The Eternal Timeliness of the Clickhole Headline, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point"

At the risk of hyperbole, everything in life corresponds to a Simpsons gag or article from my longtime employers, The Onion, or their spin-off site, Clickhole.

Some of The Onion’s stories are so iconic and ubiquitous that they don’t require text. The extremely online just need to look at a popular meme and immediately grasp the context. 

That happened recently when Elon Musk turned on Donald Trump and criticized the Big, Beautiful Bill as a monstrosity that will add trillions to the deficit. Musk himself was tasked with reducing it through any means necessary, including, but not limited to, stealing Granny’s medicaid check to pay for taxes for billionaires. 

I don’t want to give Musk the benefit of the doubt but it’s as if a businessman hired an accountant to conduct a forensic audit of their finances so that they can methodically cut out anything that seems wasteful or unnecessary, only to have the businessman tell the bean counter that he appreciated his work, and that he did such a good job that he was going to buy a golden yacht and Maserati with the money saved. 

Musk did not break with Trump for idealistic reasons. He did not wake up one morning and realize that trans people are human beings with dignity, and that he shouldn’t say his daughter is dead to him because she’s trans. 

The Tesla mogul split with Trump, at least temporarily, for financial and personal reasons. Musk became the wealthiest man in the world by selling electric cars to progressives with the generous assistance of the national government. 

Trump is implementing drastic tariffs that have thrown the international economy into a tailspin and significantly increased the cost of doing business, while removing a $7,500 tax credit for buying electric cars, which hits Musk where it hurts: the pocketbook. 

It was all well and good for Trump to insist that they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets, or to claim that Democrats are trying to make everybody in the world trans. It’s quite another to fuck with rich people’s money. That’s when the super-wealthy began to reconsider their support for Trump. 

In the explosive aftermath of the violent dissolution of an innately doomed, combustible relationship, The Onion article “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made an Excellent Point.” 

Sometimes, the image of a man with an extremely punchable face was accompanied by one of the greatest and most enduring headlines in the history of The Onion. Sometimes, only the image was shared; that’s how iconic and famous the image is: you don’t need words to convey it. Merely seeing that asshole’s face is enough to get it across. 

During my time working for The Onion, I posed for a few stories. The one that sticks out is me looking dispirited in a uniform, accompanied by the words “Employee Owned and Operated.” 

I had an ex-girlfriend pose for the story “Area Girlfriend Still Hasn’t Seen Apocalypse Now.” AND I was a body double for Bill Clinton more than a few times. Mike Leow, the graphic genius behind The Onion’s golden age, would photoshop Clinton’s face on my muscle-bound frame. 

The genius of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made An Excellent Point” is that it can be recycled endlessly, whenever an awful person violently on the wrong side of history says something you agree with. 

Every year or so, for example, Ann Coulter will say something sensible and right. The same is true of Joe Rogan. Before he became synonymous with the bro-dude wave that swept Trump into office, the man endorsed Bernie Sanders. 

I remember reading that Rogan said that he felt very uncomfortable at the Trump inauguration and didn’t think of himself as a Republican. That’s a sane, reasonable response to being in that surreal, uncomfortable situation, but Rogan helped get the man elected. It’s a little too late for regret. 

The ubiquity of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” lies in its ability to speak to the uncomfortable, yet widespread, emotion of being confronted by new information that makes you see someone you thought you knew in at least a slightly different light. It inspires mild cognitive dissonance. How can some asshole who’s always wrong about everything be right? 

It’s broken clock syndrome. The law of averages dictates that even someone with wildly inaccurate, unsound beliefs will be strongly right about something. 

“Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made an Excellent Point” ranks alongside "No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” as the most resonant, enduring, and incisive headlines from The Onion. 

“"No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” is heartbreakingly timely. It debuted in 2014 and is rerun every time another eminently preventable mass shooting occurs and conservatives insist that the answer is not gun control but thoughts and prayers and more guns. Good guys with guns are their remedy to bad guys shooting up schools and businesses. 

Musk has already begun backpedaling on his vitriolic criticism of Trump. Perhaps he came down from Ketamine and realized that he had antagonized the half of the American public that does not despise him. When you piss off the left and the right, there’s nowhere left to go. Musk’s half-hearted calls for a third party are only slightly less quixotic/realistic than his plan to send driverless sex robots on Mars within the next few months.

Alternately, he may have realized that even the richest man in the world needs an out-of-control dictator who broadcasts his eagerness to punish anyone who displeases, particularly former allies. 

The worst person we know is already moving methodically away from the excellent points he made about the Big, Beautiful Bill. That is cravenly in character. 

Musk made some excellent points, but they hurt Trump’s feelings and cost him with a MAGA crowd he is aggressively courting, so he is back to behaving in character, which can only be bad for American politics and the world as a whole.