After an unpredictable storm system delayed the Ruiz Commission’s court-approved exhumation of the presidential gravesite at Beaulieu Hills Cemetery in Turner Falls last week, America finally has an answer to the question that has riveted the nation since the first GOP presidential debate back in August: who, if anyone, is buried in the grave marked for President Rudy Ruiz?

By now, of course, y’all know the answer — unless you’ve been living under a rock buried even deeper than Rudy Ruiz’s capacious casket. (If so, I’m more than a little jealous.)

I joined the small, wet scrum of reporters who were allowed access to the exhumation on Saturday afternoon, the final moments of which took place just moments after the Texas Senate voted to acquit my state’s embattled attorney general, Ken Paxton, of his many alleged political crimes. The timing can’t have been an accident; forcing staff-strapped news outlets to choose between assigning reporters to Austin or hours away in Turner Falls means GOP leadership, which has thus far been reticent to align either with Grantham or Ruiz in their burgeoning fight for the Oval Office, can pull even more of media’s strings than they would have even a few years ago.

On site at Beaulieu this weekend were key members of the Ruiz Commission, the congressional group tasked with investigating President Ruiz’s death and, now, his more-or-less confirmed resurrection. It was a technically bipartisan group, to the extent that “bipartisan” is a word we can use to describe American politics these days. Senate (Extreme) Minority Leader Chuck Schumer donned hilariously cheery yellow galoshes to wait out the exhumation in the tony tent set up (with hot coffee and fresh snacks!) for political movers-and-shakers, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ruiz Commission Chair Lauren Boebert, disgraced former Fox talking head Rep. Tucker Carlson of Maine, and Deputy Special Commissioner Louie Gohmert. (Boebert, a Ruiz-aligned Christian nationalist, joked to reporters that she was “happy for the low-key distraction of a presidential resurrection” after she was caught vaping and groping her date in a Denver theater earlier this month.)

Us journo-folk huddled under a rotating pseudo-ceiling of whoever’s umbrellas hadn’t yet bitten the dust, spanning the gravel pathway lining the “presidential suite” of Beaulieu Hills, as the groundskeeper called it. It was a bizarrely pleasant, if black-skied and soggy, opportunity to reconnect with folks I haven’t worked alongside since the HazMedia layoffs and meet new folks in the Texas political press corps, and one of the first times I’ve felt like myself in the past few months — back where I’m supposed to be, on the scene, with my people. I really hadn’t realized how lonely I’ve felt, even on the front lines of the Ruiz story out here in East Texas. (Shout out to my friends Jenny and Collin for having the prescience to equip me with a waterproof notebook; I doubt that when they chose it as a gag gift for my birthday last year they expected I’d be using it to cover an investigation into the resurrection of a U.S. president.)

Specialists in protective gear finally unearthed Ruiz’s elaborate burial apparatus between breaks in the rain just after 1:15 p.m., and Ruiz Commissioners got the first look at its contents. I won’t say that we reporters had a formal betting pool going, but when I saw Rep. Carlson peer into the casket and heard him yelp “HE’S BACK, BABY,” I knew a couple of folks would be buying me after-work beers at Kickers in downtown Turner Falls later on.

The rest, of course, is history in the making.

RevTech, the biomedical startup that, as I’ve already reported, has been claimed to have used regenerative stem cell innovations to revive Ruiz and at least one other man from the dead, issued an unusually laconic tweet on Saturday afternoon, saying only: “When you’re right ….” And here in Turner Falls, Pastor Kathy Donaldson of the New Life Church — Ruiz’s home congregation — has mysteriously (IMO) made no mention of the confirmation of Ruiz’s empty tomb. (Wasn’t it a woman who reported back to the apostles after discovering Jesus absent for anointing on the third day? Somebody fact-check me on my Gospel history.)

