You Will Never See a More Vivid Example of What Is Running Through Republicans’ Heads Right Now Than This

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The video of Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, absolutely losing her cool at a recent constituent town hall was funny because it is somehow obscene and yet entirely relatable at exactly the same time. In response to attendees berating her about the fact that cuts to government programs like Medicaid will cause actual people to die—Republicans have been avoiding these town halls for a reason—Ernst tried to start a sentence a time or two, and then simply slumped into, “Well, we all are going to die, so …”

As my colleague Jim Newell counseled afterward in his excellent weekly newsletter the Surge: “We strongly encourage you to watch the clip, maybe 50 or 60 times like we have.”

I did as Jim instructed and watched the video at least a dozen times in a row immediately. It really is something—Ernst has the looks and accent of a Midwestern mom, and you can just feel her exhaustion seep out of her body as she dropped her hand and then drooped her shoulders right before uttering her infamous phrase. “Well, we all are going to die”—a slight “there, I said it!” smile happens here—“so …” She perfectly captured the energy of one’s mother telling you, “No, you can’t have that, we have one at home,” or even more simply, “because I said so.” That is the relatable part.

The obscene part is that this is not a woman talking to her children as they beat their little feet against the driver’s seat demanding ice cream at the end of a long day. This is one of 100 elected Americans who are, this week, tasked with figuring out what stays and what goes in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that will have dramatic ramifications for how our country works and how generous or ruthless it is to people—really, how generous it is to the wealthy and how ruthless it will have to be the poor to be so generous to the wealthy, because that is the trade-off of this legislation. (Elon Musk himself can barely take it.) Still, even in this absurd age of tragic political performance, the essential job of a senator is to get reelected every six years to keep their party in power. The main way to achieve that is not to admit to the people you represent—the people who elect you—that their deaths do not worry you, because death will come for us all.

All of that was incredible enough. How interesting to witness this precise breakdown, in real time, of how exhausting it seems to pretend to care about people when you do not (not caring is the entire premise of this second Trump administration). But what was even more remarkable than this video was what came next. Unfortunately, this part was obscene but very not relatable. In response to the backlash she was receiving for her town hall empathy break, Ernst posted an apology that turned out to be a sarcastic nonapology. It is set in a cemetery. Again, it’s worth watching!

Exactly halfway through this one-minute-and-eight-second video, Ernst reveals what she is doing here. After catching everyone up on the circumstances that led her to say the “We all are going to die” line—i.e., an attendee shouting, “”eople are going to die”—she breaks it to us: “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So, I apologize. And, I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.” She finishes the video out by extolling the virtues of believing in God if you are worried about death, specifically her “lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” Occasionally the close-up camera waivers to show nearby graves.

It is so often said that we live in the fictional world of Veep that it almost not a meaningful way to knock the self-absorbed narcissists who run our government anymore. Even so, with the first video, we have classic Veep stuff, so on the nose of what that show is all about: a woman and her staff just trying to get through their days without being too bedraggled by the people they supposedly work for that they don’t snap at them. It’s incredibly familiar.

This second video is something else entirely. Trump himself has always turned the Veep joke on its head, because he has no use for pretending to be either genteel or respectable. And the filmed sarcastic “apology” is the latest attempt by someone who has no business trying to be Donald Trump trying to be Donald Trump anyway. Ernst does not have the comedic timing that off-the-cuff Trump regrettably so often nails, and her performance here is embarrassing, just absolutely cringe-worthy to watch, in a way that is almost comforting because it’s a reminder that Trump’s unique powers are truly his own—and will, indeed, one day die with him. (We all must, after all.)

But the tragedy is the clarity with which this misguided attempt reveals that the point of being in D.C. right now and working on the side of the Trump administration is to not care—and to craft that into an asset, preferably something that also pokes fun at the idea that anyone would care. Veep was funny because it was about governing attempts—some earnest, some less so—relentlessly ending in absurdist failure. It was comedically devastating because the show was often actually trying to gesture at the literal exhausting work of modern government. Ernst’s video is not funny because it reveals how far gone we are on any of that. She is mocking her own constituents for assuming she might care about their lives, and then forfeiting her own responsibility for any of this—aka, her entire job—over to be handled by God instead. “Well, we all are going to die, so …“ it doesn’t matter what I do for you here on Earth, in this elected position of power you gave me to represent you in what remains for now the most powerful government on the planet. That is the inevitable end of her sentence—and its astonishing realism has absolutely nothing to do with the tooth fairy.