Could It Be?

I’m not a conspiratorial person. But even I have to wonder about the following scenario:

A foreign adversary seeks to bring down the United States by installing a sympathetic mole as the president. This easily manipulated doofus then implements economic plans that everyone — as in anybody with even a modicum of political, historical, or economic knowledge — agrees serves no purpose other than bringing about a second Great Depression. To be honest, it looks like the guy is deliberately trying to crash the economy.

But wait, this boorish loudmouth also lashes out at our allies and embraces the dictatorial whims of the foreign adversary. His actions undo almost a century of American foreign policy and national security within just a few weeks. Yeah, it looks like the guy is surrendering without a fight.

OK, I’m not saying Trump is a spy. But I’m saying that he could not harm this country any worse than he already has if he were actively working for Russia. Seriously, he is at maximum Putin puppet right now.

Let’s start with the tariffs, which as of this moment, are off. But check back in nine minutes. 

Even if his much ballyhooed tariffs never get implemented, the damage that this on-again off-again threat has inflicted is very real. Not content with shaking Wall Street to its core, the administration is now casually noting that “Americans are going to have to suffer.”

I guess the worst burst of unemployment since the Great Recession is not sufficient. Now the GOP wants Americans to collapse into poverty because… wait, what was the point again?

Who knows?

We’re all still reeling from the shouting match at the Oval Office, a calamity so bizarre, so grotesque that even lifelong conservatives are saying they are ashamed to be American. Trump and Vance yelling at Zelenskyy is “the equivalent of the US switching sides in WWII.”

For all our talk about being the moral center of the universe, “these are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys.”

U.S. policy is now aligned with Russia, a situation that even the most ardent Trump supporter would not have predicted in 2016. But it’s ok, because Trump has made it clear that he trusts Putin, which is “an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.”

Meanwhile, we get the great man himself pontificating and bloviating about how he is the most wonderfulest president since Washington (and even better than him, of course) in a longwinded, meandering speech stuffed with “his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies,” which only proves that “even the most unhinged of presidential speeches can seem kind of boring if it goes on long enough.”

Once again, I’m not saying the guy is a Russian spy.

But can we stop with the claims that he is playing 4-D chess or kickstarting his master plan? 

Because there is no plan. It should be obvious to anyone playing any attention that this corrupt baboon simply makes shit up day to day.

He is an easily distracted narcissist who bases US policy on his personal grievances, petty jealousies, and spur of the moment whims.

So how long will we allow a megalomanic with an insecurity complex to align America with the most bloodthirsty despot alive?

How long will we let the world’s largest economy be guided by the fluttering thoughts and bubbling rage of an erratic lunatic who has no idea of what he’s doing?

More important, by the time we finally reject all this madness, hatred, and corruption, will it be too late?

The New Dark Ages

These are magical times.

I don’t mean this is an era of enchantment and wonder.

I mean we are living in a maelstrom of religious extremism, supernatural mumbo-jumbo, and delusional leaps of faith.

For example, you might believe that a sociopathic billionaire is devoting all his energy to eliminating government waste, with no benefit to him personally, out of the goodness of his heart and fierce patriotism. Oh, he will police himself about any conflicts of interest, he will perform most of this work in secret with no accountability (which isn’t suspicious at all), and the average citizen will benefit from his magnanimity.

To trust in this absurd scenario is indeed some powerful hocus pocus.

But it fits with national mood. We are talking about a culture where over a third of people don’t believe in evolution, and the man in charge of the nation’s health thinks vaccines cause your brain to explode.

The truth is that “anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.”

We’re talking about “health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties … that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.”

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of talk about America crumbling like the Roman Empire. But some historians believe we are more like 1910s Russia, where Rasputin and various mystics tried to prop up a failing monarchy but only accelerated its downfall. 

Consider that “like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational.” Like those beleaguered Slavs of a century ago, our trusted institutions are floundering, and the entire world is on the verge of widespread global conflict.

Unlike those Russians, however, we “exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time,” with the result that “techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand.” So by some measures, we are even worse off.

The result is that “uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts.” And the loudest and most narcissistic of these walking Dunning-Kruger samples insist that they alone can fix all of our problems with minimal effort.

