How I Flushed My MAGA Mom Down The Toilet

The revolutionary dialectics of flushing a clogged toilet

I ended my relationship with my mom.

It felt like taking the first clean breath after unclogging a toilet that’d been overflowing since Bill Bubba Clinton was getting head in the Oval Office.

You know the sound. That glorious glug-glug-glug when the water level drops, the bowl clears, and whatever nightmare was festering in the pipes gets sucked into the municipal abyss. Silence returns. The porcelain gleams. You can piss in peace again.

That was my mom. A three-decade clog in the plumbing of my soul.

She’s a narcissist. The clinical kind—she’d absolutely get diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder if she believed in therapy, which she doesn’t, because therapy requires admitting something might be wrong with you, and admitting something might be wrong with you is impossible when you’re the star of your own personal biopic and everyone else is just an unpaid extra.

My psychiatrist told me once, with the exhausted sigh of a woman who has seen too much, “Your mother should not have been a mother.”

Everything has always been about her. Other people don’t really exist. At best, they’re side characters in the grandiose story of herself. At worst, extensions of her own ego—props to be arranged, praised, or discarded depending on the scene.

The last night I spoke to her, she was drunk. Slurring. And she told me, with the gravity of someone confessing to murder, “I’m a vampire.”

I didn’t laugh.

Because I’d seen it. I’d watched her drain people for decades. She cheated on my father until he drank himself into an early grave—a slow suicide by Budweiser while she was out finding her next meal. She drained her boyfriend’s life savings for a vanity project that bankrupted them both, then blamed the customers for not having good taste. Blamed the fucking customers.

And after a lifetime of belittling me—my choices, my very existence—she wanted to take credit for the tiny sliver of success I’d carved out for myself in spite of her.

How do people look at their own flesh and blood—their own family—and ask: What can I vampyrically extract from you?

The answer goes deeper than you might think. And it goes all the way to the White House.

The Narcissist’s Septic Tank

Let’s talk about the other narcissist in my life. In all of our fucking lives.

My mom loves Donald Trump. Loves him. Bought Trump coin at the top. Watched it crater. Doubled down. Didn’t even lose faith when he pivoted to Melania coin and stopped talking about Trump coin altogether.

I warned her. I worked in crypto. I told her exactly what was going to happen—that meme coins are extraction mechanisms disguised as jokes, that the only people making money are the insiders dumping on retail, that she was being farmed like a sheep with an American flag painted on its ass.

She didn’t listen. Why would she? She’s pathologically incapable of admitting she might be wrong about anything. Admitting I was right about the coin would mean admitting I had knowledge she didn’t. And that’s not how the story of herself works.

So she keeps the faith. She rolls over like a dog for its abusive owner, belly up, tail wagging, begging for another kick. Trump could personally show up at her house, take her Social Security check, and call her a loser to her face, and she’d post on X the everything app about how the Democrats were somehow behind it.

This is the septic tank we’re all swimming in.

Narcissists cannot metabolize shame. Shame is the waste product of being wrong. Healthy humans process it, learn from it, and flush. They say, “I fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ll do better.” And then they actually do better. The bowl clears. Fresh water enters. Growth happens.

Narcissists can’t do that. They have no plumbing. They’re a holding tank. Every mistake, every failure, every moment of being wrong gets stored in a festering sludge pit deep in their psyche. They cannot admit fault because admitting fault would require sitting in the feeling of being wrong. And that feeling is death to the false self they’ve constructed.

So they put up scarecrows to drive away the inconvenient truth. They project. They attack. They rewrite history in real time. Trump lost the 2020 election? No, it was stolen. Trump’s tariffs crashed the market? No, it’s 4D chess you’re too stupid to understand. Trump said something demonstrably false? No, he was being sarcastic, and anyway, he tells it like it is.

The stench is the point.

The Media is a Plunger That Won’t Unclog

And who’s standing over the bowl, plunger in hand, agitating the water but never clearing the pipe?

The 24-hour news cycle. The engagement algorithms. The pundit class that needs the clog to keep existing.

Think about it. If Trump admitted he was wrong about anything, that would be a flush. A moment of clarity. And what happens after a flush? Nothing. The toilet is clean. The room is quiet. You can move on with your day.

That’s what politics is supposed to feel like.

But a clog? A clog is content. You can stand there plunging forever. You can call in experts. You can run special reports. You can have panel discussions about the composition of the clog, the historical context of the clog, the racial dynamics of the clog. The dialectics of the clog. The clog is a subscription model. It’s recurring revenue for the attention economy.

We thought narcissists loved the media, but maybe it’s the other way around.

