If you were a reader of this blog eight years ago, you may recall that I wrote a lot about the fucked up US politics, especially as they related to Trump. You may have noticed that I haven't been doing it this time around, even though frankly it's much worse. The racism and attack on democracy isn't even veiled anymore. It doesn't mean that I don't get involved, especially when it comes to donating to advocacy organizations, but I've largely reframed it all.
To start with, Trump be Trump, and he's an exhausting moron. My concern has largely shifted to the voters who put him there, or worse, didn't vote at all. This nonsense is on them. And confronting them generally goes the same way every time. If you ask them how they could vote for a [insert offense type here], they will either disengage completely, or cite some made up thing that they believe without evidence. You can't really argue with willful stupidity any other way than, "Show me the evidence."
But even then, there are layers to the lunacy. The performative stupidity you just have to ignore. I'm talking about things that aren't real, like "renaming" the gulf or ordering a ban on paper straws. I'm not saying those things don't matter, but that category of things is designed to please the dummies who believe anything they hear. I don't have time in my own life to concern myself with small things, let alone that kind of nonsense.
The next layer is the performative actions that will, without question, be overturned by courts. We've already seen a ton of that. One organization claims he lost 92% of these cases last time around, and the New York Times counts 29 orders blocked already, in just one month, with a ton pending. It's a colossal waste of money and court time for this stuff, but that's what it's there for.
After that, there is the concern of whether or not the clown cabinet follows the courts' orders. Trying to discredit the judiciary is a classic fascist move. That part is admittedly a little scarier. In the event that he were to start blowing off the courts, two things happen. The first is that we see if Congress is willing to act. The Republican majority is thin, and according to some pollsters, only a third of them are known "loyalists," which is to say they used him as a point of reference in campaigning. More than half haven't, and don't talk about him at all. It could go either way, but their constituencies, in most states at least, also did not enjoy large majority wins. Anecdotally, I'm surprised by the number of lifelong Republicans that I know personally who were already done with him in 2020, and now they're outright pissed. Naively then, I think there would be consequences to those working at the Capitol. Ignoring the courts is a "high crime," and if you don't impeach on that, you're complicit.
The second thing that happens is that the protesting gets more intense, and the potential for violence increases. I hope it doesn't come to that, but when you keep backing large groups of people into a corner, they eventually push back.
So at the moment, we're in kind of a wait-and-see season. A lot of people are going to be and already have been hurt by this season, and it's going to get worse. The economy is already showing some signs of weakness, which is crazy that it could happen that fast. There's a domino effect already in play. They fired all of the people trying to contain and trace bird flu, which is going to harm chicken and egg prices, and potentially beef. When you withhold funds already appropriated from projects in process, more people lose their jobs. When you put tariffs on stuff, the price of everything goes up. And why, to satisfy an ego instead of an actual policy goal? These fuckwits are suggesting that programs intended to feed people are instead trying to encourage kids to get transgender reassignment surgery. This obsession against trans people is the worst of humanity, and it's being institutionalized.
That's where I'm at. I'm giving a lot to advocacy orgs right now because my employer matches them all, but only for the next month. I'm monitoring, but redirecting outrage to more useful actions and looking for organization and deliberate positive intent. There are a lot of things to track, and I'm confident that the negative impact will be widespread. Will people still believe that scapegoats are to blame, or the idiot they elected? I guess we'll find out what the durability of the system is that the founding fathers built.
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