I hope Susie Wiles lives the life she deserves, having enabled a man she knew was manifestly unfit to assume the most powerful position in the world. May god forgive her, because I won't.
I had that live feed of Lizzy Lettuce open on my browser for more hours than I'd care to admit. I guess I'm a sucker for vegetable-centric political satire.
Note the posts of support from each member of the Cabinet. My fear: this is a boon to the Administration. Why? Because it has taken Epstein off the lede in every news cast
Yep, she's the most powerful of the "normie" Republicans who know better but enable Trump anyway. They are the worst of the worst. Give me an insane true conspiracy theory believer over people like Wiles, Rubio or Lindsey Graham any day of the week. At least the crazies are being genuine and honest in their own deluded way.
Here's a shock. She's already disputing the reporting. That's why they have to call it the 'fake news'. To predispose Trumpists to believe what Trump and his entourage say regardless of evidence to the contrary.
That doesn't mean he cares about Ivanka, he just wants to put his member in her. In Trump's mind, she is nothing more than an object with his preferred look and style to satisfy him.
"Sociopathy" is not a formal clinical term. Though it's not in the DSM, there is a standard inventory for diagnosing "psychopathy": The PCL-R. While it's only supposed to be used by a professional clinical psychologist who can interact with the subject in person. You can look it up, grade Trump for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
I feel this temptation decent people have, almost reflexively, when confronting Trump's depravity. A compulsion to frame him as the aberration, the malignant specimen preserved in formaldehyde, while his American devotees (our neighbors, our colleagues) dissolve into footnotes. I can understand the reflex. It quarantines the contagion. It preserves clean hands, but a morally gangrenous president does not thrive across a decade (gaining popularity) without a morally bankrupt electorate willing to call the rot regeneration.
He didn't invent the cruelty. He audited it, and discovered how obscenely cheap it could be purchased at industrial scale. Calling him depraved is accurate but insufficient. History groans with immoral men who seized power yet remained shackled by institutions, norms, or collective revulsion.
What distinguishes this moment is that immorality itself has been weaponized into a loyalty oath. The obscenity is no longer liability. It's credential. The ugliness isn't incidental. It's semaphore, a sorting mechanism delineating belonging from exile, and once cruelty becomes the membership card, the rot no longer resides in one man's pathology but in a nation that tallied the cost of decency against the cost of surrender and chose the latter without hesitation.
This is America 2025. We will not change it unless we first possess the moral courage to own what we are.
You're absolutely right about his devotees, our neighbors and colleagues, being absolved from the cruelty trump spews out. Just remember, they're the ones that are furiously typing away, on twitter or sub-reddits or whatever, all those vile comments. Our neighbors, who we smile at or greet outside our houses! Doing vile deeds in their secret places.
So true. The ugliness doesn’t originate in some distant digital swamp. It’s produced in living rooms, on phones held by neighbors we wave to, coworkers we pass in hallways, people who borrow tools and ask about the weather.
We lost a decades long friendship after the 2020 election. We met our friends for lunch, and I remember them asking if we thought Kamala would be running the White House, and where we wanted to see Trump. My response to the second question was that I wanted to see Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit.
Later my husband and I talked about lunch and he shared that one of our friends had been listening to a lot of rightwing talk radio. That helped explain their views.
I still miss our friendship, but I really couldn't stand for their enabling Trump.
we've lost more than we know. My own sister, after mingling in the
new ' church' { it's just a building } has done a complete 180, formerly worked in hospice as an RN. now, cold as a two day old plate of beans. And a brother
who loves how South Dakota handled novel covid and purchased some odd remedy across the border on a trip to Texas. We once did power-washing together, commiserated about everything. It's more than family , much more.
I agreed, until you begin to claim that this is "America 2025".
It's not.
It's today's GOP.
The difference?
Only one-third of the American people (a minority) support the GOP. And many of those are actually brainwashed by its neofascist propaganda, so what they THINK they support when they vote for Republicans is actually not at all what they are de facto enabling...
JVL yesterday talked about “revealed preferences”. The fact is that somewhere north of 40% of the populace either supports Trump and his atrocities, or are willing to tolerate them. I agree with Patrick that we can no longer pretend this is some sort of weird aberration brought on by social media and the electoral college. This is who America is today. We are not going to emerge from this darkness until we have some sort of moral reckoning as a nation.
Not all these people were born in the rabbit hole; they got lured there and climbed their way down one ladder rung at at time. First it's the comments from a trusted friend who then sends them "articles" in their FB feed that tell "the truth." Then they start doing their own digging and find all the warrens with the crazy conspiracies that lead them to follow others spouting "truth." Of course they turn off CNN and head over to Fox, OAN, etc.
And before you know it, they are full blown believers.
I believe that social media has been a net negative for our society. But the voters still have agency. No matter how far down a right wing media rabbit hole a person is, they should still have the basic ability to recognize evil behavior and a disordered personality. After 10 years of this, nobody gets a pass from me for being misled on social media.
I think you strongly underestimate fascism. Its propaganda machine mostly takes away people's agency. Brainwashing is real.
These people obviously "recognize evil behavior". They are convinced that it's Democrats who commit it. Systematically.
Or as Kamala Harris says, we need to keep in mind that we're NOT dealing with the same "facts" (we versus GOP voters today). They do live in a completely "alternative facts" bubble by now.
Of course, we could all just sit there feeling righteous and judging everyone else. As history has shown, that isn't exactly how we'll empower ourselves to defeat fascism though. Fascism vitally NEEDS our cynicism. It needs us to dehumanize The Other - not just its supporters but an entire society, including those who reject fascism.
Because as long as we think something is wrong with who GOP voters ARE, at their core, we will give up engaging in THE most civic duty we all have in a democracy, namely engaging in real, respectful debates with those who think differently. And in the end, only those debates can save us.
So no "anticipatory obedience" or dehumanizing the other, please. You're only strengthening neofascists whenever you do so.
Exactly right. If the true believers had a full spectrum of information - as in the Cronkite era when everone had more oreless the same inrformation, there would probably be few "40% ers". Note recent articles about the anti-Israeli move of young MAGAs because they watched TikTok's scenes or Gaza destruction. This has strategic implications for the Democratic part to preach less to its choir and start looking for ways to articulately reach Trump's supporters
Social media & Fox News. Fortunately, friend-wise, we live in a blue bubble. And the only couple who are good friends and also Trump supporters watch Fox News from morning til night. They are good people, but are comfortable in their fact-free universe.
Taking heart in ‘just reading’…. ‘They’ came in immediately after the swearing in and bulldozed ! And got more and more emboldened and the fabrications and lies, misinformation and COVERAGE exploded….
I remember the McCarthy hearings and the HUAC (House UnAmerican Committee) in the 50’s, the plane “crash” that revealed the two men with their ‘brief cases’ full of money also in the early 50’s,(never really disclosed who or what the $ was for) LBJ’s late and SLOW support for Hubert Humphrey and the fractional loss to Nixon! Same song, lotsa verses, a little bit louder and so much worser.. However……. Not quite the same…. Read US…. Here and other forums..
and dt may be (HOPE so) in not knowing any limits, his own downfall…. The price is very very high…. For everyone….
This treats reality like a technicality instead of a lived condition.
Ask the simplest questions first: What country did this happen in? and what year is it?
Not what party logo was on the ballot. Not what percentage feels comforted by the word “minority.” This is the United States, in 2025. The consequences are national. The machinery is federal. The damage is real, present, and enforceable. Pretending this is merely “today’s GOP” is a semantic escape hatch, not an analysis.
Authoritarian drift does not require majority buy-in to become a national condition. History is unambiguous on this point. It requires a motivated faction, asymmetric power, and a larger population that insists it is somehow not their problem yet. Saying “only one-third support this” (is wrong based on all the polling which shows majorities of non-voters as Trumpers) but it also misunderstands how power actually works. Minority rule is not a bug of democratic collapse; it’s the mechanism, and once it takes hold, headcounts stop mattering.
This is America, not because everyone supports it, but because it is happening here, now, with American power, under American law, enforced on American soil. Refusing to own it that way doesn’t protect the country. It anesthetizes it, and anesthesia is exactly what allows the patient to be operated on without resistance. (I won't contiue it here, becuase I wrote 3000 words on it this weekend: https://open.substack.com/pub/complexsimplicity/p/the-mascot-presidency-why-trumps?r=2r6ysj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web )
You're absolutely right. We here may not have voted for him, but the American People elected him. What happens here is done in our name. Simply voting is no longer enough. Whatever I do, I remind myself that it's never enough
Simply voting was never enough. That's where so many pro-democracy Americans got it wrong for such a long time already.
For a democracy to thrive, citizens need to be well-informed, have taught critical thinking, and need to actively engage in real, respectful debates with fellow citizens who think differently.
I think this is more than a minor quibble and there seems to be general agreement on this point. The global nature of this is essential to take into account because this is not just a national phenomenon. We have our own brand of the problem, for sure, but we miss the mark if we don't take a broader view.
All polls show that only one third supports the GOP today. Or, for that matter, Trump.
So if you think there are polls showing that it's actually "HUGE majorities", where are these polls... ?
In the meantime: yes, of course, something needs to be broken in society as a whole before fascism can be "democratically" voted in. This has been decades in the making, and many factors caused it (the demise of the legacy media, the low quality of research and teaching in humanities and philosophy departments, the disappearing of a sense of civic duty, "DEI trainings" (not DEI programs, which are entirely legitimate), etc.). The left clearly contributed to some of these too.
But most of these factors were installed out of a desire to get rid of the US Constitution and switch to a fascist regime instead.
And no, as history has shown this is NOT over yet. MANY people are waking up and fighting back each day. That's yet another reason to not imagine that simplistic notions could somehow summarize what an entire country has become.
Before anything else , the ALL CAPS and the breathless “all polls” framing already reads like a Trump tweet. Alarmism without precision is part of the same disease.
Now, the substance:
No. This frames fascism as a misunderstanding instead of what it actually is, a power project.
Propaganda doesn’t erase agency. It works because people choose lies that protect their identity and justify harm. Calling it out isn’t dehumanization, it’s accountability.
“Respectful debate” only works when both sides share reality and limits. Fascists don’t. They use debate to stall while power consolidates. History is brutally clear on that.
Fascism doesn’t feed on cynicism. It feeds on hesitation, on the belief that civility will stop a boot already mid-air. Be well.
By "all polls" I mean all solid, reliable polls. As I already said, I'm happy to be proven wrong though, so again, please give us some examples of polls showing what you wrote, namely that "HUGE majorities" support Trump?
Secondly, ask yourself: why did you put "HUGE" in all caps? To try to write like Trump? No, it turns out that everyone does it, and for good reasons. So no need to judge it when others do it too (talking about "accountability") ;-)
And yes, of course propaganda erases agency. That's why it works in the first place.
As to "respectful debate": it means that you categorically refuse to use ad hominem arguments (including dehumanizing the other).
Why would we not indulge in the cynical hypothesis that some people just ARE bad?
Because it's demonstrably false. Science has shown that most higher mammals, including Homo sapiens, have innate compassion.
Finally, as to the idea that fascism vitally needs cynicism: I don't know of any expert in fascism who disagrees with that idea. Do you?
They are NOT brainwashed. This is literally who they are when they are allowed to be. Faux built their media empire not because they brainwashed people, but because they delivered a product that people WANTED.
Rush was successful not because he brainwashed people but because he delivered a product people WANTED.
These people could have "bought" any media product they wanted--and they did.. and the media followed their audience as it developed and grew. Continued to deliver what they wanted, even if it was lies. Faux lost almost a billion dollars because they delivered lies out of fear that they would lose audience if they told the truth.
Actual persuasion and manipulation like people often postulate (brainwashing) is not really possible outside of very controlled and lengthy processes. It is a LOT harder than people assume. I say this as someone who has studied this stuff for decades.
It is somewhat easy to persuade someone to buy car X instead of car Y. It is difficult, verging on the impossible to persuade someone to swiftly change identity (moral and political beliefs and attitudes).
This is who these people are, as ugly as it is. Many of them have been that way for a very long time, but you never saw it because it was something that was kept hidden for the most part. But as I pointed out before, I remember listening to the adults around me talking about things in the late 60s early 70s in privacy amongst themselves and it was all of the nasty stuff you are seeing and hearing right now. And a lot of that got passed down to the kids.
You just did not say it in public.
Well, NOW you can say it in public and many of them do. And you can act on those things out of ignorance of the larger effects (economic and social) and when it blows up in your face, all of a sudden it's THIS is not what I voted for. When it actually was. You just didn't think it would play out this way or cost YOU what it has cost you--because you never actually thought about it nor did you listen to anybody that had thought about it. Experts, what do THEY know.
People have multiple faces--there is, at a minimum, the face that they show in public and then there is their real face. What the GoP and MAGA and Trump have done is allowed people to show more of their real face as their public face.
And maybe that is a good thing--a wake up call. It could bring the realization that despite what face people put on, there is a lot of often very nasty stuff going on behind that despite the smiles and superficial politeness and churchiness.
You are more likely to get personal truth from MAGAFanatic67 on X or other social media than you are from Sally Doe, the person behind MAGAFanatic67. Because Sally feels anonymous and safe.
And sitting here and excusing all of this because they have been "brainwashed" is avoiding a reality.
No, I don't believe this. I saw my mother change from a level-headed, tolerant person to someone spouting right wing nonsense. It happened by osmosis at first. She would have the radio on for the cats and as it played in the background she absorbed it. Then she began to actively listen and suddenly it was all Fox News. She died before he came down that escalator. It would have killed me if she would have gone MAGA.
I'm really torn on this. I have been saying all along that "kill them all and let God sort it out" is the prime political belief of most of the people I knew as a child. Racism is alive and well behind closed doors, although it seems like most of our churches are openly and voluntarily segregated by race these days. When you let people worship as they will, they segregate, I guess.
But I still believe that I have seen brainwashing take place. It started in the 1980s with Greed is Good. And I firmly believe that American Business and commercial interests have been trying to brainwash me to be a consumer and not a citizen, and that attempt has been going on my entire life.
What you are talking about WRT American consumer culture is basically part of the larger cultural background. You are constantly exposed to it, it is the ocean that you swim in, so to speak.
It isn't brainwashing. It is how things have naturally developed as a consequence of human nature encountering environment.
