Forget demented personalities, perverse mindsets, laughable trickery and militant propaganda. What matters most is the direct impact on real lives of those most besieged, with ripples that paralyze the next generation.
As MAGA’s federal court rebukes explode, the AlterNet headline catches the moment: “That’s a lot of losses,” says legal beagle Elie Mystal, making this administration by far “the biggest loser” in American judicial history. Judicial denials are but temporary checks on MAGA assaults that ransack economic growth, human rights, health and safety, clean energy, and functional global trade. The disease goes beyond D.C., spanning Florida, Texas, red states, and billionaire-bought, extremist politicians and influencers far and wide. As the scope is national, so are the real-world impacts.
The visible domestic losses are undeniable and worsening: fewer jobs, higher prices, stagnating growth (vs. stunning failed promises), petrified wages, knee-jerk, belligerent militarism and unsinkable sex scandals. All knitted together with nonstop lying from top to bottom. What else happens when trusting crackpots like Laura Loomer, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, JD Vance, and RFK Jr, the least qualified, thus most lethal cabinet member ever? Can one willfully arrogant relative exile the three-Kennedy legacy into the Trumpster dumpster?
When have so many mean-spirited politicians managed so much damage to so many millions in such a short time? Midterms can’t come soon enough to check the carnage, for a Democratic House can use serial impeachments as opening gambit restraints. Brace for further self-destructive moves oozing from the MAGA swamp. Is not today’s reign of error, like the Trump brand, its own worst enemy, embracing debacle after debacle.
Question for the next year: how much losing and failure-driven misery can America’s working class, let alone centrist constituency, take? How can ruthlessly “burning it all down” not end up with mounds of burnt cinders? Do fewer disease/pandemic experts not invite suicidal outcomes? Are dead-in-their-tracks whoppers (attacking state-run mail-in voting) not cynical, desperate nihilism? How many aroused Trumpers already have big-time buyers’ remorse?
Progress be damned!
So Paul Krugman asks, Why Does the Right Reject Progress?,” with this stinger, “The perverse push to make America miserable again.” Are we not eight months into national devolution, as a tactically aggrieved, misinformed gang into revenge runs towards a steep cliff? Krugman: “America is now ruled by people who hate progress of all kinds, economic and social as well as scientific. They refuse to acknowledge the progress we’ve made on multiple fronts and are doing their best to reverse it.” Is not the opposite of intelligence unshakeable stupidity?
MAGA types so addictive to using violence and fear as revenge, Krugman declares,
they can’t accept the idea that America prospered, not by using its power to dominate other nations, but . . . adhering to international agreements that kept world markets open. . . . They can’t accept the idea that cities can be relatively safe, not because armed men are keeping everyone in line, but because most Americans—whatever their national origin or the color of their skin—are decent people more inclined to get along with their neighbors than to hate them.
Dire headlines come from sources left and right. From Democratic adviser Simon Rosenberg’s blog: “after almost eight months of this historic shit-show, [it’s] becoming harder and harder for any reasonable person to put lipstick on the Trumpian pig and ignore the damage he is doing to the country, his clear physical and cognitive decline, and the ongoing and intense rejection of him and his agenda by the American people.” Thom Hartmann: “Trump’s horrific cult contains the seeds of its own destruction,” and Michael Cohen argues “America is at war with itself,” that “‘Conservative’ principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.” Amy Goodman clocks in with Don’t Despair: Trump Keeps Losing Bigly.
Robert Reich piles on, after shrunken jobs numbers: “Trump’s latest fail threatens the GOP.” From another brilliant Krugman interview this weekend, “Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann,” climatologist Michael Mann concludes,
if you look at the policies now of the Republican Party, almost every single policy goes against the interests of the voters who are actually voting for them. That’s the amazing achievement, that they’ve been able to create this army that wins elections and is weaponized to further their very specific agenda, the agenda of the plutocrats at the top of this whole structure who profit from this.
