind a notice with a code where they can go online or call a toll-free number and do it there.

And if they still don’t respond, they become “proxy eligible,” i.e., we enumerators are obliged to knock on their neighbors’ doors, asking nosy questions about who lives next door, etc.

You can imagine how well this goes over in Detroit, especially when the questions are posed by a Karen like me.

Almost everything I had today was a proxy-eligible case. Rarely they’re easy; mostly they’re not. But the job is taking me onto some blocks where you can really see how fragile a neighborhood really is. Blight is a metastasizing cancer. I once shadowed a neighborhood manager in Detroit for a day, and he theorized that if you don’t get there early — if you don’t tear stuff down when there are maybe two rotten teeth in a row of houses — you risk being too late. Two bad houses can be cleared, and it’s a block with a couple of vacant lots, which in a still-stable neighborhood will be mowed and cared for and maybe turned into garden plots by the people who live adjacent. But if all the houses go bad, quickly, all you’re left with are those little-house-on-the prairie blocks.

Which can be very pleasant, I hasten to add. The people who stick it out often find themselves quite content, listening to pheasants and watching other natural scenes out their windows. The other day I was pulling out of a condo complex near Lafayette Park and a red fox trotted right across my path. I know they can become quite comfortable in urban environments, like their coyote cousins, but it is still startling to see.

Anyway, today I had one of those blocks. A weird one, too — one whole side of the street was 90 percent boarded, the other was maintaining. One address was easy, a godsend even, as it was being restored and the owner was there. The other was partially boarded, but not entirely. No answer to the knock, of course. A neighbor, a proxy, said he “saw people going in and out,” but only sometimes, and probably they were squatters. I stared at the app on the phone. I figured something out, but not sure what it was.

On the other hand, there were delights, the best being a 12-year-old boy, alone in the house, one year too young to be officially interviewed, who stunned me by saying, “Oh yeah, the census. We only got until the end of the month, right?” I asked how he knew that.

“I read everything,” he said. “I play video games and I read.”

“So what did you learn today?” I asked.

“The Chinese are test-driving a flying car,” he answered, instantly. You don’t say.

Ten more days of this.

I’m grateful to be busy. Friday night’s news, combined with one slice too many of pepperoni pizza, had me staring at the ceiling until past 2 a.m. If eyeballs could shoot death rays, I’d have burned a hole in the roof. I stopped reading about it by Saturday morning; I just can’t stand it anymore.

And now the week yawns before us. God, let it be not-too-terrible. I can’t take another like this one.

Friends, I’m going to be away for a few days next week, so you have to play nice. We’re going up north for another half-week of vacation, and that’ll be the end of mine in this insane year.

I was looking through my recent photos when it occurred to me we’re coming up on six months of everything changing in Detroit, in Michigan, in the country, in all of our lives. Of course the virus marked that milestone a few weeks ago, but March 15 was when the stay-home orders began and it all hit home. So for my final post until late next week, here are 19 images from my life these past six months.

It begins:

This was actually March 6, but the last night out like this we had, at Shadow Show’s set at Third Man Records. The girls were worried no one would come because of the big Bernie rally at Cobo, but they eventually showed. This was a Friday night. The Michigan primary was the following Tuesday, and that night, after the polls closed, the governor announced the first cases had been diagnosed in Michigan.

Pretty soon, this is what the toilet paper and cleaning products aisle looked like at my local grocery. We had about a dozen rolls left at this point.

But you could still get cleaning wipes, if you were willing to pay $50 for this industrial-strength (80 percent alcohol) variety. And people did.

The checkout line at the still-no-TP grocery store was not, shall we say, reassuring.

Hey, everyone remember their first virtual cocktail hour? God, my hair was short.

Then we all settled in to wait for spring. I told Kate this would surely be contained by Memorial Day. But we were still close enough to the beginning that sights like this seemed worth a snap:

My trainer tried a socially distanced outdoor workout for a couple weeks. Soon it was derailed by stricter stay-home orders, though:

Then it seemed we all just settled in for the long haul. I went for a bike ride and found this cardboard customer at a closed bar. (Is that Conor McGregor?) At least one person was having a good time.

Oh, fuck you:

Ran this before, but a sign of the early-spring times: A socially distanced teen hang.

Yes, I too had a baking phase.

Because this is Grosse Pointe, this was inevitable:

Then, in the midst of everything, this happened:

Thank god the bars opened again — for about five days before one place in East Lansing became a super spreader and the whole sector had to shut again, at least indoors. Dig that plexiglas:

Oh, fuck you II:

And then the weather got warm and it almost seemed normal again, given that you could eat and drink outdoors with friends. Masks became commonplace. And sights like this seemed to blend into the scenery:

Drive-through Covid testing.

