January alone provided enough outrages for the entire year, but Trump and his minions have much more in store.
“Tank is full and his toll is paid
Hellbound and determined
He run a dangerous payload
When he comes to the crossroads
Ah man, it’s all timed to explode
‘Cause you’ll just see the sky burning”
Steve Earle, “The Unrepentant”
Watching Donald Trump and his enablers destroy America is like watching someone take a razor blade to the Mona Lisa or a sledgehammer to the Statue of David, or some MAGA red-hat strapping twelve sticks of dynamite to the Lincoln Memorial. The desecration goes on, day after day. January alone provided enough outrages for the entire year, but Trump and his minions have much more in store. Another Venezuela. Another Minneapolis. More threats to torpedo NATO and undermine the European Union. And a lot more grift along the lines of Trump’s Board of Plunder in Gaza.
For this is an election year, which must be why Tulsi Gabbard — remember her? — the Director of National Intelligence (I know, it’s an oxymoron of the first order), was down in Georgia observing as the FBI seized voting information from the 2020 election. In case you have forgotten, Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden that year, but pulled every string he could to overturn the result, including an attempt to coerce the Republican Secretary of State to find, or manufacture, 11,780 votes. Now, it’s reasonable to ask what role the DNI has in a five-year-old state election case, since Gabbard’s job is to coordinate intelligence on external threats to the nation. If it sounds fishy it’s because it is. A likely scenario is that the Regime is laying the groundwork to contest the 2026 midterms by declaring them fraudulent, rigged or manipulated by malign foreign actors.
A day or two later, Trump demanded that Republicans seize control of the election process — in direct and flagrant violation of the Constitution. Not that Trump cares about that beleaguered and impotent document any more than he cared about Venezuela’s national sovereignty when American forces kidnapped the president of that country and his wife on January 3. Keep in mind that when Trump narrowly won reelection in 2024, he and his Republican toadies had nothing to say about “election integrity.” When they win, everything’s hunky-dory. The Regime is preparing to ratfuck the 2026 midterms because they can already see the Blue Tsunami forming on the horizon. Once again Trump is talking sideways from his asshole about hordes of illegal immigrants streaming over the border in order to cast ballots for Democrats, and in the next breath gloating about record numbers of deportations and how not even a rattlesnake can slither across the southern border without being beheaded by the crack troops of the Border Patrol.
The Regime doesn’t make sense because it simply can’t make sense, anymore than Joseph Stalin’s NKVD made sense in the Soviet Union during the purges of the 1930s. Today’s ally was tomorrow’s enemy; what was legal one day was illegal the next; the playing field shifted constantly and even Stalin’s secret police struggled to keep up; all they cared about was not getting on Stalin’s bad side.
In 2024 Trump campaigned on economic grievance, with the core idea being that everything from eggs to gasoline was too expensive and it was all Joe Biden’s fault, even though inflation was slowly subsiding and The Economist magazine declared in October 2024 that the American economy was the envy of the world. Dim-witted American voters swallowed Trump’s lies and returned a mentally-addled convicted felon to the White House.
This year, when costs are high and the economy is lopsided (the wealthy are doing just fine, but the rest of us are struggling with uncertainty caused by Trump’s idiotic tariffs), Trump’s pitch — and that of his smarmy lackeys — is that everything is fantastic, wonderful, peachy: the economy is booming, eggs and prescription medications are virtually free, and the Golden Age is here; in two weeks, the whole shebang will turn Platinum.
For the next nine months, the Regime and its billionaire pals, like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, Fox News “personalities” and every nitwit Bro podcaster, will turn up the gaslighting from every electronic orifice. The central message will be that the reality citizens see with their own eyes (like the broad daylight murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis), and experience at the grocery store or when they pay their utility bills, is false, a trick of the collective imagination. Only Donald Trump holds the Truth, and it always validates his pronouncements, no matter how detached from observable reality they might be; only Trump can defy the laws of physics.
Day by day Trump forces Americans to live in his world of make-believe. Come November and December, we’re going to find out how much this tottering democratic republic really means to the American people.
