Presidential Incapacity

We know already he can't do good things.

Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President "starting a war" to distract and cover-up a scandal. In the movie they hire a Hollywood movie producer to manufacture a fictitious war, complete with P.O.W. war hero and a fictional country with footage of villagers who don’t exist running from bombing runs that never took place. In real life, as the movie played in cinemas and the U.S. Congress held impeachment hearings, Bill Clinton as Commander in Chief ordered air strikes on Iraq.

The movie takes its title from the idea of a dog’s tail waging the dog, an inversion of the dog waging its own tail.

It’s a good movie, and if you get a copy with the DVD commentary, you can hear the firsthand account of what happened behind the scenes when the actors and filmmakers met President Bill Clinton (while the movie was in production and before the events surrounding Bill Clinton’s impeachment were known). The President asked what their movie was about. Dustin Hoffman, who plays a lead character in the movie, answered with an extemporaneously concocted fictional premise. One can only imagine what Bill Clinton thought when he later learned the real movie premise hit home and was being mentioned by television pundits. I like to think he shook his head, smiled and said to himself, "that man told me a fiction."

The depiction of a president bombing and waging war to distract from a scandal that jeopardizes their presidency has made the title a shorthand for that actually being done.

Why would I mention this movie and its resonance in American politics during a week when the current President has been absent from public view and the internet is filthy with rumors large and small about his health and even whether or not he is alive? Because the U.S. now has two aegis guided-missile destroyers, another destroyer, and a cruiser massing off the coast near Venezuela, and plans to have three amphibious assault ships join that force next week. Those are the sort of ships that allow marines to attack the land from the sea.

So far there is nothing saying the U.S. plans to land any of these thousands of soldiers in Venezuela, but the rumors of the U.S. invading are swirling in Venezuela. The only stated purpose is for the U.S. forces to vaguely support efforts involving drug cartels in a way not yet clarified to the public.

Is this some valid saber rattling, a legitimate way to pressure an illegitimate world leader, as has been done before? Or is the tail wagging the dog?

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And where does being in a position to ask this even leave us? I started writing this yesterday, Monday, September 1, 2025, and now on the 2nd, my various feeds seem to have shifted from vague conjectures to various Large Language Model (LLM) “confirmed” conspiracy theories as to what the f is up with potus.

No general purpose LLM like ChatGPT can possibly aggregate the press and public postings about what may or may not be happening in current events and give any insights with any certainty. All general purpose generative artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT needs to be vigorously fact checked or they will probably lead you astray. They are prone to what the marketing people at the companies that make them call “hallucinations,” they make things up. They output something plausible whether or not it is true. They lie. And no, you can’t ask nicely (or cruelly) for them to tell you the truth because no matter how much they promise to tell you the truth, they do not have a concept of true and untrue like humans do. They are incapable.

Today, I don’t feel like getting into the why of why AI LLMs like ChatGPT are so consistently inconsistent with the truth. But the reality of whatever is going on with this Presidential administration has right now feels a little like a hallucination. The various possibilities people and press suggest are massive, but they all are reacting to these two annoying facts:

• The President’s absence from appearing and speaking on camera this long is unusual for any President, but it is especially odd for this one who often calls cable news shows to rant and rave at the smallest provocative criticism.
• We don’t have nearly enough information to know right now what exactly is going on beyond: the conspicuous and unusual absence, and the deployment of U.S. military forces, which is hardly atypical on a Tuesday.

Vlad Vexler spoke to this in a YouTube video. He tries to address with candor the shortcomings of the press reporting on nonfactual hubbub as if it is the real story worth journalistic focus, and he is by and large intellectually aiming at rigor.

And that’s what we need to try to keep doing in our day and age: bring our intellectual rigor to bear. Do various world leaders try to provoke a purely emotional reaction from us to get more of what they want at our dear expense? Yes. Do entire nation state’s governments and intelligence capacities try to get us to question the nature of truth and reality itself? Also yes. Do we have a very real need to try to ground ourselves in actuality as best we can, knowing we are never going to be perfect but always attempting to use our minds to not be at the mercy of those with malevolent intentions? Absolutely and 100%. We need to think things through.

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Our hope and belief that things can be made better, our optimism, is part of what autocratic efforts need to destroy to for them to prevail. Malicious leaders can and do want us to believe they are all powerful already, and in so doing dissuade us from resisting their plans and actions. Do. Not. Let. Them.

If we keep ourselves from utter despair, we have options. If we give into doomerism, we have none. In the future, if we have maintained hope, we might face disappointments, in fact we probably will as some unpleasant things may well have happened. But we will also have kept working for what we believe in. If we relent and tell ourselves all is already lost, sure we absolve ourselves of having to do anything, but: in the future we likely will look back and see that we had options we closed ourselves off from, we complied in advance and in that future we will suffer more greatly because we did comply in advance.

Bad things are happening, but so are good ones. Demonstrations and protests across the country this last weekend did not get much press coverage from large outlets, but they happened. People are showing up. And they show us that Americans are not going gently into that good night, but are raging against the dying of the light. And more and more people each day are organizing and pushing back against this autocratic breakthrough.

If we each do what we can, where we are, with are with what we have, to make things better, then together we will in fact make things better. It is inevitable. Right now, for me, that means eating some breakfast and then going to a routine doctor’s appointment. Even small things to keep ourselves intact count toward our efforts.

No matter what potus says this afternoon, possibly a simple announcement about Space Command's headquarters location (which may give us proof he's alive) and nothing more, do what you can today. And tomorrow. We will get there, together.

© Copyright September 2, 2025, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com

David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.