Because while pretty much everyone has been exposed to this for long periods of time, you have gotten a range of reactions, from advocacy all the way to actual resistance.
Not everyone believes that greed is good--many do not. Not everyone is racist (or at least not malevolently racist).. and so on. These people cannot really make you something that you are not, something that runs against your nature and world view. Some advertisements and movies and TV shows are NOT going to make that lift.
People have been avidly searching for the magical means of persuasion for thousands of years. Haven't found it yet... and they are unlikely to find it, I doubt it exists.
It becomes increasingly clear, as we learn more about human cognition and behavior, that a lot of what we are is determined. This can slowly shift, but it will never go away, never be trained away, persuaded away. Some remnant continues.
We can change surface patterns, make certain things more convenient, "safer," more or less acceptable. But what is there underneath does not change much for most people.
Yes, we all need some human touch, to have a little remorse now and then and DO something about that feeling. Otherwise, food, shelter and clothing. Consumerism, Materialism. Not just greed, envy or lust.
I'm so glad I had the experience to capture rainwater, heat with wood
lived simply and at the time, me and my partner were flush with cash, built two homes ( it's nice to live in a new home that is self-planned ) paid the bank off swiftly. AND , the best part, sit back, agree and look at the big picture. In the 1990's. Good Years.
I'm a little disappointed in myself for not putting the pieces together sooner. The fairness doctrine, gone. School became less about citizenship and more about job training. Corporations able to funnel unseen money into politics. Antitrust laws out of date and unenforced. Of course this leads to oligarchs supporting a dictator. Someone to make deals.
There is a gentler way to look at "kill them all and..." All our lives are forfeit, and the lack of compassion shows who they really are. I think Donald Trump is living in a circle of hell. He insists on making his problems everyone's problems. His moral bankruptcy was always obvious. Now he's mentally ill as well.
This is an appealing but simplistic argument that promotes polarization and bad policy. Saying "they wanted Limbaugh" implies that his followers already had Limbaugh-like ideas and couldn't be changed. I suggest that, on the contrary, Limbaugh and Trump were artful persuaders. They had some valid arguments which they overused to build masterful personal images through absolute self-assurance. The answer is not to give up on people but understand strategy and counteract it. An extreme case is Germany, the cultured nation of Goethe and Schiller, which became mesmerized by Hitler. The Germans weren't born Nazis - Hitler was a brilliant demagogue who exploited people's demoralization and provided visions. Same thing in the killing fields of Cambodia.
It is simplistic because of where I am presenting it. I have actually studied this stuff, have a degree in it and the reality of it IS more complex than presented here.
It requires pre-existing attitudes and belief systems to be effective. With the pre-existing conditions you can use absolutely shitty, non-valid arguments that engage almost purely on the emotional level. Because they WANT to believe you. They are active participants. Youy are amplifying and radicalizing what was already there.
The absolutely most effective means of persuasion are exactly those that are labeled as fallacies, because that is the way that people actually think.
People want simple, easy to understand answers that align with pre-existing beliefs/attitudes. That are emotionally satisfying.
It took the Right 20+ years to build things to this point and tens (even hundreds) of billions of dollars. We do not have the 20 years or the money. You will not persuade these people to abandon what they have arrived at in any meaningful time frame.
The best hope is that Trump and his minions screw things up SO bad that it actively disrupts these people--but you can already see how hard it is to crack the existing attitudes/beliefs. A number of behaviors come into play to justify continued belief, despite the in your face results, despite established facts.
All of this is far more entrained and deterministic than people want to believe. Note that only a segment of the population responded to this whole thing. They were predisposed to that. They encounterd it and said give me more. It fell flat a lot of other places (even when somewhat valid arguments were employed) because those were not the answers that people wanted.
Now, when people are desperate (Weimar Germany with hyper inflation, a lost war with massive casualties, large scale social disruption and fighting in the streets between the right and left) things can move swiftly and more broadly. Because people are looking for simple direct and immediate answers.
Persuasion requires pre-existing conditions and suitable context. It also requires a strategy and a group willing and able to carry out that strategy (which the Democrats of the late 20th and early 21st century are NOT). It also requires people to be open.
Are there people in the "middle" that you can reach? Yes. These are the people that flop back and forth from election to election. So you can temporarily "persuade" them. But it is temporary. You can (at least temporarily) reach any of the many who have not "drunk the kool-aid." But you have to work really hard to change and keep them.
Could the Limbaugh or MAGA followers been other than what they are now, at the start? They could have been moderated or kept moderated. They were not going to become DEI advocates or gay marriage advocates or whatever. It is not who they are. What Limbaugh and MAGA did was activate these people and make them more extreme. Which is easier than changing their minds.
There are FUNDAMENTAL differences in how people view the world. This is one of the roots of partisanship. partisanship is not created, it is a pre-existing condition--it is only directed along certain paths.
Radicalizing people is much easier than changing people's minds.
You just caused me to flash back to my first job out of college where my office mate subjected me to Rush every day, and in hindsight where we are today seems like the logical near-endpoint of him.
This is the best response yet. I was subjected to intense brainwashing as a 13-year-old in a "drug rehab" cult. I mean 24 hours a day of non-stop propaganda, no-contact-with-the-outside-world, abusive brainwashing. For over a year.
My inner core never caved. Did it harm me emotionally and psychologically? Yes? Did it fundamentally change my belief system? NO. I concur that the people who many like to call 'brainwashed" are in fact, just revealing their private selves in public because of the MAGA permission structure that allows them to do so.
This country is revealing its true nature and it is really ugly. He has the support of about 1/3 of the county - not a majority, but not nothing either. He has been able to parlay it into the absolute destruction of decency, morality, and norms. None of what is going on would be possible unless he had the support of a wide swath of Americans who have no moral compass, empathy, and compassion and whose sole life purpose is hurting anyone who is not a white "Christian".
I take all the 'he's sinking in the polls' with a grain of salt because no matter how you slice it, more than a third of the country is A-OK with all of this. Even if you remove him and his administration, those people - the 36ish percent of Americans who think this is great - will lay in wait for the next person to come along and validate their immortality. Look how long the Lost Cause waited.... since 1865, yet, here they all are again, in all their racist, hateful glory. They are more committed to their cause than a lot of Americans seem to be to democracy.
South Carolina sent Strom Thurmond to the Senate for FORTY SEVEN YEARS. Countless other example exist. The author is exactly right - we have always been this, we just kept it out of public view until the age of Trump.
What you're saying is: ok, fascism dehumanizes The Other? Then I'll dehumanize those who vote for it.
That is NOT how we will defeat it.
As to the GOP's neofascist propaganda machine: it has been FIVE DECADES in the making. And the last decade, they directly consulted foreign experts in fascism (not scholars, but fascist leaders and their consultants).
You're strongly underestimating fascism and the power of its propaganda.
Liberalism and fascism are antitheses. Liberalism is based upon inclusion, fascism on exclusion. They are fundamentally different world-views and political projects.
Liberalism runs counter in some regards to human nature. One of the central components of human nature is the Us/Them mechanism. Liberalism in its best incarnations seeks to turn Them into Us.
Fascism works with, not against the natural Us/Them tendency. It is an "easier" sell. It seems common sensical. It creates strong group cohesion--but only in a specific group.
Fascism (and strong nationalism) creates a false impression of strength and security. Both are actually destructive, economically and socially. They are the answer to the question, how can I really screw things up and create poverty, endemic violence, and a lack of freedom.
When you look at history, it seems rather clear that larger and more inclusive societies win out over smaller and less inclusive societies. Liberal societies (relative to their times) defeat non-liberal societies.
Liberal societies most often defeat THEMSELVES by turning into illiberal societies.
All one has to look at to understand this is the outcome of WW2, most particularly the Pacific War. The fascist regime of Japan created poverty and oppression internally even before the war (in order to create military strength) and the conquests they undertook to "enrich" the nation failed to do so and led to their destruction and the deaths of millions. dfeated by a nation of weaklings and shopkeepers who buried them though production and strategy.
Sparta (which far too many people fetishize) was a literal slave society (one of the worst of its time realtively speaking) that was not (contrary to common belief) militarily successful and was certainly not an economic powerhouse. They created no great art or thought, contributed little or nothing to civilization other than some mythology.
Germany cannibalized its own people, killing or forcing out some of the brightest in the name of purity, turned it's economy towards war (poorly and ineffectively, BTW) and proceded to immolate themselves.
The USSR, despite massive support from the liberals during the war never recovered and also died, its people poor and unfree, replaced by an even poorer copy of itself that cannot even defeat a weaker and smaller next door neighbor.
What success illiberal regimes have had has been the result of the unwillingness of liberal societies to proactively resist--yet when push came to shove, the liberal socities have tended to come out on top because they have a social unity/power and an economic power that is actuallysuperior to the fascists and totalitarians.
Dehumanization is not a path to victory except in the very short term. It costs too much and sows the seeds of its own destruction.
I have to disagree with you on an important point. If it is true that 33% (I think it's more in the 40% range) support Trump and the GOP then a decade in, where is the other 66%? They're home, asses comfortably settled on their couches, living their lives as though everything is as it was. Sure, they may not like it but they are in no way moved to DO anything about it.
Sure there's some who actively fight back as we've seen in cities occupied by federal troops. But we need more. We need to reach the tipping point where the average citizen who is not majorly effected by what's happening to decide do heave their asses off those couches and make their voices heard loud and clear. Or as John Lewis said, to get in some Good Trouble.
I appreciate you saying this. As a spectator it's incredibly frustrating watching the mass apathy. People are too comfortable, uninformed, lazy, uncaring? Which is it and what will it take to get 70 million into the streets? No King's was nice but it's a drop in the bucket relatively speaking. These f*r's have the world's largest arsenal, zero empathy and a demonstrated willingness to kill the 'other' - who are anyone that doesn't bow down - how can that not move US citizens en masse?
I think the American electorate is generaly uninformed (or misinformed if they consume right wing media), lazy and selfish. We've seen time and again they feel no need to react unless they're effected personally.
The sad reality is that, unless people are directly and personally affected, they usually will not act. It is not in their interest to expend the effort, everything is good enough as is.
Sure, they might bitch about it, but that is the limit. Until it actually gets real.
This is a natural outcome of evolutions "concern" with conserving energy and effort. Consuming energy requires gathering more energy. Herbivores are very "busy" because their energy sources are low in energy. Predators laze around a lot because they have to expend a lot of energy (usually) to get energy. That is why your dog or cat sleeps or lays around so much--and they usually have guaranteed energy sources that require low effort. Evolution shaped them that way.
We have been shaped by the same pressures... and dealing with abstract might be kinda things are usually not priorities. Not part of the energy budget.
The same thing goes when you poll people and they are in favor of X. So the politicians try and do X and when people get presented with the bill for x, they decide they are not so much in favor of X after all. It is too inconvenient, too costly.
In real life, in Trump's first year already there have been mass protests bigger than the US has ever seen. The only difference is that this time, the legacy media almost don't report on it, so you need to go to independent media to know what is going on.
There is also tremendous fighting back going on in the courts - done by many Democrats and also independent groups. Most of the time, they're winning. History has shown how crucially important these victories are, because they strongly delay the installation of fascism, and that delay is needed to still have a chance to turn the tide when Democrats win in 2026 and 2028.
I do agree that we need more. But WHAT we need more is what we already urgently needed these last few decades, and what any democracy needs to be able to thrive: constant, real, respectful debates among citizens, and especially with those who disagree with us.
"Real" means: we accept at any moment that even our strongest beliefs may turn out to be false, and engage in the conversation in order to, TOGETHER, get closer to the truth (regardless of whether or not the other agrees with this principle).
"Respectful" means: no ad hominem arguments. In other words, no dehumanizing of The Other, no matter how profound our disagreements may be.
Reinstalling that and making it part of the fabric of the American society again will take years.
Fortunately, places like Substack do allow us to get it all started again...
Considering where we are at the moment, your comment is nothing more than magical thinking. What's clear is that those in charge care nothing about respect and togetherness. Their goal, stated publicly (Project 2025, Project Esther, etc) is to remake this country in their own white, christian image, to strengthen the power and wealth of the already obscenely wealthy and nothing less will do. They have created through technically legal though quite borderline congressional action, a Supreme Court that's all in on their project.
What they're not getting very much of is meaningful pushback. Wins in the lower courts become meaningless when they reach SCOTUS. In fact the opposite happens and the abuse becomes codified as acceptable, 'constitutionally based' law (e.g. complete presidential immunity).
Meanwhile the majority remains silent - except perhaps on substack where it counts for nothing. That just makes us feel better but results in nothing in reality.
I understand that you feel as if not enough people are fighting back.
There's feeling and then there's facts though.
Yes, the GOP has become a neofascist party and is trying to install fascism in the US.
For now, however, even the majority of GOP voters don't know yet THAT that is what the GOP is doing, and the others don't support the idea of fascism either.
How can a minority of people win elections and do what no one wants them to do?
History shows that it's not the first time that a democracy is turned into a fascist regime by having fascists win elections. So if we want to figure out how to fight back, we HAVE to look at how others did it.
And how others did it was in part by fighting back in court, and, again, the number of suits against the administration is today at a record high AND we are WINNING most of them. That is crucially important and a real reason for hope. It's not enough, but it's vital that people know that this is happening, so that we can spread the word and support those who are achieving all the winning on our behalf. And that is indeed WITH a SC that has a two-third majority that actively supports fascism (defined as the bundling of all powers of government into one branch, the executive one). In other words, what is crucial to understand is that the vast majority of these lawsuits never get to the SC in the first place. And history has shown how crucial achieving all these victories is.
So don't let yourself be discouraged by what the current SC does! The legal pushback right now is actually EXTREMELY meaningful.
And then again, having THE biggest protests against a president EVER, and already in his first year, that is really the very opposite of "silence".
But there's more: now even REPUBLICANS are beginning to fight back. They see Democrats winning elections in landslides (a Democrat just became mayor of Miami for the first time in 30 years), and they begin to reject gerrymandering based on race.
Finally, in the long run, even if Democrats win in 2026 and 2028 and restore democracy, America's democracy will remain terribly fragile if we're not willing to do the groundwork, way beyond voting. And that is informing ourselves and then engaging in real, respectful debates with those who don't vote and those who vote for the GOP (or third party). Here too, I don't see how you can just discard what is happening on Substack as "nothing".