If Michigan were a more temperate climate, we could maybe live like this for a while. But summer is dwindling, so no more meals al fresco:

May this all end soon, and may all your tests be…

Oh, I have been neglectful of you, haven’t I? I’m trying to squeeze all the summer out of summer, while also doing a little census moonlighting and prepping for the next election. I find myself, at the end of the day, staring blank-faced at the wall, often.

But here’s a few minutes before I have to make dinner, so here goes.

Also, from time to time something like the Trump boat parade in Texas happens, and I might have to be convulsed with laughter for 24 hours or so. I forget how few people have done much boating, and don’t know how something like this happens. If you’re among them: Big boats make big wakes. As Alan sometimes says when a big ol’ cruiser passes us, “Man, imagine how much gas it takes to move that much water out of the way.” Lots of big boats together make lots of big wakes. Wakes are just waves, and when they hit other waves, they “reflect,” or are bounced back. Sometimes it happens naturally, via a big wind shift — sailors call these conditions “washing machine” waves, but it also happens when wakes crash together.

Now add a bunch of small boats, driving into this washing machine. It’s difficult to steer through them safely, and given the skill level of many boat owners, well, you see what happens. A smaller boat can take a big wave over one quarter, then another, and pretty soon it’s swamped and it’s everybody into the PFDs (which they probably weren’t wearing to begin with) and try to grab something that floats.

To put it more simply: There are reasons narrow channels, harbors and other crowded areas are often designated no-wake zones.

But you can’t have a big celebration without some speed! Get them MAGA flags flapping! Also, in probably the most-used news photo from Saturday…

Rough waters on Lake Travis as hundreds of boats in Trump boat parade. Several swaamped. #Statesman @bobphoto pic.twitter.com/DPpKKhgljF

— bobphoto (@bobphoto) September 5, 2020

…notice the forward blue flag on the one boat looks like it’s about to dip into the water. That’s not exactly a sea anchor, i.e., a small underwater parachute to stop a boat quickly, but it would probably be destabilizing. Anyway, whoopsie! Hope everyone can swim.

No one was hurt, although at least five boat owners are probably asking themselves whether this was the best idea they ever had.

This looks like the same boat from a different angle. Yeah, that’s a big ol’ nope from me.

Otherwise, the weekend is…going. Saw friends Thursday and Friday, did the grind on Saturday, ground some more today, and tomorrow? Ribs on the grill because why not. Also, potato salad. It’s not really the end of the summer, but it’s the end of a big part of the summer, so I’m here for every bit of it.

The weather is shifting, as it does at this time of year. Nice. Cooler nights, warm-but-not-miserably-so days. This is my time, brief as it is.

Now, to work on other things. Happy week ahead.

In my last days at Bridge, the site was producing a documentary to go with our Divided Michigan project, which many might call a high-minded Cletus safari. The doc didn’t turn out well, but that’s another story. Along the way, though, our filmmaker became enamored of the Trump Unity Bridge. He spent many hours with the guy who came up with this…what’s the word? Attraction, maybe.

A Facebook friend referred to it as a “float,” and that’s probably the best description of it — a towed thing suitable for slow cruises in parades, or parking at rallies. It’s not a scam, because the people who over the years have donated $67,000 to its upkeep and fuel fund know exactly what they’re doing and getting.

Anyway, the bridge is a trailer with a bridge-kinda thing built on top, festooned with signs, which change from time to time. It was parked at the We Build the Wall event, the Bannon/Kolfage grift, and many selfies were taken in front of it.

And he drove it around downtown during the Democratic debates of…god, was it only last summer? Yeah. He plays music, too, really loud, and as it passed my editor and I on the street, he had Aretha’s “Think” cranked up to 11. (Like so many dummies, I’m sure what he liked about it was the FREEDOM chorus.)

“The next sound you hear,” I told my editor, “will be Aretha, rolling in her grave.”

Anyway, in a story that I tried to frown at but actually couldn’t stop laughing over, someone in Oklahoma stole it, took it for a joyride and wrecked it:

The vehicle was running so people could continue to take pictures in front of the bridge, which includes lights, a Statue of Liberty and large letters that spell out “TRUMP.”

At about midnight on Friday night, a man jumped in the vehicle and drove away.

“Rob, somebody’s stealing the Unity Bridge,” Cortis said he was told as he was at the counter in the hotel. He left his wallet at the counter as he rushed out to determine what was happening, he said.

Boy, that’s a totally believable quote, isn’t it? Someone’s stealing the Unity Bridge!

I asked several of my colleagues, when this thing first appeared, where’s the unity? What’s it a bridge to, or between? No one knew. The guy supposedly said it’s about Trump unifying the country. I guess we know how that worked out. Probably time for it to crash, although he already has a repair estimate and I’m sure wallets are being opened as we speak. But the moral of the story? Never leave your keys in your vehicle.

