Well...

Trump's Hot Mess Rally:
The Fyre Festival of Affordability Begins

Free link: https://t.co/zLCwkeAmHF

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) December 10, 2025

I remarked on Twitter that for some reason, Rick's post made me think of Neal Stephenson's writing.  First, this description of Trump's hate rally from his article:

The premise was simple enough: reassure Americans that he “fixed” prices, that inflation is over, that you’re all doing great, and if you don’t feel that way, it’s because the media lies and the Fed is mean to him personally. 

What you actually saw was a freshly botoxed and be-Spanxed Trump, his greasy umber makeup applied with the subtlety of a 1970s hooker, his shellacked, lemur-pelt wig swooping back from his porcine eyes like an Art Deco-era car’s fenders stalking on stage and leaning on the podium for 90 minutes of madness.

Now this from Snow Crash:

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.

You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. 

When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

* music

* movies

* microcode (software)

* high-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Been over 30 years since I read that book, but somehow it still feels so...germane.  

In conclusion: here's another hot mess you've gotten me into!