Conclusion: I'm afraid you're practicing "anticipatory obedience". Neofascists WANT you to imagine that you're alone and no one but you is fighting back, but the facts prove the oppose. And it usually takes an entire decade to turn a democracy into a full-fledged dictatorship. Right now, we're not even at the end of year one yet. So we CAN do this, and millions of people ARE fighting back!
You're hyperbolizing, generalizing and incorrecgt re the historical record.
1. While people in the US may say they don't support authoritarianism they will, for example, tell you they do support what Trump and Co are doing to close the border. You say they don't yet know what's happening and while that's true to a certain extent it's also intentional ignorance if not agreement - as in "I don't care how he does it, I just want it done"
2. While the lower courts are holding (and despite what you hyperbolized I do not think that means nothing) Scotus has hog tied them. One example is that lower courts can no longer issue rulings that apply to the whole country. They are limited to adjudicating that one single case. So sure the Nat'l Guard had to leave CA but it's entirely free to invade any other city at will and while a lawsuit specific to that city is filed, citizens have to wait months for ruling specific to that city.
3. Few dictators have been stopped through courts because that is one of the first things authoritarians seize control of (as the GOP has done with SCOTUS). *See Orban's history
4. "...it usually takes an entire decade to turn a democracy into a full-fledged dictatorship." Um, no. It took Hitler about 1 /12 years. It took N Korea just a few years. It took Orban a couple of years to dismantle democracy and a further few to consolidate complete control.
5. They're putting their thumbs on the scale big time now re voting and SCOTUS has approved extreme politcal gerrymandering as 'a politcal issue beyond the purview of any court'. If they are successful our situation is going to devolve exponentially.
I find your conclusion condescending. We can turn this around but it's going to take grass roots action. Period.
I have long been convinced that the smarter Trump apologists, and also the ones most likely to preen in their Christian piety, love Trump precisely because they can use his amorality and lawlessness as a weapon against their political opponents and an instrument to plow down legal and institutional and ethical obstacles to their agenda - without having the taint of criminality on their own hands.
Except they are, in actuality, accomplices and fundamentally unChristian in both what they support and what they want. But they feel good about themselves, which is all that counts, I guess :P
Don’t forget the abject cowardice of law firms, CEO’s bribing him, university presidents, the media, etc. They help to destroy this country and they own Trump’s cruelty.
You've provided so many quotable comments! I read your post a few times, but I won't remember them all. I'll just say you're so right about obscenity being a credential, immorality being a loyalty oath, and the ugliness being a semaphore to sort those belonging and those not. Too many want to belong to the DJT cult of uncontrolled bigotry, greed, and misogyny. We had better own it because it's a large portion of who "we" are. Maybe that portion is shrinking, but I don't think it will ever go away. However, in past decades, better (meaning kinder, smarter, actually more Christian, and devoted to the Constitution) prevailed and can again. I have to believe that!
I recall early on stating, it's just like the end of 7th grade, who can I connect with so next year won't be so lonely. I see a lot of immaturity, the winning team, gather strengh,
all that. Guess I'm so proud to have always been anti categorical.
Yeah, if only someone could have figured out that one can divide the electorate into two baskets . . . but that would've required some sort of rebiggulator, which is of course utterly preposterous!
Oh my…. Well written and damning…. As I have indicated before, at 89…. ‘Been here’ and each time there is more money, continued deliberate ignorance, and deliberate pain to those who ‘do not agree’ or are ‘different’ however…. ‘We’ have NOT had a place to ‘share’ like this, before…. There IS ‘conversation’, COMMUNICATION and ‘intelligence’ and caring…. Hmmmmmm. Thank YOU…
Beautifully put. Beautifully written. In this timeline we’re living in, the rot spreads easily—24/7 “breaking news,” social media, and Faux News. We’re always under assault. Hitler had to actually work hard to bring his message to his followers. Trump just twitches his thumbs and the message is blasted all over the universe. The useful idiot is still useful, even while he naps. This will not end well. But it will end. Will our democracy hold?
"The post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have them at all is evidence of a twisted soul."
Exactly. There is no bottom to the cesspool of this man's hatred and jealousy of, and utter lack of empathy for, anyone and everyone whom he believes to have slighted him or not sufficiently fawned over him and greased his pathway to personal success and fortune.
Grotesquely inappropriate as that is, the bigger issue remains that it is even possible. It was not long ago that such a horrific screed would have been a disqualifier for any further standing in political circles. (And professional circles otherwise. It still could get the rest of us fired from our jobs under certain circumstances were we to do so.) What it says beyond the depth of the author's complete depravity and disrespect for appropriate social discourse is how fast and how far Americans as a whole have lost their moral compass and chosen to lower their standards to lowest common denominator standing. Any further evidence desired can be found by looking at internet comment forums, where political hatred outpaces common decency in too many posts about the topic, where otherwise seemingly normal humans in daily life cannot stop themselves from giving primary voice to their political hatred and resentments, the intellectual equivalent of pigs happily wallowing in their own filth.
Our is a sick nation. There will be no healing until enough people say "Enough!" to this and other forms of abuse of freedom of speech. That role starts at the top (or nearly so, in this case). But those people have abandoned any sense of responsibility of being morality influencers. Anything goes with them, as long as it enhances their bottom line and personal welfare. If there is a way out of this doom loop of the destruction of our civil society, I do not see it. I suppose "Each One, Reach One" is the only viable pathway left. Accordingly, keep on reaching, and keep on being the parade if they insist on being the rain.
The profitability of angertainment is the key accellerant of incivility. The vast right-wing noise machine has spent 30+ years stirring it up. It cannot be calmed quickly.
Mob boss starts by asking just a small favor, nothing much, and you may hardly notice how your path has turned.
Klansman or Proud Boy starts by fanning flame of your discontent, offering a frame of blame to explain, it’s not your own failure nor the arrangement of overall power structure - it’s THOSE people.
Malign bot-masters study our psychology &divisions; then utilize those insights to amplify whatever worst impulses we reveal by our clicks. There’s no one set agenda except chaos. Distrust. Suspicion. Sow those, and we’ll all take it from there.
…plenty people stumble, hardly noticing the nudge. Our technology/media culture has given the ones that do the pushing some great tools & access to us.
Talk about petty tyrants! I still remember how Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in late 1995 & early 1996 because of his petty grievance that Bill Clinton had seated him in the back of the presidential plane when they were returning from Israel.
Your excellent comment addresses what JVL was talking about yesterday. As you say, we are a sick nation. We can argue about the causes - social media, bigotry, the revenge of the Confederacy, the election of an educated black man that caused many Americans to lose their minds, " social influencers", poor public education, - the answers are probably limitless. And you correctly say that nothing will change until enough of us shout "ENOUGH".
How soon we forget what should be eternal infamy. Remember what a great thigh-slapper it was when Paul Pelosi got hammered? Yuk Yuk Yuk. All the red-hats in America practically died laughing.
A couple of years back, Elon Musk foiled a Ukrainian attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet by turning off Starlink at a critical moment. He claimed at the time he was preventing WWIII. We should be reminding everyone again about what this traitor did. I am still angry that he got away with it .
I understand this impulse, (I won't be upset) but this reaction is part of the trap. Treating his death/removal as the resolution mistakes a symbol for a system. He isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom that found fertile ground. Cheering the end of the mascot risks letting the underlying failures off the hook, and worse, it creates the illusion that accountability, repair, or reckoning can be outsourced to biology.
If we reduce this to a countdown clock, we guarantee we learn nothing from it, and when the conditions remain, something else (something more capable and competent) will rise to fill the space. (I don't expect you to read it, but I did write 3,000 words on this, this weekend: https://substack.com/inbox/post/181613174 )
The threat you cite is certainly real. But the catalyst that keeps the fire going is Trump - the disinhibition, the creation of an image that allows people to project opposing grievances and desires onto him, the showmanship, belligerence, etc. Nobody having all of these "attributes" is presently visible, not JD, not Jr, not Tucker, etc. Maybe one will rise out of nowhere. More likely, the key objectives of MAGA will proceed in a slower and less noisy manner.
I don’t disagree with your description of Trump’s role as a catalyst. He is uniquely disinhibiting. He lowered the floor. He made the unsayable sayable, the illegal testable, the unthinkable routine, but that’s exactly why focusing on his singularity is dangerous.
Trump didn’t pry open the doors of authoritarianism because he was skilled. He did it because he was catastrophically incompetent and still succeeded. People keep sliding past this reality. Everyone with a functioning brain can see that he’s a buffoon, and yet that buffoon was enough to stress-test the system to the point of fracture. He exposed how little resistance there actually was.
The risk isn’t that someone identical to Trump hasn’t appeared yet. The risk is that Trump proved you don’t need his specific cocktail of chaos to advance these objectives. You only need someone more disciplined, quieter, more procedurally fluent, and less addicted to spectacle. Someone who doesn’t need rallies to feel alive. Someone who understands levers instead of crowds.
That’s why “slower and less noisy” isn’t reassuring. It’s worse.
Noise attracts attention. Incompetence creates openings for resistance. Trump’s volatility accidentally preserved some friction. A more capable actor pushing on the same doors won’t announce themselves as a threat. They won’t need to perform belligerence. They’ll normalize it. They’ll routinize it. They’ll make it boring.
Once it’s boring, it’s hard to stop.
So yes, Trump is a catalyst, but the lesson he taught is not “only Trump could do this.”
The lesson is “this system was weak enough that he could.”
That’s not a reason to relax once he’s gone. It’s the reason the danger accelerates after him.
"The risk isn’t that someone identical to Trump hasn’t appeared yet. The risk is that Trump proved you don’t need his specific cocktail of chaos to advance these objectives. You only need someone more disciplined, quieter, more procedurally fluent, and less addicted to spectacle. Someone who doesn’t need rallies to feel alive. Someone who understands levers instead of crowds."
This is a much more difficult needle to thread in practice than you think it is. MAGA loves Trump and flocks to him like no other person alive specifically because he *isn't* quiet and *is* addicted to spectacle. They want their president to be a WWE wrestling character, not a right wing version of Joe Biden who is outwardly demure and reserved on social media and TV. They want fiction. They actually right now believe the economy is great, the immigrants are all gone, crime is gone, the border wall is there, etc. because Trump and the right wing cinematic universe tell them this. They don't want a politician who is a fluent orator, that means they feel talked over and down to. They want their president to have a reading level and speaking style of a 5th grader like they have. They want cartoonish, action movie-esque government action even if it isn't actually doing anything to change much; they want the *feeling* of change they want is happening. That's all.
It is not possible to be appealing to the MAGA base without being a 24/7 megaphone of grievances, victimhood, and lies pandering to the fictional world in their heads in which they imagine they live. Someone educated and practical will be seen by MAGA as intellectually elitist and untrustworthy. They just want a big mouth rich white guy validating their fears and blaming their hated imagined enemies. If you don't do this all day every day, you're not capable of winning their loyalty.
What you described there is someone like Mitch McConnell. MAGA doesn't want a new Mitch. They want a movie character who behaves as if he can control all of reality itself minute to minute as the main character of the universe, a guy who is their avatar. No one alive in the GOP other than Trump has the brew of personality disorders, decades of brand building, and frankly outright stupidity necessary to be the new cult leader.
I think what I’m describing applies to almost anyone, which is precisely the problem. Tucker fits the pattern well, but he’s hardly unique. The danger isn’t that a single brilliant figure replaces Trump, it’s that an inept, incurious, and fundamentally incapable man can occupy that space at all. When incompetence reaches the highest office, it doesn’t neutralize risk, it creates it. It opens the door for more disciplined, more strategic actors to operate without scrutiny, restraint, or resistance.
That’s why your first example actually reinforces my point. What looks, in isolation, like decline or fragmentation is often just redistribution. Different voices, same underlying current. If we can’t acknowledge how easily this system adapts, and how little it depends on any one personality, then we’re likely talking past each other rather than toward a shared understanding.
"They actually right now believe the economy is great, the immigrants are all gone, crime is gone..."
I don't think so. I don't think belief of that sort -- that they actually think these things are true -- is in play one way or another. I see MAGA as a project of crowd-based trolling and gaslighting. The more over-the-top the claims they say they believe -- A+++++, greatest EVER -- the better they serve to stick thumbs in our eyes. They are signals of fealty internally and linguistic weapons externally. What many pundits fail to grok is how social this can be: how MAGAs group in communities virtual in real, in which loyalty to Trump is the maguffin of comradeship, thus to abandon Trump is to betray your friends, your neighbors, your Bible study group, your bowling team...
It a cult-of-the-person. All beliefs get swept into and subsumed under "only he can save us."
It's not easy to switch figureheads, but not all cults die with their leaders. When you think 'so and so isn't up to it' you're seeing that person through a normie lens. They look different inside their silo, and the massive right wing anti-reality media machine is very, very good at their brand of evil.
If you’re waiting for the Red Hats to resolve this through a spontaneous eruption of self-awareness, you’re not describing accountability, you’re describing abdication. Authoritarian movements do not unravel because their adherents pause, reflect, and recoil from their own reflection. They unravel when power is stripped from their hands, when legitimacy collapses, when the machinery that rewards cruelty can no longer function. Conscience is not the solvent of authoritarianism. Pressure is.
The hope that they will one day look inward and feel shame assumes shame still governs them. The record suggests it does not. What many see in Trump is not deformity but authorization, not ugliness but permission. Cruelty reads as resolve. Domination reads as strength, and if that is the constituency you are waiting on to deliver a moral correction, then you are quietly consenting to a future shaped by their values. That is how dystopias form, not in a single violent rupture, but in the long, patient pause of those who kept waiting for a conscience that never arrived.
I keep hearing that according to polling, a higher proportion of people who sat out this election would have voted Republican than Democrat. Demoralizing the Trumpists and *getting* them to stay home is a viable strategy at this point.
To some extent yes, but the Kirk podcast falling from the top 10 to like 94th overall in downloads/listens since his death proves how once the figurehead is gone, the cult quickly shrivels.
Yes he's proven we need a new constitution fostering a government more representative of the actual will of the people, more explicitly constraining of executive power, less prone to gridlock in the legislature, and free of unwritten gentleman's agreements that any proto-dictator can just ignore. But there is no one in the GOP with his inexplicable gravity and appeal to the maga base. No one cares about JD Vance. No one cares about Elon. No one cares about the legions of parasites in congress who parrot Trump and have no intrinsic skills or value of their own. It's all him. As soon as he leaves this earth, it will be like the death of Stalin and the GOP will be a rudderless, cannibalistic power vacuum.
