The Great Tomato - An Obituary for a President Who's Long Since Gone Rotten

Once upon a time, there was a president who didn’t care much for anything fresh - except maybe the color of his tanning lotion. On July 14, 2025, long after the world should have forgotten him, he reached once more into the nationalist toolbox: he slapped a 17.09 percent tariff on Mexican tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes of all things. The vegetable he probably only knew when it was smashed onto an overcooked burger became the symbol of his late-stage economic crusades. “Protect American tomatoes!” he declared - a phrase as meaningless as “Mexico will pay for it!” While in southern Mexico, women working in scorching heat stacked crates of Roma tomatoes, the man in the West Wing claimed they were part of a “blood-red conspiracy against the American farmer.” That said farmer had long since been producing for Walmart didn’t bother him. Facts were always just suggestions to him. The reality? Prices rose. Wages didn’t. A sandwich in Phoenix suddenly cost a dollar more, and at the market in El Paso, mothers cursed “this damn policy from Mar-a-Lago.” The president himself? He was probably sitting on a golden couch, ketchup stains on his shirt, asking his aides whether tomatoes were fruit or Deep State spies.

F.A.F.O., one of his digital disciples posted on X - an invitation to the world to finally find out how far madness could go. What no one dared to say: this president had long since left the world behind. Mentally. Politically. Morally. He was an expiration date in human form. And like an overripe tomato - you could still see him, still smell him, but no one wanted to touch him. Maybe in the end, that was it: not the 17 percent tariff, not the inflation or the imported suffering - but the realization that a man who thought himself greater than history was ultimately outdone by a sandwich. Because at least that could still satisfy hunger.