The media doesn’t want Trump to change. They don’t want him to grow. They want him exactly as he is: a perpetually malfunctioning septic system that generates endless hours of horrified fascination.

And so they reward the narcissist’s inability to flush. Every refusal to admit fault is a new cycle. Every lie is a news segment. Every tantrum is a new notification beamed into the country’s consciousness against its will.

We’re all standing around a toilet that hasn’t been flushed since 2016, wondering why the bathroom smells like death.

The Vampire’s Logic

Here’s where I need to explain why my mother is a vampire and why Trump is one too, and why it’s more than a metaphor, but an entire economic relationship.

The late, great David Graeber—a based, hilarious giga chad with a quadruple digit IQ—coined a term for the way we treat people we actually care about: baseline communism.

Forget the Soviet flags and the gulags. That’s not what he meant. Graeber’s baseline communism is simple: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

It’s how families work. It’s how friendships work. It’s how tribal nomadic life worked for 200,000 years. You share because you have an ongoing relationship. If you screw someone over, they’ll catch on and cut you out. You have a logical incentive to consider their well-being. It’s not altruism per se—it’s long-term self-interest dressed up as love. It works.

But baseline communism doesn’t scale. Dunbar’s number says the human brain can handle about 150 relationships. Civilization shoved us into cities of millions of strangers—strangers who might not have our best interests at heart. So we invented something else.

Exchange. And money to facilitate it.

Exchange scales beautifully. Billions of strangers can coordinate without needing to develop personal relationships. The material wonders of our world—air conditioning, antibiotics, the ability to order a dildo at 2am and have it arrive by noon—are built on exchange.

But exchange contains a dark kernel. With a stranger, you have no obligation beyond the explicit terms of the deal. If you can bamboozle them and get away with it, there’s no relationship to lose.

The incentive structure encourages extraction.

It’s the difference between grandma’s cookies and cookies from the store. Grandma bakes with love because you’re her grandson and she’ll see you at Thanksgiving. The store bakes with high-fructose corn syrup because you’re a credit card number and you are nothing to them.

The vampire is the person who treats everyone like the store. Family, friends, lovers, voters—all just credit card numbers with pulses. All just sources of blood to be drained.

That’s my mom. That’s Trump. That’s the entire logic of late-stage crapitalism metastasized into a personality disorder.

Flushing the Bowl

So I flushed my mom—

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no final confrontation. I told her I was done and then blocked her. BAM.

For the first time in my life, the water in my bowl was clear. I could see my own reflection. I could breathe without gagging. I no longer had to play subtle mind games to navigate the emotional hall of mirrors I mistook for a mother.

Going no-contact was the most necessary, liberating, quiet, joy-inducing plumbing of my so called life.

Which brings me to the question I can’t stop thinking about.

What is the Political Equivalent of Going No-Contact?

I know how to flush a narcissistic mother. I know how to protect my own pipes. But what do you do when the narcissist isn’t in your family—he’s in the Oval Office? What do you do when the septic tank has overflowed into the water supply of an entire nation?

You can’t go “no-contact” with the government. You can’t block the President and hope he gets the hint. The extraction is ambient. It’s in the air. It’s in the price of gas and the interest rate on your student loans and the quiet agony you feel when you open the news.

David Graeber had a phrase I love, one he used in his final years: the revolt of the caring classes.

He was arguing that what our extraction economy desperately needs is to replace the logic of the vampire with the logic of care. To rebuild systems—economic, political, social—that look more like baseline communism rather than pure exchange. To recognize that we share the same bowl, and we all have a stake in keeping the water clean.

That’s the flush we need. Not just a change of who’s sitting on the porcelain throne, but a complete replumbing of the house.

But how? How do you revolt with care when the other side is armed with brain-breaking AI generated images of transgender immigrants—and a media ecosystem that rewards the clog?

I don’t have the answer. I’m just a guy with a mediocre newsletter and a recently unclogged soul.

But I know this: the first step is recognizing the smell. Naming the sludge. Refusing to pretend the bathroom doesn’t stink just because you’ve gone nose-blind to it.

And maybe the second step is building something small and clean and functional in the wreckage. A little mutual aid network. A community toilet. A relationship with someone you actually see in person, whose cookies taste like love instead of corn syrup.

The vampires will always be vampires. You can’t fix them. You can’t therapize them. You can’t vote them into empathy.

But you can flush. You can clear your own bowl. You can bring in fresh water.

And once enough of us have clean pipes, maybe—just maybe—the whole system backs up in reverse. Maybe the septic tank empties into the street. Maybe the vampires drown in their own sludge.

A man can dream.

But for now, I’m just enjoying the silence. The clean porcelain. The simple, sacred act of a toilet that finally—finally—works.

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