This example actually proves the opposite of what you’re arguing.
Kirk’s audience shrinking while Candace Owens’s grows doesn’t show a movement collapsing. It shows attention being rerouted. The energy didn’t vanish, it migrated. One node weakened and the network compensated. That isn’t a cult dying with its figurehead. It’s a system redistributing its load.
This is exactly why the “it’s all him” theory is so dangerous. When one voice fades, another rises. Not because anything was resolved, but because the demand for the message remains. Podcasts make this visible in a way institutions often don’t, but the same process is happening across media ecosystems, donor networks, courts, and legislatures. The audience didn’t recoil. It didn’t reflect. It simply found a new mouth.
So Kirk falling and Owens rising isn’t reassurance, it’s a warning. It shows this isn’t a movement tethered to a single personality. It’s an ideology with interchangeable messengers. Waiting for the right figure to disappear misunderstands the threat entirely. The system has already learned how to survive without him.
(This is such a perfect illustration of how statistics get weaponized. From a single, isolated data point, the story feels reassuring. One graph, one decline, one tidy conclusion, but systems don’t behave like anecdotes. When you widen the frame, the narrative flips. What looks like decay in isolation is actually resilience in aggregate. The numbers don’t lie, but they do mislead when they’re stripped of context.)
And that is exactly why I posted a copy of that vile tweet from him on my FB page. Because when Trump eventually die and my family gets horrified that I am cracking a bottle of champagne and dancing in the street with thousands of my neighbors instead of "being respectful" I can go back to that post and tell them I am simply reacting the way Trump himself would when one of his "enemies" died.
“Even if the Ukrainians didn’t sink the sub, just damaging it could have strategic implications. A damaged boat tied to a pier does not launch missiles, threaten shipping, or force Ukraine to divert air defenses. But it does represent one less instrument available to attack Ukraine. And that matters.”
There are bigger implications. Russia no longer has control over the Black Sea. Strategic Shipping lanes for oil are no longer safe. And the port at Novorossiysk wasn’t just strategic for its deep sea ports capable of servicing Russian submarines, they were also critical to protecting the vital oil tankers used to ship oil, and pay for the war.
And it appears the country without leverage is doing a bang up job against Russia. And from the perspective of drones, the student has become the master. IMHO…:)
So many things anger me these days about the Trump administration and the MAGA cult, but our failure to fully support Ukraine and NATO ranks at the very top. It makes me ashamed to be an American. We desperately need some of that Ukrainian courage within our own population. There aren't any Russian missiles raining down on our cities, but make no mistake, we are fighting for our survival here as well.
Pardon me if I don't race to read Susie Trump's interview with the magazine that hired Olivia Nuzzi AFTER she had an affair with the person she was reporting on.
I must say the excerpts were eyebrow raising in their candor. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it takes a narcissist to work and survive around Trump.
Put a camera on a head of lettuce! What are the Polymarket and Kalshi lines on Wiles’ remaining tenure in the WH? She uttered the truth. What happens now?
Also, I’m with Mona, Costco can do no wrong. But I kinda want the Court to allow the tariffs. We need economic pain because it seems to be the thing that hurts Trump the most. The Court shouldn’t save the President from himself.
It’s so amazing, brain shattering, horrific; that I completely agree with you. Deny the lawsuits on tariffs. Let health insurance double, or triple. Plunge the country into a deep recession. Raise food prices by half-again. Continue incredible cruelty of ICE invasions of our cities. Let everything 77 millions voters asked for come to fruition…..and watch that same 77 million blame the Democrats for it
Yup, we forced them to vote Trump. They've been saying that for a decade. Nobody believes it. Well, the people like Weinstein who are too morally crippled to take responsibility for their own actions believe it because they'll believe anything that absolves them, but nobody else thinks this delusional way.
I am ready for the economic pain from health insurance costs, tariffs, general inflation, a resurgence of preventable diseases--all things that I am powerless to stop (but absolutely would if I could).
Elections have consequences, and I am ready for America to eat the full bitter fruit of their (our) own actions.
On a side note, regarding political violence, please, Democrats, stop trying to unilaterally disarm when we are on the cusp of political, economic, and/or social collapse, with civil war possible (if not inevitable).
I kind of want the economic pain too. It might be the only frail thread to break this mass mental illness event we are struggling through. It has to be significant; Trump 1.0 wasn’t a big enough dose of inoculation to halt the disease of this nation’s soul.
I hear you that the People turning on Trump and emasculating him next November would be ultimate justice. I'm leery of that since there are month and months between now and then for the kind of damage that puts family on the streets. Same as the ACA subsidies, the suffering will be massive. SCOTUS really *should* swat these tariffs down, but I'm not naive enough to believe that they won't let Americans suffer for the sake of...the founding fathers wanting it that way? Yeah, I don't get it either.
The administration has been making noises about having alternative legal routes to impose tariffs, so I wonder how much of a defeat it would experience.
As I understand the scene, it will apply to some countries and not others, some import categories but not others. Maybe a 30-40% reduction overall. Still enough to be noticed.
My guess is they disallow these tariffs, but will let the government keep what’s been paid so far to avoid the refund mess. Then the administration will keep them in place, but use another contorted rationale and we start all over with the court cases. It will quickly end back up with SCOTUS as to whether they issue a stay keeping the tariffs in place while the case proceeds in lower courts. This current round decision will not keep the issue from coming back to haunt SCOTUS.
I burst out laughing when I read Andy Borowitz yesterday. He said that Republicans had finally come up with a healthcare plan. It was to tell Americans to move to Canada!
Either Wiles will be gone in a month, or she’s completely given what was left of her soul away. Or both. (“Our new Fox News commentator …”)
Meanwhile, an alleged govt employee yesterday posted a comment in a NYT article that Trump and family has been putting tariff money into personal investments. Others correctly said let’s get proof, but almost nobody doubted it’s possible. Such are our times, emulating shithole countries.
“The entire interview is extraordinary, and we encourage people to spend some time reading it in full, as it provides the most unvarnished look at the White House to date. It also gives you a deeply honest, sort of unnerving portrait of Wiles, who sees herself far more as a facilitator for Trump than a check on his worst impulses or even a strategist on his payroll.”
Perhaps it’s even more extraordinary for what it implies. Wiles has always been tight lipped; what changed?
Trump has been having some very bad weeks in the press, polling and on policy; extrajudicial killings, federal lawsuits, etc….perhaps Wiles finally sees the writing on the wall and decided to get ahead of the story or create here own narrative?
After all, this administration is starting to implode!Just a thought!..:)
Yah Rob…but ‘just following orders’ didn’t work that well for the Nazi’s. “Facilitation” of war crimes might not be the best defense. But it’s probably the only one she’s got. I recall during Trump 1, Ms. Kelly Ann Conway was, ‘just doing her job’, and granted, she’s landed on her feet within the circle of hell she inhabits. So, Ms. Wiles will always have a chair at OAN or NewsMax waiting for her. Maybe she’ll hit the ‘Big Enchilada’ and get a recurring gig on FOX. Or perhaps, she’ll relegate herself to living quietly on a secure compound in S. Florida where her only concern will be having people spit on her when she appears in public.
She’ll make more money back at her lobbyist position. I don’t think she wants to be the next Pete Hegseth. But any moderating impact she might have in the WH is not apparent to the outside world.
She doesn't think T wakes up thinking about retribution!? If that's so, it's the only time of the night or day that he isn't plotting retribution, or raging that one of his plots failed. There isn't a sane, balanced, good person in this WH.
Excellent, incisive analysis and writing, Mona. The moral clarity is exactly what I needed. I’m going to keep it close, to re-read and share, whenever other less honest or more trembling writers fall back on the moral equivocation that got us here. Thank you. My own moral frustration thanks you, Mona.
Why is anyone surprised? The President has been (and will continue to be) amply rewarded for "telling it like it is." This crude, awful display is WHY he's in the White House. The whole disgusting rant was the least surprising thing I've seen since January.
As a devoted follower of Jesus, this has been one of the most perplexing aspects of this era to me. I will never understand how well-meaning Christians could condone (at least with their votes) this moral depravity.
I was in a Bible study last week where politics was briefly touched on, and one of the participants said that we should not discuss politics in the group. Although I agree with that sentiment in a vacuum (because the most likely outcome would just be that we all get angry with each other), I do believe that if/when we emerge from this, American Christianity is going to have to do some very difficult introspection.
I'm a former Catholic. One of the reasons that I'm "former" is that the only real moral guidance offered by the Catholic Church for decades is that abortion is awful and should be illegal. Every other issue pales in comparison to abortion.
I can easily see why some Christian sects are thrilled with the President.
As long as abortion is illegal, we can lock children in cages, shoot people clinging to debris at sea, allow hundreds of thousands of USAID recipients to die, not provide disaster aid, mock the disabled, etc. It's all good and moral!
And they only blame women for abortion. Not men, who apparently have nothing to do with unwanted pregnancies. How convenient that only men can be priests and the only sin priests care about is one where they pretend men can't possibly commit that sin.
Mike, 2 observations: 1) Your experience nicely encapsulates my biggest concern as a follower of Jesus: that the behavior and attitudes of Christians in this era are doing more to drive people away from God than the enemy could do by himself in a thousand years; 2) Applying morality to politics is a dangerous game. If we allow one issue, however important it may be, to subordinate all of our other values, we risk our own destruction through that which we condone.
Let me clarify: we absolutely should apply moral principles to our political judgments. And we should expect moral behavior from our leaders. Where it gets dangerous is when we choose our most important issue, and choose to support whomever aligns with us on that one issue. I believe that is where many American Christians went off the reservation in 2016. They had a singular focus on abortion. Over the next 10 years they never realized they were the frog in the boiling pot, and now they find themselves supporting (waves hands) all of this. I’m not excusing it. The man’s moral void was crystal clear long before the 2016 election. But I believe American Christians allowed themselves to be blinded by one issue.
Yeah, but they only focus on certain aspects of abortion. I'm not going to see a church newsletter about how children who were sexually abused by church leaders grew up to have abortions, for one example. I'm not going to see a church movement for men to agree to pay child support either.
I like Abraham Lincoln's take on this. When asked if we should pray for God to be on the Union's side, Lincoln replied "let us pray that we are on God's side."
There was an article that suggested an explanation of how Christians could support Trump beyond Franklin Graham's argument that a flawed man was needed to clean up flawed society. The Old Testament not only deplores homosexuality but has a wrathful God who orders the destruction of the Malakites, Jebiusites, Amorites, et al.
Watching the General in interviews and now reading his insightful columns gives me faith that our military will not follow the monster who sits in the oval office off a moral cliff. His clear thinking and understanding of our nations characteristics are comforting.
The Trump article says the whole truth and it would be helpful if more of the legcy media would do the same.
I hope Susie Wiles lives the life she deserves, having enabled a man she knew was manifestly unfit to assume the most powerful position in the world. May god forgive her, because I won't.
What's going to last longer post-interview, Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff or this head of lettuce?
I had that live feed of Lizzy Lettuce open on my browser for more hours than I'd care to admit. I guess I'm a sucker for vegetable-centric political satire.
That presupposes Trump will even hear about it.
Someone who wants her job will gladly get those quotes put in front of Trump's face
Dear God the thought of who might come next.
Or that ketchup when thrown against the wall?
Ooouuu, pick me! pick me! The head of lettuce!🥬
Note the posts of support from each member of the Cabinet. My fear: this is a boon to the Administration. Why? Because it has taken Epstein off the lede in every news cast
Yep, she's the most powerful of the "normie" Republicans who know better but enable Trump anyway. They are the worst of the worst. Give me an insane true conspiracy theory believer over people like Wiles, Rubio or Lindsey Graham any day of the week. At least the crazies are being genuine and honest in their own deluded way.
100%. Wiles, Rubio and Graham all know what Trump is, and they play along for their own selfish reasons.
The Trump taint will never leave them.
Her comment about USAID was awful. People have already died from Musk “feeding it into the wood chipper.”
None of the people around Trump have any empathy or compassion.
I think they share Trump’s transactional view of life.
What can they get out of being Trump sycophants?
Here's a shock. She's already disputing the reporting. That's why they have to call it the 'fake news'. To predispose Trumpists to believe what Trump and his entourage say regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Talk, then deny. Classic Trumpian strategy.
The felon has no strategy, he just lives the lie.
Trump’s presidential library (planning has begun) may have a “fake news” wing.
Wow. Trump really IS a comedian!
Not just a wing, the whole thing!
i expect his "library" to be subway tiles and tweets all over, like graffiti.....
Actually I kind of hope God doesn't forgive her, either.
Facilitator, enabler, whatever term Wiles uses she's helping a moral leper.
I suspect that she can live with that
Some people will serve any low life if they see profit in it.
Trump's a psychopath. He has no regard for anyone or anything but himself, probably not even for his fucked up family.
According to his niece Mary, he has no more regard for even his children than he does for anyone else.
Certainly not Eric
Well, he still has the hots for Ivanka.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRmgTetv9xc
That doesn't mean he cares about Ivanka, he just wants to put his member in her. In Trump's mind, she is nothing more than an object with his preferred look and style to satisfy him.
And probably did. If you look at the pictures of he and she when she was growing up, you will buy it. A shocking degenerate.
how true
You mean all those spoiled nepo-babies?
A real sociopath.
"Sociopathy" is not a formal clinical term. Though it's not in the DSM, there is a standard inventory for diagnosing "psychopathy": The PCL-R. While it's only supposed to be used by a professional clinical psychologist who can interact with the subject in person. You can look it up, grade Trump for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
I feel this temptation decent people have, almost reflexively, when confronting Trump's depravity. A compulsion to frame him as the aberration, the malignant specimen preserved in formaldehyde, while his American devotees (our neighbors, our colleagues) dissolve into footnotes. I can understand the reflex. It quarantines the contagion. It preserves clean hands, but a morally gangrenous president does not thrive across a decade (gaining popularity) without a morally bankrupt electorate willing to call the rot regeneration.
He didn't invent the cruelty. He audited it, and discovered how obscenely cheap it could be purchased at industrial scale. Calling him depraved is accurate but insufficient. History groans with immoral men who seized power yet remained shackled by institutions, norms, or collective revulsion.
