It’s so fucking dumb. It’s the inevitable result of impeachments without conviction, and filibuster without having to show up, and blocking appointments without consequence – the MAGA movement has decided that since nothing has consequences, rules and laws mean nothing. We’ve basically fed Article I of the Constitution into a chipper shredder and allowed the President to allow a drug-addled shaved monkey billionaire to stage a leveraged buyout of the federal government.
It’s not even a proper reduction in the size of government, executed by passing laws through a Congress that the GOP ostensibly controls. It’s more like going through a person and saying “you don’t need an appendix, you don’t need toes, you definitely don’t need TWO kidneys, look at all this small intestine, nobody needs a small AND a large intestine, it’s woke to give women separate holes for pooping AND giving birth when it’s all pushing stuff out” – there is absolutely no actual knowledge behind the decision-making.
The more frustrating bit is this: Trump got 49% of the vote. His margin of victory in the popular vote was smaller this time than the margin Hillary Clinton beat him by in 2016. And yet, the press treats this as the Mandate of Heaven and a sweeping triumph, and the Democrats flop around as if 48% of the electorate didn’t vote against this exact thing. The Democrats cannot muster a tenth of the pushback against Trump that the Republicans did against Obama in 2009, and that is an absolute disgrace. They need a wartime consigliere, too young to remember black and white TV, who has actually fought a competitive election since the invention of the World Wide Web and isn’t living in trauma of Reagan in 1984.
Democrats can’t fix this. They can’t even appreciably ameliorate this. What they can do is make sure everyone knows whose fault it is and give the appearance that they’re strewing glass in the path. They need to get on that right now, or find someone who will, because otherwise we are done for my lifetime.
If I could obtain a job and citizenship in some other EU-or-equivalent country right now, I’d be off like a shot. But that’s not on offer. After all those years, I’m back in Alabama without ever leaving California, and help isn’t coming.