Cue the Nuremberg Rallies! Gather the MAGA faithful from all across the land and let us worship at the feet of our glorious leader. Let us revel in our spite, our ill will, our grudges, our self-righteousness, our imagined grievances. Trump has returned with his colossal mandate of 1% of the popular vote, and his vengeance is ours.
Oh, this time it will be different. No half measures, no attempts to assuage the full half of the country that is completely opposed to our agenda. This time the cabinet and all of the government leadership will be inhabited by true believers. There will be no room for RINOs or half-hearted conservatives. And certainly, no traitorous America-haters from the left.
The purge will start on day one. The Musk-led oligarchy will use its master-of-the-universe brain power to whittle down the government with dramatic eliminations of services and social net infrastructure. The first to go will be any suspected ‘deep-state’ elements. Let’s piss them all off on day one by forbidding remote work and expressing our utter contempt for them.
Then let’s pardon all the violent rioters from January 6th and pretend that it was just a love fest for our glorious leader and a justified outrage at the stolen election that not a single lawsuit or investigation could ever legitimize even under Trump-appointed judges. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Trump. Sadly, rewriting history is not quite so easy, as Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pinochet and others have discovered.
Then on to America First! Scrap the Paris Accords; abandon all efforts to fight climate change; exit the World Health Organization; persecute the International Criminal Court members that dared to call out Israel and Netanyahu for crimes against humanity; ignore anything from the UN that doesn’t align with our interests; threaten Panama, Greenland and any other country that is bold enough to question the might and the manifest destiny of the greatest country that ever existed. International cooperation be damned!
Declare emergencies right and left! An energy emergency, a border emergency, a law-and-order emergency. Maybe we’ll need to set a Reichstag fire or two to get things moving! Fortunately, the first steps of a massive manhunt for undocumented people will set the stage for future crackdowns. Getting rid of the liberal press will require some finesse, but all in due time.
Am I being melodramatic? Perhaps, but given Trump’s increasingly messianic lunacy (‘I was saved by God to make America great again’), his aggrieved desires for vengeance, his absurd narcissism, his dark inclinations toward violence and his absurdly simplistic appraisals of world events, it seems prudent to expect and prepare for the very worst.
There may be many aspects of Trump’s agenda that appear to be highly desirable and reasonable to the run-of-the-mill conservative or the Christian fretting over cultural issues. I want to believe that we can find ways to achieve some of what the Trump voters desire without making a frightening lurch toward autocracy.
But it is an incredibly dangerous Faustian bargain to give so much power to a man with such obvious psychological flaws. Let us all pray that the remaining legal, bureaucratic, and legislative barriers will be enough to prevent a full authoritarian transformation in our country, or worse yet, a major war.
Well done, Bob!
ReplyDelete