Happy New Year from sir, with love

Columnist Sabrina Haake imagines the future in this satire piece.

It’s morning, New Years Day, 2030. After a night of revelry, Americans are waking up to a dancing hologram, by now familiar, floating over their beds. Trump’s three-dimensional image gyrates enthusiastically if irrhythmically to the dreaded YMCA song, tiny fists boxing the air as everyone grabs the covers. Swinging a flyswatter, throwing a shoe or spraying disinfectant at the specter does nothing; running is equally pointless as Trump’s hologram dances right along into the bathroom.

Like Chinese water torture, the music has sent more than fifty million people into therapy to date, seeking relief from an earbug and nonstop media presence that threatens their sanity. After the Village People sued for copyright infringement, JD Vance declared the song was gay anyway, and ordered all recordings interspliced with Lee Greenwood’s bible song, netting Trump Inc. $2.3b in annual royalties.

The dancing hologram has been beamed down from Starlink every morning since Trump went AWOL in 2026, the day he said at a Nuremberg-style rally that Elon Musk was foreign born and ineligible for President. Lucky for Musk America, ruling by hologram isn’t all that different from ruling by tweet.

Trump steals the Panama Canal

After Fox News declared that Trump’s 49% of the 2024 vote was a landslide, because winning by 1% equals mandate the likes of which no one has ever seen, Trump invaded a ten mile strip of the Panama canal. The move allowed Trump to indefinitely extend his presidency because, “We’re at war. If Franklin Roosevelt overstayed his welcome, so can I.”

Tearing up the Panama treaty like it was a Nancy Pelosi speech, Trump declared the increased fees for passage through the drought-stricken canal were a “complete rip-off.” Just ahead of the scheduled increase, set to cost GOP donors millions in transport fees, Trump demanded that Panama add a 50% surcharge for direct deposit to MAGA, Inc. When President José Raúl Mulino refused, Trump took the canal by imminent domain, planting a “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Space-X flag by the locks.

For fair market compensation, Trump promised Mulino that Panamanian caddies could retrieve and keep all golf balls that fall into the canal after its conversion to a water trap on his next 18 hole golf resort. It will be Panama’s most beautiful golf course, some say in the world, with waves from two different oceans gently lapping “sir, sir, sir” from both sides.

Trump continues to deduct $350 billion, the value of the golf balls, as a quarterly business expense against the resort’s $2.5 million in profit.

Goodbye, national debt!

During the second year of his second term, Trump nullified the national debt ceiling by Executive Order. After the checks cleared on his $6 trillion tax gift to wealthy donors, he nullified the nation’s debt as well.

When Trump defaulted, Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba and China’s Xi Jinpeng tried to foreclose on domestic assets like the Washington Mall, prompting Musk to beam Trump’s life-size hologram into their bedrooms, wearing his uniform red tie. Once parked at the foot of their beds, Trump stopped dancing and pointed at their stunned faces, commanding ominously, “Pull my finger.”

Fart and hilarity ensued as both men grasped at the air finger, Musk spasmodically laughing in the background. The Space Nazi then tweeted a video of the exchange to his 200 million pre-pubescent followers and promised that the Tesla fart feature unveiled in 2020 would be installed on all military tanks and aircraft of the future.

Meanwhile, with the mass-deportation kitty emptied, developers refused to build on credit. Half-built immigrant concentration camps were converted into paintball and crash-derby meccas, and Squid Game evil eyes modeled after Kash Patel’s popped up every fifth mile along the border.

Rape and debauchery: mandatory skills in Trump’s cabinet

Near the end of his second term, Trump’s reality-show cabinet used an abacus and eight ball to figure out that eliminating the federal government was actually the opposite of expanding it. Musk, Thiel, and friends are still trying to erase federal agencies (and their pesky regulations), while Johnson, Greene and SCOTUS Christo-nationalists have enabled an all-powerful Seal Team 6 because women’s monthly cycles won’t track and report themselves.

Unable to please one MAGA faction without pissing off the other, Trump suggested via tweet that Congressmen bring weapons to the capitol to resolve their differences the old fashioned way, when men were men. When AR-15s showed up on the dais, Democrats retracted their butter knives and ran for cover.

Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz raised $1.5 trillion off a House Ethics Committee report accusing him of statutory rape, prostitution and using illegal drugs, and other republicans wanted in on the action. A congressman from Kentucky went on Fox News to announce, “I’ve slept with underage girls, too you know.” “Oh yeah?,” said another on Fox and Friends, “I’ve slept with underage boys.” When a third House member from Alabama said he’d slept with his underage son in a monster truck while torturing puppies, $5 trillion poured in from the MAGA base. It remains an unshattered one-day record in political fundraising.

Trump’s hologram ended climate change

After Florida broke off like a cookie and floated down to Cuba in a massive hurricane, Trump rebranded and embraced climate change. “It’s not a hoax anymore. No. Really. That was all part of the weave.”

The Guardian then uncovered Trump, Musk and Putin’s ten year contract to accelerate the heating of the earth by insisting that donors drill, baby, drill whether they wanted to or not. Under the terms of the contract, they co-developed private, warm water shipping routes and beachfront resorts along melted glacier coasts of Canada and Greenland. After Hegseth reminded Denmark that we’d used nukes before and can easily (hiccup) do it again, Trump seized Greenland’s lithium and zirconium and the rest of its rare earth elements, prompting Musk to shave his head and run around with a pinky at the corner of his mouth.

For the remainder of January, Trump’s hologram will retreat to the warm, balmy shores of Siberia with his wife Melania, who, despite living in the US for 30 years with access to private tutors, still can’t speak fluent English. Her First Lady coffee table book, ‘Perks of dark side,’ sold 77,284,118 copies following the official ban of all competitive books including the bible; an alleged “Jewish carpenter” was either a loudmouth DEI hire or original nepo baby, depending, and the word breast hid in 27 passages. Melania is now co-authoring a children’s book with Supreme Court Justice Kim Kardashian about the First Amendment and why it’s illegal to criticize her husband, tentatively titled, “Be nice if know what best.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.