But eventually, shit gets real, and fast. Refusing a vaccine “might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.” 

People who believe that crystals cure cancer or that Jesus will swoop in and save us are betting the country’s existence on irrational hope and desperate prayers. They will soon learn that America “cannot function without experts in every field,” and that attempts to purge scientists, well-educated leaders, and competent professionals “is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.”

This nationwide decline in logic and embrace of the supernatural makes me think of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who was a favorite of hard rocks icons from Led Zeppelin to Ozzy Osbourne.

Crowley’s philosophy was a weird mashup of yoga, astrology, mysticism, and made-up gibberish. He conducted rituals that included pentagrams, sacrificial altars, and something called “sex magick.”

Yes, it’s all very metal. But it’s not the best guide for how to tun a country.”

Crowley believed that “magic is will made manifest.” He insisted that when you focus your intention or desire with enough conviction and energy, your willpower can create real, tangible change in the world. 

How is this different from the belief system of hardcore Trump supporters? 

They insist that Trump will solve everything and bring on a new golden age for America, with no more effort than a wave of his hand, or more accurately, the signing of a couple dozen executive orders. They believe he can do it all through sheer willpower and God-given inspiration. Basically, MAGA views Trump as a fucking wizard. 

Consider that almost two-thirds of Christians voted for Trump in November. And this pious demographic is now gleefully rooting on billionaires who are cutting off aid for starving children, cackling at “the kind of brutality made notorious by Abu Ghraib guards,” and exulting “in the repatriation of their fellow believers into the care of regimes poised to kill them.”

Ultimately, their high priest, their orange sorcerer, will go down in flames. But he will drag the whole country down with him, and no magic will repair the nation.

Abracadabra.

Shock Therapy

Let’s continue the nonstop fun ride that has been 2025 by hyperanalyzing how our country got so fucked up that we clamor for oligarchs to rule us while simultaneously cheering the murder of those same oligarchs.

There’s some deeply Freudian shit going on there. And it’s not just me saying this.

Political experts believe that the MAGA movement “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.”

Basically, giving half a damn about your neighbors is a sucker’s move, and voting Republican means you can embrace all your “libidinous instincts” and allow “malign energies to express themselves in action.” In this way, conservatives gain a “kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.” 

Damn, that is a lot of psychological baggage to process. So here is a simpler way to break down Trump’s appeal to a certain type of voter: These guys want chaos.

Many Trump fans “may not feel horribly mistreated so much as they resent what they perceive as the better treatment accorded to people they don’t think deserve it.” These voters love the guy who has “run three times as the candidate of rage and grievance,” and they aren’t “turned off by Trump’s aggression and his threats because his brash rhetoric is part of the appeal.”

For those seeking madness and the obliteration of binding societal norms, “the GOP has become the party of anti-establishment rulers—swashbuckling outsiders who pledge to use their power to burn down the system.”

The insecure, the aggrieved, and the perpetually pissed off see Trump’s incoherence and boorish behavior as a plus, because “showing off flaws has become a way to reassure those voters—and there are many of them—who hate criticism.” These lovers of discord believe that “he who misbehaves is popular; those who dare to preach become unbearable.” Hence, all the bubbling rageat the self-righteous liberals who can’t take a joke, are hypersensitive, or say trans people aren’t freaks.

Of course, this “right-wing populist movement so animated by its opposition to left-wing ‘snowflake culture’ is itself a collective of self-avowed victims” who bitch and whine nonstop about how they are horribly oppressed and constantly disrespected.

Meanwhile, true believers of right-wing Christian nationalism are openly laughing at the angry rubes who voted for Project 2025, which turns out to have been the agenda all along.

So what will happen to these furious, intolerant voters when Trump fails to improve their lives in any way? Well, I’m sure they will blame liberals for not warning them, and then proceed angrily on their way, oblivious to their desire to destroy America, torches in hand, always ready to burn it all down to the ground.

The Power of the WWC

I don’t want to be a hater.

But I will now offer the mildest of critiques to everyone’s favorite demographic: the white working class.

Who doesn’t love these guys?

Yes, we know that Trump made gains with every racial demographic, but these “small deviations from long-term minority voting patterns could be a short-term blip that has not truly transformed the GOP’s voter base,” which is “hardly a multiracial coalition.”