OK, then. Another week awaits. Here’s a story I wrote, about a local Instagram celebrity. I find it fitting that as my career draws to a close, I find myself out-earned by a young man who, after our first interview, informed me he was no longer giving his time away free and asked to be paid to answer follow-up questions. And he wasn’t even towing a bridge.

A good one to all.

One of my census “cases” last night was here:

I’m not sure which of those two houses was the one I was supposed to visit. I looked at the app for a choice. Demolished didn’t quite work, so I chose uninhabitable. And I got no closer than this, because surely something was living back there. Quite a lot, actually. I was wearing sandals and didn’t want to encounter whatever critter or critters that might be. Or the poison ivy.

Also had a few vacant lots. You had to look for the driveway cut across the park strip to tell there had been a house there, once upon a time. And that tells you what the last 10 years did to Detroit.

Another exciting moment: I’m standing on the porch of a seen-better-days house, about to tell the app that I can’t determine whether or not it’s occupied — early lesson: never assume a rundown house in Detroit isn’t occupied without some compelling evidence — when I look up and see a pit bull sitting in the driveway, looking at me.

I don’t like pit bulls. I know there are some very nice ones, it’s all bad owners, and I’ve known a few sweet ones, but call me a breedist. I just don’t trust them. This one wasn’t threatening at all, and wasn’t 100 percent pit bull, but enough that you could tell. No collar. Looked healthy, and the neighborhood wasn’t a feral-dogs kind of place, but still. If this was its house, I was on its porch. We looked at each other for a long moment until I remembered you’re supposed to avert your eyes. I had a clipboard I could potentially use as a weapon. My flimsy shoulder bag, filled with paper, might be a shield, if an attack was only half-hearted. I looked back at the dog. “Who’s a good dog?” I asked in the voice I use on Wendy. No response. I opted for a slow sideways sidle off the porch and down the front walk. The dog watched me go, stood up and stretched, then turned around and headed for the back yard.

Potential unsecured dog, I thumb-typed into the app.

And that was my census adventure Thursday night. I should add that the people I encounter are mostly very kind and sweet. Most of my cases were in Detroit, and I had pleasant chats with more than a few Detroiters. House for house, I’ve seen far more hostility in Grosse Pointe and Harper Woods. But cheerful souls there, too. House by house, we count ’em up.

And no, I didn’t watch Trump’s speech last night. I don’t have 70 minutes of my life to give to that asshole, and Twitter was doing most of the heavy lifting. The scene at the White House was as horrifying as any movie monster. But Jim Gaffigan, the comedian, had a spectacular night. His tweets aren’t threaded, but they’re easy to find on his account. This was my favorite:

Fuck Lou Holtz. Biden is Catholic in name only? Compared to who? How many abortions did trump pay for? How many women has he raped? How many times did pull the shit he did in Ukraine. Wake up. He's a crook and a con man.

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

Also this one:

By the way you can't be against Cancel Culture and tell people to stay out of politics. You know that time you did a job and didn't get paid? That's trump and you know it.

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

And this one was the coup de grace:

hey fuck you karen

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

I’m taking today off from census-ing, but will be back Monday (I hope) with more tales of the count. Unless I am attacked by a dog.

I don’t like Melania’s new Rose Garden. On the other hand, I’m not sure it is her Rose Garden. I know, I know: The press releases said the “restoration” of the R.G. would be overseen by her, but I’m not buying it.

We’ve all heard the stories. She spends most of her time in her parents’ house in Maryland, and who can blame her. I’m sure the terms of her prenup require her to show up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from time to time, and maybe even to smile and wave, but we’ve all seen the photos, too. Even when she leaves the stilettos in her closet, she looks as comfortable in a garden as she very likely looks in her husband’s bed, assuming she’s occupied it even once since Barron was born.

(A White House Pilates studio, design and construction overseen by Melania? That I could believe.)

So my guess is, overseeing the Rose Garden overhaul consisted of attending some meetings, nodding over the plans and saying, “Mek it so” before running back to Maryland. Still. Her name is on the project, so she has to take the credit/blame for it.

I noted on Twitter that the comparison photos circulating aren’t entirely fair. The Befores feature tulips and flowering crabapple trees, which means they were taken in spring, and the Afters have the slightly burnt look of a garden in late summer. Still, we can notice some things. I approve of what looks to be lavender planted here and there among the roses, but I can’t approve of the roses, which are all white, from what I can tell. I hate one-color flower beds. A garden should be about contrasts and comparisons and for the love of God, seasons. Roses flower in June, but spring in D.C. really begins in March/April; what are we to look at until then? Did the First Lady take reporters or photographers on a tour, explaining why this in this bed, what that there, etc?

