How an empire dies
The common clay of America elected an imbecile as president not once, but twice.
The great voting public of America saw what Donald Trump did from 2017 to 2021, and not only thought that was good, but that he deserved a second term to finish what he started.
Well, he certainly is.
To my mind there is no doubt that he is in office merely and simply to kill this country. He is in office to act out his revenge fantasies against a nation and world which has always laughed at him as a louche, slimy nouveau riche scumbag.
Electing a "New York City real estate developer" to the highest office not only in the United States, but the world, should have been such a farcical idea that it would have been laughed out of the realm of any possibility. Certainly, when he rode down that garish escalator in his falling-apart building, and immediately began talking about Mexican rapists, that should have been the end of him.
But it wasn't. Because a majority of white America was frightened enough and angered enough about a changing national demographic that it decided to gamble to roll back the clock. And yes, I know that other demographics, especially in 2024, also sided with white America, Latin men being the most numerous. But white America, for now, is still the majority. And it wants to maintain that majority. It wants to maintain the unearned privilege which it has enjoyed for four hundred years. It doesn't want to play nice with others. It sees this as an existential crisis, fearing that what it did to others will be visited upon them. It is this fear of chickens coming home to roost which drives white America's politics.
Trump lied to get into office. He lies about everything.
Trump promised to bring down prices on "day one". Instead, we are in the middle of the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Great Recession. Yes, even worse than the Covid inflation which cost President Joe Biden his job.
Trump promised to go only after the "bad hombres" in his anti-immigrant purge. Instead he's locking up many of the immigrants who supported him due to them thinking that their white-adjacency would protect them.
Trump and his minions warned that Kamala Harris would get us into untold wars. Instead? Trump began a war against Iran which he has, let's be frank, lost. As the graphic shows, we are on the third or fourth truce, a truce which won't last because Iran's demands are intolerable. But even Trump knows that the vast majority of this country has no stomach to expand a war it didn't want in the first place. So we will have a few weeks of "peace", which will descend into renewed hostilities once the basis of that peace proves once again to be as crumbling clay.
To quote H.L. Mencken: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” We are an incurious and anti-intellectual nation. We are a people which believes that ignorance has as much value, if not more, than knowledge, because ignorance comes from those plain folks who are the masters of the land. And because of that, we have explosive diarrhea and concentration camps. An elitism of education and wisdom has been, at long last, replaced with an elitism of know-nothingness and stupidity. And truly, it's been a minor miracle that it has taken this long for the long-awaited apotheosis.
Electing the right people is no longer enough. We did that in 2020, and look where that got us. There needs to be a massive re-education program, and some tough love. God bless Joe Biden for having done so much for the GOP voters in red states; but it was a wasted effort. We see now how they rewarded him and Democrats. It's time to play the kind of hardball that the federal government did with increasing the legal drinking age: You want federal funds? Change your laws. And that hardball must extend to the Supreme Court, by expanding it, assigning a size of one justice per district, so that the size of the court can grow if more appeals districts are created. If we want the Republic to survive and thrive, we have to dispense with depending on the better angels of our nature. Those who vote for Republicans have ably demonstrated that they would rather burn down the nation than make it work if they cannot be the holders of power. It's time to treat them and their states as the arsonists they are.
Finally, Donnie: It's "parameters", not "perimeters", you fucking mouth-breathing moron.