In fact, the white working class remains the cornerstone of the Republican Party. Seriously, “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.” After all,  “under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.” Meanwhile, the GOP’s “attention to the white working class is overwhelmingly symbolic” in that Trump presented “nothing substantive on policy” that would actually help these voters. Instead, what our president-elect “essentially offered the working class were attacks on undocumented immigrants, which his campaign blamed for much of the nation’s ills.”

And while a disturbing number of black and Latino voters were down with demonizing immigrants, who do you think really responded to this campaign strategy? 

Yeah, take your time analyzing that one.

White working class voters made it clear that they were far more interested in outlawing trans people and keeping Muslims out than in preserving democracy, but every conservative, most of the media, and a lot of progressives still excused this hate-voting with the same tired excuses: economy anxiety, cruelly left behind, felt talked down to, and blah blah blah.

We were told — lectured really — that we needed to respect and listen to white working class voters. They had no choice (none at all!) but to vote for the guy who boasted that he would be a dictator.

But these voters “aren’t five-year-olds who have to be cajoled into behaving themselves.” For all the talk about respecting the white working class, there was little acknowledgement that when “you respect people, you also hold them responsible for the choices they make.” It’s maddening, hypocritical, and “infantilizing to assume” that white working class voters  “aren’t or shouldn’t be interested in things like America’s democratic traditions.”

So which is it? Should we respect them and pay attention to their opinions? Or should we coddle them and excuse their ignorance?

And it is ignorance, because their hero is already backtracking on his absurd promise to bring down grocery prices. Every progressive in the country said that the incompetent buffoon wouldn’t follow through on this pledge, but we were told to shut up and stop being elitist.

And speaking of being elitist, we’ve learned that progressives are far too woke for the white working class, and we need to knock that nonsense off. However, this is yet another way in which the fawning of the white working class for authoritarianism has been excused.

You see, “anti-woke” voters basically said, “Those leftists claimed that white men have done some terrible shit throughout history. This has enraged me so much that I have no choice but to vote for a white man who will do some terrible shit today.” 

Of course, people will say that I am being simplistic by blaming the white working class for its parochialism and lack of education. That’s possible. 

But it’s also possible that media figures are overcomplicating things and becoming apologists for horrific choices. Perhaps it is too disturbing to admit that bigotry and misogyny are prevalent in every demographic and especially strong in the white working class. It is more comforting to say it’s the pompous college-educated progressives and hypersensitive minorities that are exaggerating and out of touch. This viewpoint, which its practitioners love to portray as insightful and contrarian, is in fact the prevailing opinion and a strong reinforcement of the status quo. It’s also a lazy excuse.

But hey, what do I know? I’m not a member of the white working class, so my opinion is null and void.

I hope you guys know something that I don’t know, because we are all in this together.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

I really don’t know why all of you are freaking out.

Our tariff-loving, immigrant-hating president has picked only the most qualified, most intelligent, most principled people for his cabinet. Yeah, one of them is probably a Russian asset, another is determined to destroy the agency he is poised to lead, and another thinks vaccines are witchcraft. 

But they are all likely to be confirmed for their posts, so the Senate must know what it’s doing, right?

OK, if that doesn’t reassure you, this fact should help you sleep at night: A bunch of guys who are just a few years removed from getting drunk on prom night now have access to all your personal information, and they (and their oligarch overlord) will decide who actually gets Social Security checks.

Damn you seem nervous.

Well, that is understandable, because our seething cauldron of president and his zealot followers are frantically trying to “punch their way to a first-round knockout” by shocking and awing the hell out of the rest of us. The good news is that if we are able to withstand all this sound and fury, we may find that these right-wing lunatics are “utterly unprepared for a 15-round grueling slog” and ultimately give up, resigning themselves to endless rounds of golf and the hero worship of red-state yokels. But the “pessimistic take is that the first-round knockout might happen.”

For a metaphor that doesn’t involve boxing, let’s turn to the professor of the moment, Timothy Snyder, who writes the following:

"Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.”

In truth, it doesn’t matter if it’s cars or boxing. Or both.

Any comparison you can make is terrifying.