Don’t be silly. She doesn’t do that sort of thing. She walks, she poses, she demonstrates why she was never much of a model and lets Twitter do what it will.

The new garden looks very French, i.e. boring. Symmetrical, same-same-same, more symmetry, and a hard-surface walkway so the stilettos don’t sink. I prefer the English model — riots of color, a surprise around every corner, a hidden nook for sitting and enjoying the bees and the breeze. Of course, a garden designed for holding public events can’t be like that, but it can be more interesting than showing the same thing in every sightline.

Here’s something I read once: Tulips are profoundly middle-class flowers. I’m sure Melania, a sex worker who rose higher in the world than she probably ever dreamed, wants nothing to do with anything middle-class.

OK, enough about the goddamn Rose Garden.

Census-taking continues to improve; I’m getting better and faster at it. Last night I encountered a group of four young men making a movie. The film is called “Rent Due” and, they said, is about four young men trying to hustle up the rent. I told them they had everything they needed to be real filmmakers — plenty of bottled water and a bong. They laughed, and I left. Karen out.

And now Wednesday gets underway. Karen out again. Have a good one.

Guys. What a long, exhausting week, and it’s not even over yet. It does appear to be on the downslope, though, so – a few minutes have I to catch up.

I feel maybe a little guilty playing the Tired card; Alan was out of town for two days, fishing, and I had the joint to myself, so it’s not like I didn’t have the time. But I spent it mopping the kitchen floor and gadding about with friends. The summer is slipping away, and there will be precious little gadding about possible once it gets cold. So I hopped off to Howell to meet my old Lansing boss kinda-halfway and sit at a sidewalk table for a steakhouse dinner.

Unfortunately, it was Drive Your Loud Vehicle Through Town night in Howell, a conservative town with a reputation as a Klan outpost. That made conversation trying at times, but it was nice to see my buddy. I made the mistake of ordering dessert.

“Our carrot cake is famous,” the waitress said. OK, that’s the play, then. Holy shit. It reminded me of Jim Harrison’s line, that only in the Midwest is overeating seen as somehow heroic. The piece was enormous, topped with about a pound of cream cheese frosting. If I’d been with Alan we’d have split it, but you can’t split food with someone not in your germ pod. I took half home, and the half I ate sat in my gut like a nuclear warhead all the way home. I still feel its poison in my body, 48 hours later.

The thing about a binge like that is – because the rest of the meal was similarly over-the-top, too – it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. In a normal year, I’d be selectively shopping the Nordstrom anniversary sale, assessing my fall wardrobe, rotating some pieces out, freshening up for the cool weather ahead. Now all I can think about is: More time spent in yoga pants and slippers? Why not have more cake?

Also: A friend of mine tested positive last week, a rather baffling result for someone who’s been very careful. She’s asymptomatic and I think false positive is a very real possibility, but she’s one person I’ve been outdoor-socializing with, too, so I went off to get my own nose-poke this afternoon. It was as uncomfortable as the last one, but driving home down 8 Mile Road was cheering, in that perverse-Detroit kinda way.

Traffic was fairly heavy, and you know who was doing a land-office business? The weed shops. With the pandemic precautions, they’re running almost exactly like street dealing in days of yore: Pull up, make your selection depending on what’s in stock. A runner retrieves it and you’re cashed out upon delivery by a masked employee. You don’t have to get out of your car, and it all seems to go very smoothly.

Other news today: Steve Bannon, charged with being a grifty grifter. Here’s a lightly edited version of what I said on Facebook, for those who don’t follow me there:

Steve Bannon is rich. Right? He has all this dough from working at Goldman Sachs, investing in “Seinfeld,” blah blah blah. And as an ex-Trumper, he could spend the rest of his dissolute life consulting and speaking and cashing checks.

Supposedly he cleared $1 million from this particular grift, which seems an absurdly low payment for the chore of dragging his ass around the country and having to look at Sheriff Clarke in a million green rooms. These people truly are despicable.

Check out the website for this shit. And let me assure you, the people whose donations added up to that $25 million, assuming the number is that high, didn’t do it by writing big checks. In Detroit, these were people living on Social Security. The most prosperous-looking people there were probably the Bikers for Trump. Who can steal from the pathetic like this? The worst people in the world.

Also, you know who the biggest clown was in that particular car? Not Bannon. Clarke. Pro wrestling missed something when they didn’t draft that asshole.

A rare witty comment on the Deadline Detroit Facebook post of the story today: “We have entered the Layla portion of this ‘Goodfellas’ remake.”

So now I’m pretty much all caught up, right? Weekend lies ahead. Hope my Covid test is negative. And I think it’s going to be salads and club soda for a few days. Let’s be optimistic.