In the longest sentence ever written on Substack, Gene Weingarten skewers Trump

Commentary and news for thoughtful Americans, including those living in Florida

Just a quick note of congratulations to Gene Weingarten, the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, who, with a Substack post this morning, set a record for the longest sentence ever published on this social media platform.

Or so he says.

By my count, it is 286 words long. Which is loooong. Twitter (the social media platform currently known as X) limits posts to 280 characters, not words, for example.

But it is not the longest sentence ever published. That honor goes to a sentence in The Rotters’ Club by Jonathjan Coe. It was 13,955 words, which, let’s be honest, is a completely unreadable length and only done out of vanity.

This sentence, however, is highly readable and a masterstroke of political commentary.

Without further ado, here it is the first sentence followed by a link to his Substack site for the rest of the article, which you should definitely check out.

In the last two weeks alone, Donald Trump has destabilized the Middle East, turned the United States into a pariah state, killed more than a hundred little girls by mistake then denied he had done it and then admitted he might have done it but he didn’t know for sure because he hadn’t bothered to look into it, caused gas prices to spike by 25%, enabled Israel to commit atrocities against Lebanon, begged for military help from our historic allies whom he had previously insulted and alienated, and then threatened to punish those same allies if they don’t help him, said many in the media were “guilty of treason” for not cheerleading his benighted, unpopular war, gloated about having castrated the fourth estate, proudly identifying his conquests by name in a social media post, declared the Iran war over, then not over, and then over, again, then said that we had “totally demolished” a key Iranian oil facility, but added that he might bomb it a little more “just for fun,” continued pardoning his cronies and white-collar felons whose crimes have already wiped out nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for various frauds, said that a former U.S. president he wouldn’t name had told him he regretted not bombing Iran first, but all four living former presidents immediately denied having said it, saw his approval rating plummet like a flapping turkey dropped from a helicopter, said he might “take” Cuba, revealed that his administration was considering withholding HIV aid to Zambia “on a massive scale” unless that impoverished country gives us access to their copper, cobalt and lithium stores … and played at least four rounds of golf.

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J.C. Bruce

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