Now that we have little choice but to make our own fun when contemplating the gently glowing radioactive shitshow that is the American political apparatus, we’ve come up with a couple of little mental games to get ourselves through this long dark night of the American soul. Fun impeachment-themed stuff like “Guess The Next Whistleblower Intimidation Trick,” or “Would You Even Be Able To Tell If Rudy Giuliani Had Rabies Right Now?” Still, our favorite has got to be “What’s The Weirdest Index Entry?” which is where we try, in real time, to figure out what the dumbest or strangest thing will be that still gets mentioned in the index of an academic textbook written about this whole debacle, 40 years down the line.
Take, for instance, rapper A$AP Rocky, who managed to barge into today’s high-stakes installment of Washington Dinner Theater from an unexpected angle: The testimony of official U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. There will likely be more important long-term takeaways from Sondland’s testimony—which drew parallels on Twitter today to a different, also legally imperiled rapper, at least in its willingness to dish up dirt on dangerous and powerful men—and yet we remain bizarrely fixated on the fact that the congressional records for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump will also contain a passing reference to the guy who wrote “Fukk Sleep.”
Specifically, Sondland was recounting a phone call he’d had with Trump that was mostly about the rapper—and also, in passing, about whether Trump might have successfully pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into launching an investigation into the Biden family—on account of the Trump White House’s efforts to aid him as he faced assault charges earlier this year in Sweden. (He was released back in August, and later charged with time served.) Sondland brought the conversation up at least in part because he’d had his memory of it jogged by the testimony of another witness in the hearings, State Department official David Holmes, because, really, A$AP Rocky is all over these particular national-fate-deciding proceedings. These phone calls obviously have wide-ranging implications for the impeachment hearings, as well as for our hypothetical future book index creator, who’s really going to have to ask themselves whether they want to include that stylized dollar sign S in the rapper’s entry in their tome, or go with the far more prosaic Rakim Mayers when talking about him instead.