For Mann, it’s no accident “people like Elon Musk want to go to Mars. They figure they’re going to destroy this planet, but they can probably colonize some other planet. They think that their wealth and technology can buy them out of any problem we create, and that simply isn’t true.” To which Krugman replies, “the United States may be turning itself into an island of barbarism amidst the larger world.”
A war also against the intellect
Mann links the entire anti-expertise, anti-knowledge, anti-science agenda not only to fossil-fuel propaganda but a myriad of profit-obsessed hustlers selling fake medicines, supplements, crypto, and MAGA doodads. Who needs education when everyone (MAGA) “knows” COVID shutdowns were wrongheaded, vaccines dangerously fraudulent, and climate change a calculated hoax? Per Mann: “It took centuries to build the leading scientific infrastructure in the world here in the United States. And it’ll only take years to destroy it. And once you destroy it, you’re not going to rebuild it.” Thus Mann links the current assault on academia:
It’s not coincidental. It’s not accidental. This is one of the last remaining institutions in a position to speak truth to power. That’s a threat to the bad actors that we’re dealing with today. And so those of us within academia need to do everything we can to make sure that our administrations observe and respect the bedrock principles upon which these institutions were based.
There is marginal good news (beyond courts and massive criticism), especially if more fed-up, ex-Republicans, like Oregon State Rep. Cyrus Javadi, switch parties. Javadi explains:
It’s not about governing. It’s about burning things down . . . isolating minority communities when politically convenient. It’s about waving the Constitution when it helps your argument and ignoring it when it doesn’t. That’s not conservative. That’s opportunistic, [corroding] everything it touches. I’ve had enough of politics as performance art.
Finally, from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a distinguished conservative Republican, ex-Dubya and Cain adviser, no fan of Biden or Democrats. The Wash Post headline confirms he’s “The Republican economist who says Trump is wrong about almost everything.” Blogger Holtz-Eakin pulls no punches, “The private sector is ‘dead in the water,’ an early August missive asserted. Anyone who thinks Trump’s tariff policy will be temporary is “crazy optimistic,” an April essay predicted. And inflation’s“upward pressures” will continue, Tuesday’s said.” Aghast at Treasury’s Scott Bessent’s nonsense that tariffs would both raise $300 billion and boost gross domestic product, he wrote, “There is simply no excuse for this gibberish to appear anywhere in the public domain.”
Eviscerating Trump, Holtz-Eakin described the void of policy coherence, neither free market, nor socialism. There’s no “ideology because it has no central tenets and principles. The toddler-in-chief doesn’t have any. I mean he’s capricious.” “He just sells out the country and trumpets it as another ‘art of the deal’ moment,” adding:
The fire wall is the American people. He was elected with the simple job of delivering better economic performance, growth in the standard of living with low inflation. And he’s on track to fail. And failure won’t be tolerated, and the people who supported it . . . will pay a deep price.
Across the boards, there’s high agreement MAGA Trump exposes negligent ignorance on tariffs, trade, the importance of key trading partners, diplomacy to stop brutal wars, immigration law and practices. To cover their ass, Trumpers fall back on extortion and intimidation, unearthing novel criminal ways to break the law and offend millions. Passing so many points of no-return inevitably incurs the shipwrecks of inflation without raises or job growth—stagflation if not recession.
Krugman’s spot on: MAGA Trump is out to make America miserable, at this point its sole predictable “achievement.” Any president idiotic enough to squander inherited (and slandered Biden) economic strengths will enlist wrecking balls to batter what he can’t and won’t understand. Thus the ongoing, hellish destiny of merging economic and spiritual bankruptcy. Par for the Trump course. If success (and intelligence) feed on what works, willful, blockheaded failures lurch from bad to worse.
Live with revenge and die with revenge as reality will punish MAGA with the retribution of disgrace and permanent failure. Just as the world obeys unchangeable physical laws, so there are fixed thresholds in the economic and political world. Reality is ultimately a higher court than any biased, defective, lame-brain partisan gang arrogant enough to think it can commandeer everything.
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