What distinguishes this moment is that immorality itself has been weaponized into a loyalty oath. The obscenity is no longer liability. It's credential. The ugliness isn't incidental. It's semaphore, a sorting mechanism delineating belonging from exile, and once cruelty becomes the membership card, the rot no longer resides in one man's pathology but in a nation that tallied the cost of decency against the cost of surrender and chose the latter without hesitation.
This is America 2025. We will not change it unless we first possess the moral courage to own what we are.
You're absolutely right about his devotees, our neighbors and colleagues, being absolved from the cruelty trump spews out. Just remember, they're the ones that are furiously typing away, on twitter or sub-reddits or whatever, all those vile comments. Our neighbors, who we smile at or greet outside our houses! Doing vile deeds in their secret places.
So true. The ugliness doesn’t originate in some distant digital swamp. It’s produced in living rooms, on phones held by neighbors we wave to, coworkers we pass in hallways, people who borrow tools and ask about the weather.
We lost a decades long friendship after the 2020 election. We met our friends for lunch, and I remember them asking if we thought Kamala would be running the White House, and where we wanted to see Trump. My response to the second question was that I wanted to see Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit.
Later my husband and I talked about lunch and he shared that one of our friends had been listening to a lot of rightwing talk radio. That helped explain their views.
I still miss our friendship, but I really couldn't stand for their enabling Trump.
we've lost more than we know. My own sister, after mingling in the
new ' church' { it's just a building } has done a complete 180, formerly worked in hospice as an RN. now, cold as a two day old plate of beans. And a brother
who loves how South Dakota handled novel covid and purchased some odd remedy across the border on a trip to Texas. We once did power-washing together, commiserated about everything. It's more than family , much more.
It's so sad to see people you know and love transformed.
I agreed, until you begin to claim that this is "America 2025".
It's not.
It's today's GOP.
The difference?
Only one-third of the American people (a minority) support the GOP. And many of those are actually brainwashed by its neofascist propaganda, so what they THINK they support when they vote for Republicans is actually not at all what they are de facto enabling...
JVL yesterday talked about “revealed preferences”. The fact is that somewhere north of 40% of the populace either supports Trump and his atrocities, or are willing to tolerate them. I agree with Patrick that we can no longer pretend this is some sort of weird aberration brought on by social media and the electoral college. This is who America is today. We are not going to emerge from this darkness until we have some sort of moral reckoning as a nation.
Social media has a lot to answer for.
Not all these people were born in the rabbit hole; they got lured there and climbed their way down one ladder rung at at time. First it's the comments from a trusted friend who then sends them "articles" in their FB feed that tell "the truth." Then they start doing their own digging and find all the warrens with the crazy conspiracies that lead them to follow others spouting "truth." Of course they turn off CNN and head over to Fox, OAN, etc.
And before you know it, they are full blown believers.
I believe that social media has been a net negative for our society. But the voters still have agency. No matter how far down a right wing media rabbit hole a person is, they should still have the basic ability to recognize evil behavior and a disordered personality. After 10 years of this, nobody gets a pass from me for being misled on social media.
I think you strongly underestimate fascism. Its propaganda machine mostly takes away people's agency. Brainwashing is real.
These people obviously "recognize evil behavior". They are convinced that it's Democrats who commit it. Systematically.
Or as Kamala Harris says, we need to keep in mind that we're NOT dealing with the same "facts" (we versus GOP voters today). They do live in a completely "alternative facts" bubble by now.
Of course, we could all just sit there feeling righteous and judging everyone else. As history has shown, that isn't exactly how we'll empower ourselves to defeat fascism though. Fascism vitally NEEDS our cynicism. It needs us to dehumanize The Other - not just its supporters but an entire society, including those who reject fascism.
Because as long as we think something is wrong with who GOP voters ARE, at their core, we will give up engaging in THE most civic duty we all have in a democracy, namely engaging in real, respectful debates with those who think differently. And in the end, only those debates can save us.
So no "anticipatory obedience" or dehumanizing the other, please. You're only strengthening neofascists whenever you do so.
Exactly right. If the true believers had a full spectrum of information - as in the Cronkite era when everone had more oreless the same inrformation, there would probably be few "40% ers". Note recent articles about the anti-Israeli move of young MAGAs because they watched TikTok's scenes or Gaza destruction. This has strategic implications for the Democratic part to preach less to its choir and start looking for ways to articulately reach Trump's supporters
Social media & Fox News. Fortunately, friend-wise, we live in a blue bubble. And the only couple who are good friends and also Trump supporters watch Fox News from morning til night. They are good people, but are comfortable in their fact-free universe.
Yes and No, if a person is wiling to do that now, they always were.
but, Murdoch, yeah. And presently some copycats, for a johnny green back dollar.
Taking heart in ‘just reading’…. ‘They’ came in immediately after the swearing in and bulldozed ! And got more and more emboldened and the fabrications and lies, misinformation and COVERAGE exploded….
I remember the McCarthy hearings and the HUAC (House UnAmerican Committee) in the 50’s, the plane “crash” that revealed the two men with their ‘brief cases’ full of money also in the early 50’s,(never really disclosed who or what the $ was for) LBJ’s late and SLOW support for Hubert Humphrey and the fractional loss to Nixon! Same song, lotsa verses, a little bit louder and so much worser.. However……. Not quite the same…. Read US…. Here and other forums..
and dt may be (HOPE so) in not knowing any limits, his own downfall…. The price is very very high…. For everyone….
This treats reality like a technicality instead of a lived condition.
Ask the simplest questions first: What country did this happen in? and what year is it?
Not what party logo was on the ballot. Not what percentage feels comforted by the word “minority.” This is the United States, in 2025. The consequences are national. The machinery is federal. The damage is real, present, and enforceable. Pretending this is merely “today’s GOP” is a semantic escape hatch, not an analysis.
Authoritarian drift does not require majority buy-in to become a national condition. History is unambiguous on this point. It requires a motivated faction, asymmetric power, and a larger population that insists it is somehow not their problem yet. Saying “only one-third support this” (is wrong based on all the polling which shows majorities of non-voters as Trumpers) but it also misunderstands how power actually works. Minority rule is not a bug of democratic collapse; it’s the mechanism, and once it takes hold, headcounts stop mattering.
This is America, not because everyone supports it, but because it is happening here, now, with American power, under American law, enforced on American soil. Refusing to own it that way doesn’t protect the country. It anesthetizes it, and anesthesia is exactly what allows the patient to be operated on without resistance. (I won't contiue it here, becuase I wrote 3000 words on it this weekend: https://open.substack.com/pub/complexsimplicity/p/the-mascot-presidency-why-trumps?r=2r6ysj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web )
You're absolutely right. We here may not have voted for him, but the American People elected him. What happens here is done in our name. Simply voting is no longer enough. Whatever I do, I remind myself that it's never enough
Simply voting was never enough. That's where so many pro-democracy Americans got it wrong for such a long time already.
For a democracy to thrive, citizens need to be well-informed, have taught critical thinking, and need to actively engage in real, respectful debates with fellow citizens who think differently.
Yep. That’s why I’m not optimistic
Minor quibble- the consequences are global.
No you're 100% correct about this. I've written about that previously. You're 100% right.
If only it wasn't so...cheers and keep writing :)
I think this is more than a minor quibble and there seems to be general agreement on this point. The global nature of this is essential to take into account because this is not just a national phenomenon. We have our own brand of the problem, for sure, but we miss the mark if we don't take a broader view.
Fair...my quibble was really reflecting my point of disagreement with the post not that the global impacts are minor.
Yes to this! I've tried to articulate this, but it sure was never as clear and as potent as this. Thank you.
Same goes for your original post. Only more so.
All polls show that only one third supports the GOP today. Or, for that matter, Trump.
So if you think there are polls showing that it's actually "HUGE majorities", where are these polls... ?
In the meantime: yes, of course, something needs to be broken in society as a whole before fascism can be "democratically" voted in. This has been decades in the making, and many factors caused it (the demise of the legacy media, the low quality of research and teaching in humanities and philosophy departments, the disappearing of a sense of civic duty, "DEI trainings" (not DEI programs, which are entirely legitimate), etc.). The left clearly contributed to some of these too.
But most of these factors were installed out of a desire to get rid of the US Constitution and switch to a fascist regime instead.
And no, as history has shown this is NOT over yet. MANY people are waking up and fighting back each day. That's yet another reason to not imagine that simplistic notions could somehow summarize what an entire country has become.
Before anything else , the ALL CAPS and the breathless “all polls” framing already reads like a Trump tweet. Alarmism without precision is part of the same disease.
Now, the substance:
No. This frames fascism as a misunderstanding instead of what it actually is, a power project.
Propaganda doesn’t erase agency. It works because people choose lies that protect their identity and justify harm. Calling it out isn’t dehumanization, it’s accountability.
“Respectful debate” only works when both sides share reality and limits. Fascists don’t. They use debate to stall while power consolidates. History is brutally clear on that.
Fascism doesn’t feed on cynicism. It feeds on hesitation, on the belief that civility will stop a boot already mid-air. Be well.
I'm sorry, but you're again being too simplistic.
By "all polls" I mean all solid, reliable polls. As I already said, I'm happy to be proven wrong though, so again, please give us some examples of polls showing what you wrote, namely that "HUGE majorities" support Trump?
Secondly, ask yourself: why did you put "HUGE" in all caps? To try to write like Trump? No, it turns out that everyone does it, and for good reasons. So no need to judge it when others do it too (talking about "accountability") ;-)
And yes, of course propaganda erases agency. That's why it works in the first place.
As to "respectful debate": it means that you categorically refuse to use ad hominem arguments (including dehumanizing the other).
Why would we not indulge in the cynical hypothesis that some people just ARE bad?
Because it's demonstrably false. Science has shown that most higher mammals, including Homo sapiens, have innate compassion.
Finally, as to the idea that fascism vitally needs cynicism: I don't know of any expert in fascism who disagrees with that idea. Do you?
Sorry I’m not here to do homework for you. Review the cross tabs, you’ll learn. A lot. Ta-ta!
They are NOT brainwashed. This is literally who they are when they are allowed to be. Faux built their media empire not because they brainwashed people, but because they delivered a product that people WANTED.
Rush was successful not because he brainwashed people but because he delivered a product people WANTED.
These people could have "bought" any media product they wanted--and they did.. and the media followed their audience as it developed and grew. Continued to deliver what they wanted, even if it was lies. Faux lost almost a billion dollars because they delivered lies out of fear that they would lose audience if they told the truth.
Actual persuasion and manipulation like people often postulate (brainwashing) is not really possible outside of very controlled and lengthy processes. It is a LOT harder than people assume. I say this as someone who has studied this stuff for decades.
It is somewhat easy to persuade someone to buy car X instead of car Y. It is difficult, verging on the impossible to persuade someone to swiftly change identity (moral and political beliefs and attitudes).
This is who these people are, as ugly as it is. Many of them have been that way for a very long time, but you never saw it because it was something that was kept hidden for the most part. But as I pointed out before, I remember listening to the adults around me talking about things in the late 60s early 70s in privacy amongst themselves and it was all of the nasty stuff you are seeing and hearing right now. And a lot of that got passed down to the kids.
You just did not say it in public.
Well, NOW you can say it in public and many of them do. And you can act on those things out of ignorance of the larger effects (economic and social) and when it blows up in your face, all of a sudden it's THIS is not what I voted for. When it actually was. You just didn't think it would play out this way or cost YOU what it has cost you--because you never actually thought about it nor did you listen to anybody that had thought about it. Experts, what do THEY know.
People have multiple faces--there is, at a minimum, the face that they show in public and then there is their real face. What the GoP and MAGA and Trump have done is allowed people to show more of their real face as their public face.
And maybe that is a good thing--a wake up call. It could bring the realization that despite what face people put on, there is a lot of often very nasty stuff going on behind that despite the smiles and superficial politeness and churchiness.
You are more likely to get personal truth from MAGAFanatic67 on X or other social media than you are from Sally Doe, the person behind MAGAFanatic67. Because Sally feels anonymous and safe.
And sitting here and excusing all of this because they have been "brainwashed" is avoiding a reality.
No, I don't believe this. I saw my mother change from a level-headed, tolerant person to someone spouting right wing nonsense. It happened by osmosis at first. She would have the radio on for the cats and as it played in the background she absorbed it. Then she began to actively listen and suddenly it was all Fox News. She died before he came down that escalator. It would have killed me if she would have gone MAGA.
On target. See my following argument
I'm really torn on this. I have been saying all along that "kill them all and let God sort it out" is the prime political belief of most of the people I knew as a child. Racism is alive and well behind closed doors, although it seems like most of our churches are openly and voluntarily segregated by race these days. When you let people worship as they will, they segregate, I guess.
But I still believe that I have seen brainwashing take place. It started in the 1980s with Greed is Good. And I firmly believe that American Business and commercial interests have been trying to brainwash me to be a consumer and not a citizen, and that attempt has been going on my entire life.
What you are talking about WRT American consumer culture is basically part of the larger cultural background. You are constantly exposed to it, it is the ocean that you swim in, so to speak.
It isn't brainwashing. It is how things have naturally developed as a consequence of human nature encountering environment.
Because while pretty much everyone has been exposed to this for long periods of time, you have gotten a range of reactions, from advocacy all the way to actual resistance.
Not everyone believes that greed is good--many do not. Not everyone is racist (or at least not malevolently racist).. and so on. These people cannot really make you something that you are not, something that runs against your nature and world view. Some advertisements and movies and TV shows are NOT going to make that lift.
People have been avidly searching for the magical means of persuasion for thousands of years. Haven't found it yet... and they are unlikely to find it, I doubt it exists.
It becomes increasingly clear, as we learn more about human cognition and behavior, that a lot of what we are is determined. This can slowly shift, but it will never go away, never be trained away, persuaded away. Some remnant continues.
We can change surface patterns, make certain things more convenient, "safer," more or less acceptable. But what is there underneath does not change much for most people.
Yes, we all need some human touch, to have a little remorse now and then and DO something about that feeling. Otherwise, food, shelter and clothing. Consumerism, Materialism. Not just greed, envy or lust.
I'm so glad I had the experience to capture rainwater, heat with wood
lived simply and at the time, me and my partner were flush with cash, built two homes ( it's nice to live in a new home that is self-planned ) paid the bank off swiftly. AND , the best part, sit back, agree and look at the big picture. In the 1990's. Good Years.
