MAGA World Fails, Flip Flops + Finally Flings Itself Into Self-Correcting Foment
Bile is no substitute for governance. But there's only one way to figure this out: the hard way.
The thing that’s been most bedeviling in the era of both Trump’s ascendancy and his time on centerstage, has been the obdurateness of his “fan” base. From the outside it walks, talks and quacks like willful stupidity but this is not it. Not nearly it.
Inside the fence it’s been explained thusly: everything outside the fence is toxic sludge. Enemies, and everything outside of the MAGA fence is enemy territory, will use anything and everything to distort the message and the messenger, such is their desire to hold on to power and to prevent Trump Jesus from securing it.
CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYT, and even the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal are journals of ill repute, just as likely to tell lies as they are to spread them. And therefore: unreliable. Establishment tools, the inquiring MAGA minds avoid them and push beyond these to head for places where they can get raw data, parse that through Reddit consensus and come to their own conclusions, conclusions that undergird all of the bluff and droll banter of their Diogenes, the 47th President of the US, Donald Trump.
As hard as it is for the rest of us to join in on the systematic denial of the reality of the experience of Trump’s chaos — the sexual assault bits, the sex offending known associates bit, the financial improprieties and ultimate failures — MAGA world, confirmed in the hard cast belief that the ends justifies the means, stands firm. There is nothing that could be said or done, in opposition to the man himself, that held any water for them.
“Well, he’s either a genius and it’ll all work out. Or he’s insane and it won’t.”
They didn’t come to this belief without help. Trump and Trumpworld, the Bannons, Stones and Millers, were more than glad to deny, deflect and what-about-ize just about any of the brickbats thrown their way. And Trump, for his part, proved masterful at what most 5-year-olds can manage without even trying, changing his message to fit the circumstance and leaving the opposition gasping at the audacity of the mendacity.
This has been the playbook as lifted by his consigliere Roy Cohn, the scumbag behind the red-baiting, blacklisting Senator Joseph McCarthy, the conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs, and denying he had AIDS, while cozying up to Reagan who believed it was G-d’s punishment for homosexuality, all while having and ultimately succumbing to AIDS himself. Cohn, finally, was so well-liked by the LGBTQ+ community that his panel on the AIDS Memorial Quilt is emblazoned with the legend “Roy Cohn. Bully. Coward. Victim.” (And yes, that is sarcasm.)
So it’s a cross-generational rot whose roots run deep with nary a pause for dissenting opinion. Which is the way we had gotten used to understanding them. And during the interregnum of the Biden years we got to watch their oversize glee at “owning” the libs. Right up until they controlled each and every one of the levers of power in this country.
There was a lag, inevitable we guess, where they were still taking delight in being the sand in the ointment but before too long, like now, it’s become apparent that they are the ointment. Which is right around when the real fun started.
Fun: cheesing off our allies, cozying up to our enemies, raising tariffs, rescinding tariffs, reinstating tariffs, and the sine qua non, hiring boychild Elon Musk. The neurodivergent Musk with an outsider’s delight has taken to doing what the Republicans have claimed that they’ve loved forever: given us some small government.
How?
By breaking the bigger government into smaller and smaller pieces, with the tacit agreement of, well, everyone in the Beltway at this point, whether through fear or, well, just fear really. Of course much of this is illegal and the bulwark against fascism, our judiciary has said so. Only to, at first, be ignored, then to be threatened.
“I know you might be shocked by this,” said one of the first MAGA guys I know not named Gavin McInnes. “But there’s a possibility…” and here he paused… “That Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
And woebetide the MAGA world “threats”…salvos launched by horn hat wearing folks who give off the appearance of having very little to live for, have actually beaten the not-very-brave-to-begin-with into submission. Over the stupidest shit. See: teacher who was been ordered to remove a sign in her classroom that says “everyone is welcome.”
But this is all business as usual for the exhausting Trump and the newly deputized South African Musk.
So the only entertainment to be had these days is watching MAGA world catch up to the rest of the world. The broadsides are…no other word to describe it: delicious. The Monday morning regrets of teachers, fire fighters and each and other group that supported Trump the man only to discover, too late as usual, that Trump the man didn’t support them.
Parents whose kids who have died from measles who still don’t support measles vaccines are outliers but the bite has been felt everywhere. People being deported whose phones and social media have shown some anti-Trump animus. Americans with latino last names who are being braced by ICE despite having been born here. MAGA world women who didn’t see at all that there would be a cavalcade of rapists and sex traffickers and wife beaters visiting the Oval Office.
More than this the vast swaths of people who have been negatively affected by financial downturns (we’re looking at you, crying Midwest car dealer who saw his business decimated by ill-conceived tariffs) are all of what it took to finally, finally crack the carapace of MAGA thought.
“I know you might be shocked by this,” said one of the first MAGA guys I know not named Gavin McInnes. “But there’s a possibility…” and here he paused… “That Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“I’ve waited eight years for you to say something like this,” I said, moving beyond the gloat. “But why now?”
“He’s just got too many plates spinning,” he said. “They can’t all be kept spinning. And the tariffs….” he grew silent. “Well, he’s either a genius and it’ll all work out. Or he’s insane and it won’t.”
And there it was, some realpolitik, the kind I’ve been waiting for, from anyone in that community, forever. I let it hang there for a delightful minute, came home and sat down to write this. While I guess that there should be more handwringing and fretting since I largely suspect we’ll all be sitting in rubble before too long as the truth of what he’s said starts to resonate through the rest of the MAGA world, I am pleased, finally, to get just that.
Of course even with the midterms offering some cavalry saving possibilities, the feckless managerial class Democrats, unless they harken back to their 1970s blue collar roots, will whiff it. But at least there’ll be that one win in the face of a world gone mad with reports of aliens, extraterrestrial drones, cyborgs replacing real humans, global conspiracies of each and every variety and Trump riding the wave of craziness like the LSD-fueled corporal Lance in Apocalypse Now.
“What’s the matter with Lance man?!?! He’s acting kinda weird! Oh…he dropped acid?!?! FAR OUT!”
It certainly is. It most certainly is.
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