After Ruiz’s casket turned up empty — I failed to spot even an indent in the pristine, cream satin lining — the first wire reports of the empty grave set off a fresh wave of political panic and protest across the country. I was glad to be on the ground to witness the exhumation with my own eyes after my bizarre experience with resurrected-Ruiz himself in July, but also sorry to miss the student-lead demonstration that filled the streets in New York City, one of the last remaining municipalities where courts and public leaders have refused to enforce Harrow restrictions on unlicensed public gatherings.

Faith J. Descartes, the Hunter College junior who has emerged as the face of the Young People’s New Freedom Movement (YPNFM), a “loosely affiliated” youth-led resistance rallying against what they regularly describe as the “fascist, fucked-up American right,” told the New York Times that they have “stayed ready to mobilize in these streets, our streets” since Ruiz took the stage at the GOP debate in August. From the Times report:

Descartes, a history major and Alabama native who uses they/them pronouns, said between chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, zombie POTUS has got to go!” on Saturday that the New Freedom Movement “would not rest, whether Rudy Ruiz is at rest or not.” Descartes is the de facto leader of the loosely affiliated Young People’s New Freedom Movement, though they eschew formal titles.

“Unlike the authoritarian [expletive]s like Rudy Ruiz and Ashleigh Grantham who seek to wrest true political and personal freedoms out of the hands of everyone who deserves basic human rights and dignity in this country, we seek to dismantle power, not reinforce it,” Descartes said.

But while Descartes and the YPNFM have cast former-President Rudy Ruiz and now-President/former Vice President Ashleigh Grantham as villains — indeed, as zombies alike — in the same political performance, the dueling presidents are already at each others’ throats following Saturday’s empty exhumation.

Both camps cranked up their fundraising apparatuses earlier this week in preparation for what is unquestionably an unprecedented legal fight over the occupation of the Oval Office. I’ve grabbed a couple screenshots of what went out to their core supporters early on Sunday:

As VP, Grantham was sworn into the presidency following the plane crash that (originally?) killed Ruiz in the early hours of July 5th, and famously did not attend Ruiz’s funeral, citing his “urgent duty to maintain order.” The 94-year-old Grantham then became the oldest-ever presidential candidate just a few weeks later when he announced his intent to run for election-proper in 2024. He’s reportedly preparing to put up a 25th Amendment fight against Ruiz returning to the White House, asserting that whether Ruiz is for real or he’s a crackpot imposter who figured out how to bury an empty coffin after a presidential funeral extravaganza, he’s unfit to serve as the leader of the ostensibly free world. In an interview with The Hill on Monday, Grantham made the declaration that he’ll relinquish the presidency “over my dead body, not Rudy Ruiz’s,” which, if you think about it (and I have to), only serves to muddle the question.

At the same time, Ruiz is occupying a sort of political no-man’s-land, and has insinuated through proxy/deputy commentators on OANN and Fox News that the 25th Amendment doesn’t apply to his situation, that he is fully fit to resume work as POTUS, and that Grantham is effectively squatting in the West Wing.

Constitutional and presidential legal scholars have weighed in with practically as many opinions as there are scholars themselves; so far, the federal government seems to be operating no more ineffectively than is its usual. I’m torn between hoping that the cable news doomsayers predicting hostile actions from foreign opponents looking for an opportunity to target America at its weakest are wrong, and taking some comfort in the fact that, were the worst to happen, our government might be so tied up in its own infighting that global catastrophe might be averted.

What a time to be alive. (Or, in the case of Rudy Ruiz, alive again.)

What else I’m reading right now:

• “Texas teacher fired after assigning an illustrated Anne Frank book” (Chron.com)
• “Can you guess which city in Texas has the worst weather? A meteorologist did the math” (Texas Standard)
• “One of America’s First Women’s Colleges Is Accused of Paying Men More” (NYT)
• “Sen. John Fetterman is selling ‘body double’ T-shirts, leaning into the right-wing conspiracy theory” (Business Insider)