I'm a little disappointed in myself for not putting the pieces together sooner. The fairness doctrine, gone. School became less about citizenship and more about job training. Corporations able to funnel unseen money into politics. Antitrust laws out of date and unenforced. Of course this leads to oligarchs supporting a dictator. Someone to make deals.
There is a gentler way to look at "kill them all and..." All our lives are forfeit, and the lack of compassion shows who they really are. I think Donald Trump is living in a circle of hell. He insists on making his problems everyone's problems. His moral bankruptcy was always obvious. Now he's mentally ill as well.
The big lie works.
Watch “The Brainwashing of my Dad.” She says he recovers after he stopped watching Fox.
https://youtu.be/pNTsTOcRO-k?si=2ZJXBP0k75p0SUk3
I’m sure though that many are just nasty people by nature.
This is an appealing but simplistic argument that promotes polarization and bad policy. Saying "they wanted Limbaugh" implies that his followers already had Limbaugh-like ideas and couldn't be changed. I suggest that, on the contrary, Limbaugh and Trump were artful persuaders. They had some valid arguments which they overused to build masterful personal images through absolute self-assurance. The answer is not to give up on people but understand strategy and counteract it. An extreme case is Germany, the cultured nation of Goethe and Schiller, which became mesmerized by Hitler. The Germans weren't born Nazis - Hitler was a brilliant demagogue who exploited people's demoralization and provided visions. Same thing in the killing fields of Cambodia.
It is simplistic because of where I am presenting it. I have actually studied this stuff, have a degree in it and the reality of it IS more complex than presented here.
It requires pre-existing attitudes and belief systems to be effective. With the pre-existing conditions you can use absolutely shitty, non-valid arguments that engage almost purely on the emotional level. Because they WANT to believe you. They are active participants. Youy are amplifying and radicalizing what was already there.
The absolutely most effective means of persuasion are exactly those that are labeled as fallacies, because that is the way that people actually think.
People want simple, easy to understand answers that align with pre-existing beliefs/attitudes. That are emotionally satisfying.
It took the Right 20+ years to build things to this point and tens (even hundreds) of billions of dollars. We do not have the 20 years or the money. You will not persuade these people to abandon what they have arrived at in any meaningful time frame.
The best hope is that Trump and his minions screw things up SO bad that it actively disrupts these people--but you can already see how hard it is to crack the existing attitudes/beliefs. A number of behaviors come into play to justify continued belief, despite the in your face results, despite established facts.
All of this is far more entrained and deterministic than people want to believe. Note that only a segment of the population responded to this whole thing. They were predisposed to that. They encounterd it and said give me more. It fell flat a lot of other places (even when somewhat valid arguments were employed) because those were not the answers that people wanted.
Now, when people are desperate (Weimar Germany with hyper inflation, a lost war with massive casualties, large scale social disruption and fighting in the streets between the right and left) things can move swiftly and more broadly. Because people are looking for simple direct and immediate answers.
Persuasion requires pre-existing conditions and suitable context. It also requires a strategy and a group willing and able to carry out that strategy (which the Democrats of the late 20th and early 21st century are NOT). It also requires people to be open.
Are there people in the "middle" that you can reach? Yes. These are the people that flop back and forth from election to election. So you can temporarily "persuade" them. But it is temporary. You can (at least temporarily) reach any of the many who have not "drunk the kool-aid." But you have to work really hard to change and keep them.
Could the Limbaugh or MAGA followers been other than what they are now, at the start? They could have been moderated or kept moderated. They were not going to become DEI advocates or gay marriage advocates or whatever. It is not who they are. What Limbaugh and MAGA did was activate these people and make them more extreme. Which is easier than changing their minds.
There are FUNDAMENTAL differences in how people view the world. This is one of the roots of partisanship. partisanship is not created, it is a pre-existing condition--it is only directed along certain paths.
Radicalizing people is much easier than changing people's minds.
Yeah, I forgot how Limbaugh slowly got into my brother's brain, I should've been wiser, I guess. foresight is so valuable.
You just caused me to flash back to my first job out of college where my office mate subjected me to Rush every day, and in hindsight where we are today seems like the logical near-endpoint of him.
This is the best response yet. I was subjected to intense brainwashing as a 13-year-old in a "drug rehab" cult. I mean 24 hours a day of non-stop propaganda, no-contact-with-the-outside-world, abusive brainwashing. For over a year.
My inner core never caved. Did it harm me emotionally and psychologically? Yes? Did it fundamentally change my belief system? NO. I concur that the people who many like to call 'brainwashed" are in fact, just revealing their private selves in public because of the MAGA permission structure that allows them to do so.
This country is revealing its true nature and it is really ugly. He has the support of about 1/3 of the county - not a majority, but not nothing either. He has been able to parlay it into the absolute destruction of decency, morality, and norms. None of what is going on would be possible unless he had the support of a wide swath of Americans who have no moral compass, empathy, and compassion and whose sole life purpose is hurting anyone who is not a white "Christian".
I take all the 'he's sinking in the polls' with a grain of salt because no matter how you slice it, more than a third of the country is A-OK with all of this. Even if you remove him and his administration, those people - the 36ish percent of Americans who think this is great - will lay in wait for the next person to come along and validate their immortality. Look how long the Lost Cause waited.... since 1865, yet, here they all are again, in all their racist, hateful glory. They are more committed to their cause than a lot of Americans seem to be to democracy.
South Carolina sent Strom Thurmond to the Senate for FORTY SEVEN YEARS. Countless other example exist. The author is exactly right - we have always been this, we just kept it out of public view until the age of Trump.
Too easy.
What you're saying is: ok, fascism dehumanizes The Other? Then I'll dehumanize those who vote for it.
That is NOT how we will defeat it.
As to the GOP's neofascist propaganda machine: it has been FIVE DECADES in the making. And the last decade, they directly consulted foreign experts in fascism (not scholars, but fascist leaders and their consultants).
You're strongly underestimating fascism and the power of its propaganda.
Liberalism and fascism are antitheses. Liberalism is based upon inclusion, fascism on exclusion. They are fundamentally different world-views and political projects.
Liberalism runs counter in some regards to human nature. One of the central components of human nature is the Us/Them mechanism. Liberalism in its best incarnations seeks to turn Them into Us.
Fascism works with, not against the natural Us/Them tendency. It is an "easier" sell. It seems common sensical. It creates strong group cohesion--but only in a specific group.
Fascism (and strong nationalism) creates a false impression of strength and security. Both are actually destructive, economically and socially. They are the answer to the question, how can I really screw things up and create poverty, endemic violence, and a lack of freedom.
When you look at history, it seems rather clear that larger and more inclusive societies win out over smaller and less inclusive societies. Liberal societies (relative to their times) defeat non-liberal societies.
Liberal societies most often defeat THEMSELVES by turning into illiberal societies.
All one has to look at to understand this is the outcome of WW2, most particularly the Pacific War. The fascist regime of Japan created poverty and oppression internally even before the war (in order to create military strength) and the conquests they undertook to "enrich" the nation failed to do so and led to their destruction and the deaths of millions. dfeated by a nation of weaklings and shopkeepers who buried them though production and strategy.
Sparta (which far too many people fetishize) was a literal slave society (one of the worst of its time realtively speaking) that was not (contrary to common belief) militarily successful and was certainly not an economic powerhouse. They created no great art or thought, contributed little or nothing to civilization other than some mythology.
Germany cannibalized its own people, killing or forcing out some of the brightest in the name of purity, turned it's economy towards war (poorly and ineffectively, BTW) and proceded to immolate themselves.
The USSR, despite massive support from the liberals during the war never recovered and also died, its people poor and unfree, replaced by an even poorer copy of itself that cannot even defeat a weaker and smaller next door neighbor.
What success illiberal regimes have had has been the result of the unwillingness of liberal societies to proactively resist--yet when push came to shove, the liberal socities have tended to come out on top because they have a social unity/power and an economic power that is actuallysuperior to the fascists and totalitarians.
Dehumanization is not a path to victory except in the very short term. It costs too much and sows the seeds of its own destruction.
I have to disagree with you on an important point. If it is true that 33% (I think it's more in the 40% range) support Trump and the GOP then a decade in, where is the other 66%? They're home, asses comfortably settled on their couches, living their lives as though everything is as it was. Sure, they may not like it but they are in no way moved to DO anything about it.
Sure there's some who actively fight back as we've seen in cities occupied by federal troops. But we need more. We need to reach the tipping point where the average citizen who is not majorly effected by what's happening to decide do heave their asses off those couches and make their voices heard loud and clear. Or as John Lewis said, to get in some Good Trouble.
I appreciate you saying this. As a spectator it's incredibly frustrating watching the mass apathy. People are too comfortable, uninformed, lazy, uncaring? Which is it and what will it take to get 70 million into the streets? No King's was nice but it's a drop in the bucket relatively speaking. These f*r's have the world's largest arsenal, zero empathy and a demonstrated willingness to kill the 'other' - who are anyone that doesn't bow down - how can that not move US citizens en masse?
I think the American electorate is generaly uninformed (or misinformed if they consume right wing media), lazy and selfish. We've seen time and again they feel no need to react unless they're effected personally.
The sad reality is that, unless people are directly and personally affected, they usually will not act. It is not in their interest to expend the effort, everything is good enough as is.
Sure, they might bitch about it, but that is the limit. Until it actually gets real.
This is a natural outcome of evolutions "concern" with conserving energy and effort. Consuming energy requires gathering more energy. Herbivores are very "busy" because their energy sources are low in energy. Predators laze around a lot because they have to expend a lot of energy (usually) to get energy. That is why your dog or cat sleeps or lays around so much--and they usually have guaranteed energy sources that require low effort. Evolution shaped them that way.
We have been shaped by the same pressures... and dealing with abstract might be kinda things are usually not priorities. Not part of the energy budget.
The same thing goes when you poll people and they are in favor of X. So the politicians try and do X and when people get presented with the bill for x, they decide they are not so much in favor of X after all. It is too inconvenient, too costly.
Instead, science has shown that most higher mammals, including Homo sapiens, have innate compassion skills built in.
Your cynicism is understandable but factually demonstrably false.
In real life, in Trump's first year already there have been mass protests bigger than the US has ever seen. The only difference is that this time, the legacy media almost don't report on it, so you need to go to independent media to know what is going on.
There is also tremendous fighting back going on in the courts - done by many Democrats and also independent groups. Most of the time, they're winning. History has shown how crucially important these victories are, because they strongly delay the installation of fascism, and that delay is needed to still have a chance to turn the tide when Democrats win in 2026 and 2028.
I do agree that we need more. But WHAT we need more is what we already urgently needed these last few decades, and what any democracy needs to be able to thrive: constant, real, respectful debates among citizens, and especially with those who disagree with us.
"Real" means: we accept at any moment that even our strongest beliefs may turn out to be false, and engage in the conversation in order to, TOGETHER, get closer to the truth (regardless of whether or not the other agrees with this principle).
"Respectful" means: no ad hominem arguments. In other words, no dehumanizing of The Other, no matter how profound our disagreements may be.
Reinstalling that and making it part of the fabric of the American society again will take years.
Fortunately, places like Substack do allow us to get it all started again...
Considering where we are at the moment, your comment is nothing more than magical thinking. What's clear is that those in charge care nothing about respect and togetherness. Their goal, stated publicly (Project 2025, Project Esther, etc) is to remake this country in their own white, christian image, to strengthen the power and wealth of the already obscenely wealthy and nothing less will do. They have created through technically legal though quite borderline congressional action, a Supreme Court that's all in on their project.
What they're not getting very much of is meaningful pushback. Wins in the lower courts become meaningless when they reach SCOTUS. In fact the opposite happens and the abuse becomes codified as acceptable, 'constitutionally based' law (e.g. complete presidential immunity).
Meanwhile the majority remains silent - except perhaps on substack where it counts for nothing. That just makes us feel better but results in nothing in reality.
I understand that you feel as if not enough people are fighting back.
There's feeling and then there's facts though.
Yes, the GOP has become a neofascist party and is trying to install fascism in the US.
For now, however, even the majority of GOP voters don't know yet THAT that is what the GOP is doing, and the others don't support the idea of fascism either.
How can a minority of people win elections and do what no one wants them to do?
History shows that it's not the first time that a democracy is turned into a fascist regime by having fascists win elections. So if we want to figure out how to fight back, we HAVE to look at how others did it.
And how others did it was in part by fighting back in court, and, again, the number of suits against the administration is today at a record high AND we are WINNING most of them. That is crucially important and a real reason for hope. It's not enough, but it's vital that people know that this is happening, so that we can spread the word and support those who are achieving all the winning on our behalf. And that is indeed WITH a SC that has a two-third majority that actively supports fascism (defined as the bundling of all powers of government into one branch, the executive one). In other words, what is crucial to understand is that the vast majority of these lawsuits never get to the SC in the first place. And history has shown how crucial achieving all these victories is.
So don't let yourself be discouraged by what the current SC does! The legal pushback right now is actually EXTREMELY meaningful.
And then again, having THE biggest protests against a president EVER, and already in his first year, that is really the very opposite of "silence".
But there's more: now even REPUBLICANS are beginning to fight back. They see Democrats winning elections in landslides (a Democrat just became mayor of Miami for the first time in 30 years), and they begin to reject gerrymandering based on race.
Finally, in the long run, even if Democrats win in 2026 and 2028 and restore democracy, America's democracy will remain terribly fragile if we're not willing to do the groundwork, way beyond voting. And that is informing ourselves and then engaging in real, respectful debates with those who don't vote and those who vote for the GOP (or third party). Here too, I don't see how you can just discard what is happening on Substack as "nothing".
Conclusion: I'm afraid you're practicing "anticipatory obedience". Neofascists WANT you to imagine that you're alone and no one but you is fighting back, but the facts prove the oppose. And it usually takes an entire decade to turn a democracy into a full-fledged dictatorship. Right now, we're not even at the end of year one yet. So we CAN do this, and millions of people ARE fighting back!
You're hyperbolizing, generalizing and incorrecgt re the historical record.
