It’s been clear from just about the start that the Trump Administration and the MAGA movement are going down, and probably going down hard, and that the real issue is how many of us they’re going to drag along with them.
A lot of this is actually consistent with the catastrophism and apocalyptic worldview of the MAGA movement that is a large part of Trump’s animating power: The QANON-level conspiracy thinking, the global warming denial, the racist immigrant-invasion theory, the fake Christianity, the scapegoating promulgated by right-wing influencers (culture wars, grievance culture) that facilitates the economic exploitation of the precariat & working class.
This last-stand/good-vs-evil shitshow of a narrative enables the worst wannabe-authoritarianism … the unitary executive/monarchist power plays led by the Vought/Miller/Gorka cabal; the regressive deregulatory agenda and data-mining grift of the Elon Musk/DOGE/broligarch cabal, with their faux “efficiency” narrative; and the face stuffing and trough feeding of the Trump organization and its foreign emoluments, hotels, golf courses, market gaming, and, of course, its crypto scams.
It’s stupid, it’s illegal, its born to fail, they’re grabbing as much as they can while they can, damaging as much as they can while they can.
One of the tragedies of this moment is that a lot of what sucks about the failings of pre-Tea Party elephant/donkey politics in the U.S. — such as warmongering, de-industrialization, corporatism, wealth concentration, debt crisis, health care crisis, etc. — are actual, real problems. These cynical political operators are exploiting that genuine need for change as a cover story for their grifts, power grabs and economic scams.
The Trumpist MAGA movement is born to fail exactly because it will fail to address these real issues. It’s going to get worse, not better. Trump is not addressing the issues with any seriousness. Instead, it’s all dick-swinging, bravado, bullshitting and power plays.
Trump has both houses of Congress and has packed the courts. And yet his work is in large part not succeeding. So many of his signature policies he’s attempting to declare through EOs rather than going through the existing methods of creating policy — compromise, legislation, etc. — and they’re running headlong into the wall, again and again.
Tariffs? He rushed them through via EOs, and now the bipartisan judiciary, via Bush, Reagan and Obama appointees, are shutting them down. Why didn’t he go through Congress?
DOGE? A joke. The Institute of Peace even reclaimed their HQ and put their sign back up. Why didn’t he go through Congress? They have the appropriations powers. All we have now of DOGE is data mining by Big Ballz. Trump could have done a proper audit of a myriad agencies and shepherded it through Congress and had actual policy outcomes.
The only thing he’s really able to visibly and lastingly enact is revenge, Mafia-style rewards for his sycophants (see: presidential pardons), and ICE activities, which even the actually weaponized DOJ admits has circumvented due process.
All of these things could have gone through a more vetted and stable route through a friendly Congress and had much larger impact over time. Instead he’s rushed it through in displays of unitary executive power pushed by the likes of Vought, Gorka and Miller, his policies are being rolled back, and it seems that he’s setting up a massive groundswell grassroots backlash that may transform working-class, internationalist and human-rights politics for the long-haul.
(And I don’t mean the left equivalent of the Tea Party, which may or may not be a good thing for the moribund Democrats, but I digress.)
All he has left at this point—beyond the insane amount of money he and his family and cronies are making off crypto and illegal foreign emoluments deals—is declaring a state of emergency against protesters, which would be even more of a disaster. He could certainly count on the division that this would provoke, directly in the armed forces. And that’s what I mean by him and his cronies going down and dragging the rest of us with him. That’s the kind of reckoning that would be bloody, but one that our small-d democratic culture has the means to survive and arise from stronger than ever.
Or he could undertake the hard work of collaborating with a for-now friendly all-GOP Congress to pass actual legislation. Maybe this will happen with the “big beautiful bill”—an infantile nomenclature that reflects the infantile level of “discourse” in our political life—and maybe he’ll learn from that and start working within the norms of good governance.
But even that BBB will provoke political response. That’s just politics. That’s normal. And he doesn’t want that. Yeah, I’ll take politics as usual any day over a Reichstag Fire or other emergency-powers excuse. But will his vanity permit such a happy outcome as an actual political contest? Or is he going to keep speeding down the authoritarian highway? Maybe this is a matter of TACO. Or maybe he’ll go full kamikaze — what’s he got to lose?
He’s going down either way, and again, what really matters is how many of us he drags along with him.
