Blunt Force Truth

“The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Warning: this will not be a hopeful piece. In any human endeavor, hope is useful and necessary, but so is facing reality squarely, without illusion or delusion. In the words of the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Americans are fucked, royally fucked and for the next generation, at minimum, we will be digging ourselves and our kin from beneath the rubble and toxic waste left by the Trump Regime. Though ruinous to my spirit, I start every day by reading the news. I also read Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The New Republic and the New Yorker. I’m a loyal listener of the excellent podcast, Background Briefing with Ian Masters. I take citizenship seriously because I understand the fragile nature of our civil and political rights. Over and over in 2022, 2023 and 2024 I warned that if Donald Trump returned to political power our country would become a kleptocracy in which corruption would become the norm and the rule of law optional.

It has happened at warp speed. One institution after another degraded, hollowed out and helmed by incompetent lickspittles. Trump and his pals, his enablers and accomplices in Congress and the courts, are robbing the United States at scale and I doubt anyone can make a clear accounting of the theft. Who can possibly keep track of all the side deals, grift schemes, insider trading and kickbacks, let alone the laws broken, ignored or trampled? Trump has taken over the United States, just as Vladimir Putin took over Russia. Qatar gifted Trump a Boeing 747 that will be upgraded and no doubt decorated in gaudy and gauche gold leaf at taxpayer expense; for Trump’s ridiculous ballroom Senate Republicans slipped a billion dollars of our money into a reconciliation bill; Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion in damages; presidential pardons are for sale; Trump is slapping his name or visage on federal buildings, airports, coins, paper money, even US passports. It goes on and on, day after day, out in the open, with a brazenness never seen in our history. Feckless Democrats wring their hands and the corporate-owned media normalizes it all. Trump’s allies and mouthpieces lie with ease and within the same statement contradict themselves. None of it seems to register on people with the power to do something about it. Over the past ten years Trump has power-washed away the line between right and wrong, sense and nonsense and swung a wrecking-ball at oversight, guardrails and all the cozy gentlemen’s agreements that kept the wheels greased for most of our republic’s 250 year history.

Old Jim Crow has been welcomed back to the South like a prodigal son returned from a long journey. The colored folk and Negroes will soon return to their rightful place of subordination and political impotence. The six radical, reactionary justices on the Supreme Court rolled out the welcome mat, and every state of the old Confederacy is rushing to redraw its voting maps. No need to wait until 2028 said the high court, you are free to restore Old Jim Crow immediately. Disenfranchise at will and with our blessing. Racism doesn’t exist!

The Supreme Court’s evisceration of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act changes the 2026 midterm landscape. Without a single vote being cast, Republicans stand to gain a dozen or more seats. As Ian Masters often says, “Republicans would rather cheat than compete.” Power is the game and the Republicans play ruthlessly and always put party ahead of country, their loyalty to Trump ahead of duty to their office or their constituents. The Democrats’ path to a House majority starts at the bottom of a hill, slippery with mud and blocked by felled trees. The only way Democrats can possibly win is through massive voter turnout, like what Hungarians recently did when they finally sent Viktor Orban packing. But to emulate Hungary, Americans must turn out in numbers too big to ignore, deny or litigate away. 70 to 75 percent of eligible voters. Massive. Historic. Overwhelming.

But consider this sobering statistic. Although voter turnout for the 2022 midterms was higher than normal, it was still only 46 percent of all eligible voters according to the US Election Project. 46 percent will not get the job done.

Our situation is more dire than people understand because of the many secret powers available to a US president, such as the National Emergencies Act (NEA), an umbrella for more than 100 emergency statutes; Trump has a full quiver of arrows he can employ to keep himself and his party in power. If you want to dig into the full panoply of secret powers, simply Google the NEA or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. In his latest book, Washington Is Burning, Andrew Cockburn writes about Presidential Emergency Action Documents or PEADs, and notes how they “authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties.” Trump could, and we should expect he will, impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus, seize control of the internet, impose censorship of the press, and jail so-called subversives.

I don’t know if the 2024 election was a moment of collective madness or something else, but American voters willingly gave power to a mentally deranged, venal career criminal because he promised lower costs for eggs and ground beef. Understand the magnitude of this own goal: 77 million voters chose Donald Trump after his utterly incompetent and deadly management of the Covid pandemic, after he instigated the January 6 coup attempt, after he stole classified material from the White House and stored it in a bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, after he was found liable for sexual assault in a New York court, and after another New York court convicted him of 34 courts of business fraud. Yes, our politics are broken, the Supreme Court is corrupt and Congress (both parties) pays lip service to the material and social needs of citizens while slavishly serving the Billionaire Class that is driving us toward serfdom, but none of that mitigates the fact that 77 million voters put Donald Trump back in power.

Why did this country hand an arsonist a lit blow torch and the keys to a tanker truck full of jet fuel? I will never understand the recklessness or stupidity behind this collective decision.

From the very beginning, the American democratic republic has been flawed. Now, as it turns 250 years old, it’s in desperate need of serious top-to-bottom structural reform, but for all its flaws, shortcomings, inconsistencies and contradictions, we will miss it when it’s gone. Our one hope to interrupt our descent is to decisively repudiate Trump and his MAGA enablers this November.