1. While people in the US may say they don't support authoritarianism they will, for example, tell you they do support what Trump and Co are doing to close the border. You say they don't yet know what's happening and while that's true to a certain extent it's also intentional ignorance if not agreement - as in "I don't care how he does it, I just want it done"
2. While the lower courts are holding (and despite what you hyperbolized I do not think that means nothing) Scotus has hog tied them. One example is that lower courts can no longer issue rulings that apply to the whole country. They are limited to adjudicating that one single case. So sure the Nat'l Guard had to leave CA but it's entirely free to invade any other city at will and while a lawsuit specific to that city is filed, citizens have to wait months for ruling specific to that city.
3. Few dictators have been stopped through courts because that is one of the first things authoritarians seize control of (as the GOP has done with SCOTUS). *See Orban's history
4. "...it usually takes an entire decade to turn a democracy into a full-fledged dictatorship." Um, no. It took Hitler about 1 /12 years. It took N Korea just a few years. It took Orban a couple of years to dismantle democracy and a further few to consolidate complete control.
5. They're putting their thumbs on the scale big time now re voting and SCOTUS has approved extreme politcal gerrymandering as 'a politcal issue beyond the purview of any court'. If they are successful our situation is going to devolve exponentially.
I find your conclusion condescending. We can turn this around but it's going to take grass roots action. Period.
Check out Fox News. Lead story at present is about declassified documents (these stories never seem to go anywhere).
No mention of Trump’s outburst.
https://www.foxnews.com/
I have long been convinced that the smarter Trump apologists, and also the ones most likely to preen in their Christian piety, love Trump precisely because they can use his amorality and lawlessness as a weapon against their political opponents and an instrument to plow down legal and institutional and ethical obstacles to their agenda - without having the taint of criminality on their own hands.
Except they are, in actuality, accomplices and fundamentally unChristian in both what they support and what they want. But they feel good about themselves, which is all that counts, I guess :P
Some are excusing Trump’s outburst, saying he was criticized by the left.
My response: all politicians are criticized. If you can’t take the heat…
Yes, I say that often, He, idiot boy man placed himself in the political life, no answer
Don’t forget the abject cowardice of law firms, CEO’s bribing him, university presidents, the media, etc. They help to destroy this country and they own Trump’s cruelty.
You've provided so many quotable comments! I read your post a few times, but I won't remember them all. I'll just say you're so right about obscenity being a credential, immorality being a loyalty oath, and the ugliness being a semaphore to sort those belonging and those not. Too many want to belong to the DJT cult of uncontrolled bigotry, greed, and misogyny. We had better own it because it's a large portion of who "we" are. Maybe that portion is shrinking, but I don't think it will ever go away. However, in past decades, better (meaning kinder, smarter, actually more Christian, and devoted to the Constitution) prevailed and can again. I have to believe that!
MAGA was there before, under different names: Know Nothings, KKK, America First isolationists.
I recall early on stating, it's just like the end of 7th grade, who can I connect with so next year won't be so lonely. I see a lot of immaturity, the winning team, gather strengh,
all that. Guess I'm so proud to have always been anti categorical.
Are you saying there are deplorables in the electorate? Too bad no one recognised that sooner.
Yeah, if only someone could have figured out that one can divide the electorate into two baskets . . . but that would've required some sort of rebiggulator, which is of course utterly preposterous!
😂🤣😂
Oh my…. Well written and damning…. As I have indicated before, at 89…. ‘Been here’ and each time there is more money, continued deliberate ignorance, and deliberate pain to those who ‘do not agree’ or are ‘different’ however…. ‘We’ have NOT had a place to ‘share’ like this, before…. There IS ‘conversation’, COMMUNICATION and ‘intelligence’ and caring…. Hmmmmmm. Thank YOU…
That weaponization is what makes me believe Trump is almost entirely composed of evil. And my goodness you can write.
Beautifully put. Beautifully written. In this timeline we’re living in, the rot spreads easily—24/7 “breaking news,” social media, and Faux News. We’re always under assault. Hitler had to actually work hard to bring his message to his followers. Trump just twitches his thumbs and the message is blasted all over the universe. The useful idiot is still useful, even while he naps. This will not end well. But it will end. Will our democracy hold?
boy, I see changes like this in formerly more quiet trump backers within my own family,
at the library, more coarseness. more artificial kindness. I have a god-daughter, or I had one
she has altered her entire life and career, what a transformation. He is a ' brander' but
not as powerful as the masses. Never was.
"The post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have them at all is evidence of a twisted soul."
Exactly. There is no bottom to the cesspool of this man's hatred and jealousy of, and utter lack of empathy for, anyone and everyone whom he believes to have slighted him or not sufficiently fawned over him and greased his pathway to personal success and fortune.
Grotesquely inappropriate as that is, the bigger issue remains that it is even possible. It was not long ago that such a horrific screed would have been a disqualifier for any further standing in political circles. (And professional circles otherwise. It still could get the rest of us fired from our jobs under certain circumstances were we to do so.) What it says beyond the depth of the author's complete depravity and disrespect for appropriate social discourse is how fast and how far Americans as a whole have lost their moral compass and chosen to lower their standards to lowest common denominator standing. Any further evidence desired can be found by looking at internet comment forums, where political hatred outpaces common decency in too many posts about the topic, where otherwise seemingly normal humans in daily life cannot stop themselves from giving primary voice to their political hatred and resentments, the intellectual equivalent of pigs happily wallowing in their own filth.
Our is a sick nation. There will be no healing until enough people say "Enough!" to this and other forms of abuse of freedom of speech. That role starts at the top (or nearly so, in this case). But those people have abandoned any sense of responsibility of being morality influencers. Anything goes with them, as long as it enhances their bottom line and personal welfare. If there is a way out of this doom loop of the destruction of our civil society, I do not see it. I suppose "Each One, Reach One" is the only viable pathway left. Accordingly, keep on reaching, and keep on being the parade if they insist on being the rain.
The profitability of angertainment is the key accellerant of incivility. The vast right-wing noise machine has spent 30+ years stirring it up. It cannot be calmed quickly.
I had not heard the word "angertainment", but it's so perfect! I hope you haven't trademarked it, as I'm going to use it a lot.
Mob boss starts by asking just a small favor, nothing much, and you may hardly notice how your path has turned.
Klansman or Proud Boy starts by fanning flame of your discontent, offering a frame of blame to explain, it’s not your own failure nor the arrangement of overall power structure - it’s THOSE people.
Malign bot-masters study our psychology &divisions; then utilize those insights to amplify whatever worst impulses we reveal by our clicks. There’s no one set agenda except chaos. Distrust. Suspicion. Sow those, and we’ll all take it from there.
…plenty people stumble, hardly noticing the nudge. Our technology/media culture has given the ones that do the pushing some great tools & access to us.
Yesterday on Substack The Contrarian ran an article about politics and tribalism. It focused on Newt Gingrich's role in promoting tribalism and a
scorched earth attitude toward political opponents.
Talk about petty tyrants! I still remember how Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in late 1995 & early 1996 because of his petty grievance that Bill Clinton had seated him in the back of the presidential plane when they were returning from Israel.
I was working for the federal government then and remember that furlough.
Gingrich was a POS then and still is.
scum, did anyone read an article about him visiting a zoo. Newt
something really off about him, deep inside. Either fear or just shallow.
Your excellent comment addresses what JVL was talking about yesterday. As you say, we are a sick nation. We can argue about the causes - social media, bigotry, the revenge of the Confederacy, the election of an educated black man that caused many Americans to lose their minds, " social influencers", poor public education, - the answers are probably limitless. And you correctly say that nothing will change until enough of us shout "ENOUGH".
How soon we forget what should be eternal infamy. Remember what a great thigh-slapper it was when Paul Pelosi got hammered? Yuk Yuk Yuk. All the red-hats in America practically died laughing.
What? I thought the Left were the crude ones. /s
Now now! I want to see a new attitude!
Let's all pause to pray to The Fallen Saint, Charlie Kirk.
I remember that well.
A couple of years back, Elon Musk foiled a Ukrainian attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet by turning off Starlink at a critical moment. He claimed at the time he was preventing WWIII. We should be reminding everyone again about what this traitor did. I am still angry that he got away with it .
I made a mistake here. I meant to make this response to Mark Hertling’s post today about damaging a Russian submarine in the Black Sea. Oopsie
Good reply here, too.
This is right post. The second story was about Ukraine.
There, just saying that. I made a mistake. Hurrah.
When Trump dies, the cheering and applause will be heard on Mars.
I understand this impulse, (I won't be upset) but this reaction is part of the trap. Treating his death/removal as the resolution mistakes a symbol for a system. He isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom that found fertile ground. Cheering the end of the mascot risks letting the underlying failures off the hook, and worse, it creates the illusion that accountability, repair, or reckoning can be outsourced to biology.
If we reduce this to a countdown clock, we guarantee we learn nothing from it, and when the conditions remain, something else (something more capable and competent) will rise to fill the space. (I don't expect you to read it, but I did write 3,000 words on this, this weekend: https://substack.com/inbox/post/181613174 )
The threat you cite is certainly real. But the catalyst that keeps the fire going is Trump - the disinhibition, the creation of an image that allows people to project opposing grievances and desires onto him, the showmanship, belligerence, etc. Nobody having all of these "attributes" is presently visible, not JD, not Jr, not Tucker, etc. Maybe one will rise out of nowhere. More likely, the key objectives of MAGA will proceed in a slower and less noisy manner.
I don’t disagree with your description of Trump’s role as a catalyst. He is uniquely disinhibiting. He lowered the floor. He made the unsayable sayable, the illegal testable, the unthinkable routine, but that’s exactly why focusing on his singularity is dangerous.
Trump didn’t pry open the doors of authoritarianism because he was skilled. He did it because he was catastrophically incompetent and still succeeded. People keep sliding past this reality. Everyone with a functioning brain can see that he’s a buffoon, and yet that buffoon was enough to stress-test the system to the point of fracture. He exposed how little resistance there actually was.
The risk isn’t that someone identical to Trump hasn’t appeared yet. The risk is that Trump proved you don’t need his specific cocktail of chaos to advance these objectives. You only need someone more disciplined, quieter, more procedurally fluent, and less addicted to spectacle. Someone who doesn’t need rallies to feel alive. Someone who understands levers instead of crowds.
That’s why “slower and less noisy” isn’t reassuring. It’s worse.
Noise attracts attention. Incompetence creates openings for resistance. Trump’s volatility accidentally preserved some friction. A more capable actor pushing on the same doors won’t announce themselves as a threat. They won’t need to perform belligerence. They’ll normalize it. They’ll routinize it. They’ll make it boring.
Once it’s boring, it’s hard to stop.
So yes, Trump is a catalyst, but the lesson he taught is not “only Trump could do this.”
The lesson is “this system was weak enough that he could.”
That’s not a reason to relax once he’s gone. It’s the reason the danger accelerates after him.
"The risk isn’t that someone identical to Trump hasn’t appeared yet. The risk is that Trump proved you don’t need his specific cocktail of chaos to advance these objectives. You only need someone more disciplined, quieter, more procedurally fluent, and less addicted to spectacle. Someone who doesn’t need rallies to feel alive. Someone who understands levers instead of crowds."
This is a much more difficult needle to thread in practice than you think it is. MAGA loves Trump and flocks to him like no other person alive specifically because he *isn't* quiet and *is* addicted to spectacle. They want their president to be a WWE wrestling character, not a right wing version of Joe Biden who is outwardly demure and reserved on social media and TV. They want fiction. They actually right now believe the economy is great, the immigrants are all gone, crime is gone, the border wall is there, etc. because Trump and the right wing cinematic universe tell them this. They don't want a politician who is a fluent orator, that means they feel talked over and down to. They want their president to have a reading level and speaking style of a 5th grader like they have. They want cartoonish, action movie-esque government action even if it isn't actually doing anything to change much; they want the *feeling* of change they want is happening. That's all.
It is not possible to be appealing to the MAGA base without being a 24/7 megaphone of grievances, victimhood, and lies pandering to the fictional world in their heads in which they imagine they live. Someone educated and practical will be seen by MAGA as intellectually elitist and untrustworthy. They just want a big mouth rich white guy validating their fears and blaming their hated imagined enemies. If you don't do this all day every day, you're not capable of winning their loyalty.
What you described there is someone like Mitch McConnell. MAGA doesn't want a new Mitch. They want a movie character who behaves as if he can control all of reality itself minute to minute as the main character of the universe, a guy who is their avatar. No one alive in the GOP other than Trump has the brew of personality disorders, decades of brand building, and frankly outright stupidity necessary to be the new cult leader.
I think what I’m describing applies to almost anyone, which is precisely the problem. Tucker fits the pattern well, but he’s hardly unique. The danger isn’t that a single brilliant figure replaces Trump, it’s that an inept, incurious, and fundamentally incapable man can occupy that space at all. When incompetence reaches the highest office, it doesn’t neutralize risk, it creates it. It opens the door for more disciplined, more strategic actors to operate without scrutiny, restraint, or resistance.
That’s why your first example actually reinforces my point. What looks, in isolation, like decline or fragmentation is often just redistribution. Different voices, same underlying current. If we can’t acknowledge how easily this system adapts, and how little it depends on any one personality, then we’re likely talking past each other rather than toward a shared understanding.
"They actually right now believe the economy is great, the immigrants are all gone, crime is gone..."
I don't think so. I don't think belief of that sort -- that they actually think these things are true -- is in play one way or another. I see MAGA as a project of crowd-based trolling and gaslighting. The more over-the-top the claims they say they believe -- A+++++, greatest EVER -- the better they serve to stick thumbs in our eyes. They are signals of fealty internally and linguistic weapons externally. What many pundits fail to grok is how social this can be: how MAGAs group in communities virtual in real, in which loyalty to Trump is the maguffin of comradeship, thus to abandon Trump is to betray your friends, your neighbors, your Bible study group, your bowling team...
It a cult-of-the-person. All beliefs get swept into and subsumed under "only he can save us."
It's not easy to switch figureheads, but not all cults die with their leaders. When you think 'so and so isn't up to it' you're seeing that person through a normie lens. They look different inside their silo, and the massive right wing anti-reality media machine is very, very good at their brand of evil.
The only ones who need to learn from this are those that still support Trump and what he stands for.
We can only hope that one day they look at themselves in the mirror and come to the realization that they don't like what they see.
