Once a booster of winners, America better find a new fable that rationalizes the bitter grievance of losing.
Easy quiz: who can unearth even a whiff of “winning” linked to MAGA Trumpism in a year? How much easier to indict Trump contradictions as monumental surges configured for “so much losing.” What other president will be shunned as an agent of national suicide, managing to reverse two centuries of arguable success. Who could imagine a year ago one feckless movement of losers turning a global top dog into outcast also-ran? The world’s greatest economic superpower is being deconstructed by self-consuming MAGA rage, rather like a Greek tragedy and with three painfulyears to go. Either this happens, per AlterNet, Three signs Trump’s presidency is in a death spiral – or death spirals debase America.
What hasn’t gone bonkers domestically, whether the painful tariff/affordability squeeze, job losses, shredded health care, nutrition, and life supports, or gutted, life-saving science? Plus, the worst, most indefensible disgrace of all –a wave of ICE cruelty, homicides, and abuses, jailing bona fide citizens and law-abiding immigrants. Trumpism delivers a domestic plague of Biblical proportion, worsened by the latest infamy, an unjustified, blundering attack on Iran. That epic disaster-on-tap crowns months of belligerent, dead-end folly threatening Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, and Panama. The whopping short and long term losses, in money, mortality and prestige, will destabilize America as a world power, breaking records for imperial self-destruction.
Pick your favorite cringe comments
We all have favorite, jaw-dropping Trump gaffes, notable for displacing prior whoppers. First up in irrational, indefensible lurches, unthinkable by any marginally-qualified, reality-bound president: “I alone can fix everything.” From a mendacious failure who can’t fix anything while expert at breaking all that he touches. Perhaps you favor, “I will drain the swamp,” as the dumbest, most misleading lie. From a dim demagogue who openly drains the entire D.C. swamp into one White House? Or maybe, when refuting any checks his godlike authority, Trump pontificated, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.”From an immoral, career thug who scoffs at any curbs to his “perfect” gut instincts?
I nominate this reality-assaulting whack-a-doddle, spouted in 2016, “We are going to win so much you will get tired of winning.” Then, asif repeating make-believe makes it truer, a decade later, “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Mister President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore.’ ”
Well, a huge majority “can’t take it anymore,” too much “winning.” Unlike the other absurdities, this fabrication isn’t about Trump’s delusional volition but real-world outcomes measurable by voters. Folks know when they are better off or not, vs. future, phony baloney abstractions like “drain the swamp” or “fixing everything.” Prosperity or misery transcend heinous claims of Trumpian “morality,” exposing the cover-up chicanery to bury worse-case scenarios, like Epstein, billionaire bribery or lose-lose wars.
The undeniable, indefensible reality has shaken all but hardcore fanatics: all but the richest are demonstrably worse off today, as just after his first term, anchored to Trump’s second Great Disaster. Even the ablest debater is stymied, unable to defend mind-boggling Trump reversals about “so much winning.” The case stands, not whether we are losing, but the massive degree of destruction and the final costs, not just to living conditions but truth-telling, integrity of elections, DOGE demolition, and discarded legal and human rights. All that on top of turning politics into corrosive, calculated wedges to divide blasted citizens with verifiable common values, interests and futures. Thus, a 2026 Pew Research Center poll confirmed America (of 25 surveyed) as the only country where a majority (53%) describe the morality and ethics of fellow countrymen as “bad.” If this is not an overwhelming indictment of divisive MAGA “winning,” what is?
MAGA staggers too when America blows up
The betrayal of truth (facts, evidence, consensual reality) is the first and most significant grounds for self-destructive losing, even as Iran adds to the blight. If winning across the board matters, we can’t tolerate any leader lying as often, as brutally and as harmfully as Trump, who cares if from bad faith, manipulation or stupidity. Reality exacts its price, whether with deaths from banished vaccines or all the unintended consequences from incompetent, corrupt circus that offends allies, friends and independents. Dazzled as always, understandable with compromised people, the MAGA base can’t see the nasty bulldozer crashing America and their own backyards, symbolically exposed with the demolition of the East Wing, closing the Kennedy Center, or wiping out the federalist support networks that feed and medically care for the needy.
Because the idea of losing makes badly-informed rightwingers gag,” MAGA clings to the costly, amazing delusion that if they just hold on long enough, magical spoils will “trickle down” and make them whole. Not from anything Trump decides, nor from this perverse cabinet. Few positives (and heavy Covid negatives) battered the first Trump term, with new job numbers then and now drastically inferior to both Obama and Biden. This vile second go-round is worse, as tariff inflation steals buying power on groceries and family homes. The bottom two-thirds or more, ever fearful for offspring prospects, were under duress even before Trumpism took his chain saw to federalist supports. Mid-term projections leave much higher grievance levels clearer than ever – and a failed or lengthy war in Iran only makes bad times worse still. What is Trumpism even proposing, let alone doing with an even marginal chance to deliver “so much winning”?
How many suckered, low-information Trump voters struggle to understand how gullible to miss the unmistakable truths about Trump both the sneering, career outlaw and Trump the horrendous chief executive? Theatrical performances are the only thing Trump does well, outdoing even dishonest prosperity-gospel preachers by promising a shameless fable, not merely pie not in the sky but coming, soon, all the while punishing dastardly woke liberals. The only yellow brick road towards more affluence for the under-trained or geographically-limited is to match skills with today’s employment demands or pull up stakes and move to less benighted areas.
The fool’s game of betting for D.C. redemption
Staying put or just whining, waiting for personal “wins” by cheering on distorted cable news, let alone counting on redemption from the Trumpian Godot, is the ultimate hallucination. The fate of economic losers is to increase losing, subsidizing the very predators stealing, as with illegal tariffs, money from wallets. That empty spectacle (except for billionaires) is arguably in its death throes, offending centrists, former enablers, even rank opportunists rushing for exits before the walls tumble. The only remaining question is how much of American achievement in prosperity and living conditions will crash when MAGA Trump does. Dozens of stalwart, re-electable GOP House members have had enough, skeptical of any correlation between more Trumpism and anything that smacks of “so much winning.” As one commentator, dzepp on an AP website, quipped on GOP retirements, “Another life boat sails away from the SS Trumptanic.”
The Titanic catastrophe, equally caused by flawed, insular pigheadedness, has nothing on Trumpism and each week we endure the horror of seeing what was, alas, always there. Like Shakespearean or Greek tragedy, it’s never fate alone when human depravity and misjudgments add to the chaos. Any potential light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t, however, obscure the subsequent pain and suffering that accrues when a failed movement is empowered but lacks the means to escape its own self-made, death-dealing conundrums.
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