If you’re waiting for the Red Hats to resolve this through a spontaneous eruption of self-awareness, you’re not describing accountability, you’re describing abdication. Authoritarian movements do not unravel because their adherents pause, reflect, and recoil from their own reflection. They unravel when power is stripped from their hands, when legitimacy collapses, when the machinery that rewards cruelty can no longer function. Conscience is not the solvent of authoritarianism. Pressure is.
The hope that they will one day look inward and feel shame assumes shame still governs them. The record suggests it does not. What many see in Trump is not deformity but authorization, not ugliness but permission. Cruelty reads as resolve. Domination reads as strength, and if that is the constituency you are waiting on to deliver a moral correction, then you are quietly consenting to a future shaped by their values. That is how dystopias form, not in a single violent rupture, but in the long, patient pause of those who kept waiting for a conscience that never arrived.
As a percentage of the electorate, MAGA ain't that big.
A vast majority of them will go down with Trump's ship.
That group of folks are as irredeemable as Trump.
Those who need to look in the mirror are the independents and swingy Democrats, those who cast their votes for Trump in the last election.
They're the ones who really need to reflect, to become better at judging character, to understand that elections do, indeed, have consequences.
Right now, they're tied to Trump, whether they realize it or not.
They're the ones who need to make things right.
And the 10 Million who sat home in 2024 .
I keep hearing that according to polling, a higher proportion of people who sat out this election would have voted Republican than Democrat. Demoralizing the Trumpists and *getting* them to stay home is a viable strategy at this point.
Well if your plan is to wait for MAGA to make things right, I’m 100% confident you’ll being living in a MAGA dystopia. I hope you’re right. Be well.
To some extent yes, but the Kirk podcast falling from the top 10 to like 94th overall in downloads/listens since his death proves how once the figurehead is gone, the cult quickly shrivels.
Yes he's proven we need a new constitution fostering a government more representative of the actual will of the people, more explicitly constraining of executive power, less prone to gridlock in the legislature, and free of unwritten gentleman's agreements that any proto-dictator can just ignore. But there is no one in the GOP with his inexplicable gravity and appeal to the maga base. No one cares about JD Vance. No one cares about Elon. No one cares about the legions of parasites in congress who parrot Trump and have no intrinsic skills or value of their own. It's all him. As soon as he leaves this earth, it will be like the death of Stalin and the GOP will be a rudderless, cannibalistic power vacuum.
This example actually proves the opposite of what you’re arguing.
Kirk’s audience shrinking while Candace Owens’s grows doesn’t show a movement collapsing. It shows attention being rerouted. The energy didn’t vanish, it migrated. One node weakened and the network compensated. That isn’t a cult dying with its figurehead. It’s a system redistributing its load.
This is exactly why the “it’s all him” theory is so dangerous. When one voice fades, another rises. Not because anything was resolved, but because the demand for the message remains. Podcasts make this visible in a way institutions often don’t, but the same process is happening across media ecosystems, donor networks, courts, and legislatures. The audience didn’t recoil. It didn’t reflect. It simply found a new mouth.
So Kirk falling and Owens rising isn’t reassurance, it’s a warning. It shows this isn’t a movement tethered to a single personality. It’s an ideology with interchangeable messengers. Waiting for the right figure to disappear misunderstands the threat entirely. The system has already learned how to survive without him.
(This is such a perfect illustration of how statistics get weaponized. From a single, isolated data point, the story feels reassuring. One graph, one decline, one tidy conclusion, but systems don’t behave like anecdotes. When you widen the frame, the narrative flips. What looks like decay in isolation is actually resilience in aggregate. The numbers don’t lie, but they do mislead when they’re stripped of context.)
You've said it there. total agreement. We ARE in some peril.
When Trump dies all of these people will be religious zealots, rather than all but one.
Just to back up Patrick, below: if he dies, and Vance becomes president, what will get better? Stephen Miller is certainly not going to be fired.
And MAGAs will bitch mightily about it, totally oblivious as to why.
And that is exactly why I posted a copy of that vile tweet from him on my FB page. Because when Trump eventually die and my family gets horrified that I am cracking a bottle of champagne and dancing in the street with thousands of my neighbors instead of "being respectful" I can go back to that post and tell them I am simply reacting the way Trump himself would when one of his "enemies" died.
“Even if the Ukrainians didn’t sink the sub, just damaging it could have strategic implications. A damaged boat tied to a pier does not launch missiles, threaten shipping, or force Ukraine to divert air defenses. But it does represent one less instrument available to attack Ukraine. And that matters.”
There are bigger implications. Russia no longer has control over the Black Sea. Strategic Shipping lanes for oil are no longer safe. And the port at Novorossiysk wasn’t just strategic for its deep sea ports capable of servicing Russian submarines, they were also critical to protecting the vital oil tankers used to ship oil, and pay for the war.
And it appears the country without leverage is doing a bang up job against Russia. And from the perspective of drones, the student has become the master. IMHO…:)
So many things anger me these days about the Trump administration and the MAGA cult, but our failure to fully support Ukraine and NATO ranks at the very top. It makes me ashamed to be an American. We desperately need some of that Ukrainian courage within our own population. There aren't any Russian missiles raining down on our cities, but make no mistake, we are fighting for our survival here as well.
💯
Pardon me if I don't race to read Susie Trump's interview with the magazine that hired Olivia Nuzzi AFTER she had an affair with the person she was reporting on.
I must say the excerpts were eyebrow raising in their candor. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it takes a narcissist to work and survive around Trump.
Put a camera on a head of lettuce! What are the Polymarket and Kalshi lines on Wiles’ remaining tenure in the WH? She uttered the truth. What happens now?
Also, I’m with Mona, Costco can do no wrong. But I kinda want the Court to allow the tariffs. We need economic pain because it seems to be the thing that hurts Trump the most. The Court shouldn’t save the President from himself.
It’s so amazing, brain shattering, horrific; that I completely agree with you. Deny the lawsuits on tariffs. Let health insurance double, or triple. Plunge the country into a deep recession. Raise food prices by half-again. Continue incredible cruelty of ICE invasions of our cities. Let everything 77 millions voters asked for come to fruition…..and watch that same 77 million blame the Democrats for it
Hell, they already blame us for it.
We gave them no choice.
We ran Kamala Harris against Trump.
They had to vote for Trump.
They had no choice.
Did you hear Harris' laugh? What else was the public supposed to do? /s
The abuser’s rationale: “you made me hit you” ☹️
If we had run Jesus, he would have been, ‘too woke’
Yes! Jesus told us to " Welcome the stranger". That's waay too woke!
I suppose you want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and give alms to the poor too! WTF libtard!
This was literally yesterday from Bret Weinstein. What a toolbox.
Yup, we forced them to vote Trump. They've been saying that for a decade. Nobody believes it. Well, the people like Weinstein who are too morally crippled to take responsibility for their own actions believe it because they'll believe anything that absolves them, but nobody else thinks this delusional way.
I am ashamed to say that I agree with you 100%.
I am ready for the economic pain from health insurance costs, tariffs, general inflation, a resurgence of preventable diseases--all things that I am powerless to stop (but absolutely would if I could).
Elections have consequences, and I am ready for America to eat the full bitter fruit of their (our) own actions.
On a side note, regarding political violence, please, Democrats, stop trying to unilaterally disarm when we are on the cusp of political, economic, and/or social collapse, with civil war possible (if not inevitable).
I kind of want the economic pain too. It might be the only frail thread to break this mass mental illness event we are struggling through. It has to be significant; Trump 1.0 wasn’t a big enough dose of inoculation to halt the disease of this nation’s soul.
I hear you that the People turning on Trump and emasculating him next November would be ultimate justice. I'm leery of that since there are month and months between now and then for the kind of damage that puts family on the streets. Same as the ACA subsidies, the suffering will be massive. SCOTUS really *should* swat these tariffs down, but I'm not naive enough to believe that they won't let Americans suffer for the sake of...the founding fathers wanting it that way? Yeah, I don't get it either.
Also, because the people did that in 2018 and it ultimately meant nothing.
The administration has been making noises about having alternative legal routes to impose tariffs, so I wonder how much of a defeat it would experience.
As I understand the scene, it will apply to some countries and not others, some import categories but not others. Maybe a 30-40% reduction overall. Still enough to be noticed.
My guess is they disallow these tariffs, but will let the government keep what’s been paid so far to avoid the refund mess. Then the administration will keep them in place, but use another contorted rationale and we start all over with the court cases. It will quickly end back up with SCOTUS as to whether they issue a stay keeping the tariffs in place while the case proceeds in lower courts. This current round decision will not keep the issue from coming back to haunt SCOTUS.
I burst out laughing when I read Andy Borowitz yesterday. He said that Republicans had finally come up with a healthcare plan. It was to tell Americans to move to Canada!
Either Wiles will be gone in a month, or she’s completely given what was left of her soul away. Or both. (“Our new Fox News commentator …”)
Meanwhile, an alleged govt employee yesterday posted a comment in a NYT article that Trump and family has been putting tariff money into personal investments. Others correctly said let’s get proof, but almost nobody doubted it’s possible. Such are our times, emulating shithole countries.
I can hear it now... "the President raised those funds, why shouldn't he get to wet his beak?" *gag*
“The entire interview is extraordinary, and we encourage people to spend some time reading it in full, as it provides the most unvarnished look at the White House to date. It also gives you a deeply honest, sort of unnerving portrait of Wiles, who sees herself far more as a facilitator for Trump than a check on his worst impulses or even a strategist on his payroll.”
Perhaps it’s even more extraordinary for what it implies. Wiles has always been tight lipped; what changed?
Trump has been having some very bad weeks in the press, polling and on policy; extrajudicial killings, federal lawsuits, etc….perhaps Wiles finally sees the writing on the wall and decided to get ahead of the story or create here own narrative?
After all, this administration is starting to implode!Just a thought!..:)
Yah Rob…but ‘just following orders’ didn’t work that well for the Nazi’s. “Facilitation” of war crimes might not be the best defense. But it’s probably the only one she’s got. I recall during Trump 1, Ms. Kelly Ann Conway was, ‘just doing her job’, and granted, she’s landed on her feet within the circle of hell she inhabits. So, Ms. Wiles will always have a chair at OAN or NewsMax waiting for her. Maybe she’ll hit the ‘Big Enchilada’ and get a recurring gig on FOX. Or perhaps, she’ll relegate herself to living quietly on a secure compound in S. Florida where her only concern will be having people spit on her when she appears in public.
She’ll make more money back at her lobbyist position. I don’t think she wants to be the next Pete Hegseth. But any moderating impact she might have in the WH is not apparent to the outside world.
Well said…:)
Thank you, my friend
She doesn't think T wakes up thinking about retribution!? If that's so, it's the only time of the night or day that he isn't plotting retribution, or raging that one of his plots failed. There isn't a sane, balanced, good person in this WH.
Mass psychosis on anabolic steroids
Excellent, incisive analysis and writing, Mona. The moral clarity is exactly what I needed. I’m going to keep it close, to re-read and share, whenever other less honest or more trembling writers fall back on the moral equivocation that got us here. Thank you. My own moral frustration thanks you, Mona.
Why is anyone surprised? The President has been (and will continue to be) amply rewarded for "telling it like it is." This crude, awful display is WHY he's in the White House. The whole disgusting rant was the least surprising thing I've seen since January.
Yes, this is always been him, and our churches have always supported this and held up Trump as a moral example of how to be and what to do.
As a devoted follower of Jesus, this has been one of the most perplexing aspects of this era to me. I will never understand how well-meaning Christians could condone (at least with their votes) this moral depravity.
I was in a Bible study last week where politics was briefly touched on, and one of the participants said that we should not discuss politics in the group. Although I agree with that sentiment in a vacuum (because the most likely outcome would just be that we all get angry with each other), I do believe that if/when we emerge from this, American Christianity is going to have to do some very difficult introspection.
I'm a former Catholic. One of the reasons that I'm "former" is that the only real moral guidance offered by the Catholic Church for decades is that abortion is awful and should be illegal. Every other issue pales in comparison to abortion.
I can easily see why some Christian sects are thrilled with the President.
As long as abortion is illegal, we can lock children in cages, shoot people clinging to debris at sea, allow hundreds of thousands of USAID recipients to die, not provide disaster aid, mock the disabled, etc. It's all good and moral!
And they only blame women for abortion. Not men, who apparently have nothing to do with unwanted pregnancies. How convenient that only men can be priests and the only sin priests care about is one where they pretend men can't possibly commit that sin.
Mike, 2 observations: 1) Your experience nicely encapsulates my biggest concern as a follower of Jesus: that the behavior and attitudes of Christians in this era are doing more to drive people away from God than the enemy could do by himself in a thousand years; 2) Applying morality to politics is a dangerous game. If we allow one issue, however important it may be, to subordinate all of our other values, we risk our own destruction through that which we condone.
Let me clarify: we absolutely should apply moral principles to our political judgments. And we should expect moral behavior from our leaders. Where it gets dangerous is when we choose our most important issue, and choose to support whomever aligns with us on that one issue. I believe that is where many American Christians went off the reservation in 2016. They had a singular focus on abortion. Over the next 10 years they never realized they were the frog in the boiling pot, and now they find themselves supporting (waves hands) all of this. I’m not excusing it. The man’s moral void was crystal clear long before the 2016 election. But I believe American Christians allowed themselves to be blinded by one issue.
Yeah, but they only focus on certain aspects of abortion. I'm not going to see a church newsletter about how children who were sexually abused by church leaders grew up to have abortions, for one example. I'm not going to see a church movement for men to agree to pay child support either.
I like Abraham Lincoln's take on this. When asked if we should pray for God to be on the Union's side, Lincoln replied "let us pray that we are on God's side."
I was going to comment, until I read Tom K. I agree with him.
Have a good week.
There was an article that suggested an explanation of how Christians could support Trump beyond Franklin Graham's argument that a flawed man was needed to clean up flawed society. The Old Testament not only deplores homosexuality but has a wrathful God who orders the destruction of the Malakites, Jebiusites, Amorites, et al.
When I saw it I thought, "Well, yeah" and made semi-snarky comment. I'm a little surprised it kicked up this much of a firestorm.
And yet people who consider themselves to be devoutly religious still support this devil.
Watching the General in interviews and now reading his insightful columns gives me faith that our military will not follow the monster who sits in the oval office off a moral cliff. His clear thinking and understanding of our nations characteristics are comforting.
The Trump article says the whole truth and it would be helpful if more of the legcy media would do the same.
I felt some vibe of that as well