The best comeuppance for the first anti-American administration – perpetual exposure as the seditious Constitution-killing party

Electoral, then political payback kicks off the most lasting legal, moral, and knowledge-based assault against discredited MAGA betrayal of Constitutional government

Once upon a time, in a fit of pique induced by punitive fates, a boastful nation contracted a terrible, internal sickness – infected by fundamentalism, racism, wishful thinking, and ignorant reductionism. Not thanks to a foreign invasion, economic disaster, global pandemic, not even a looming asteroid – just the searing contradictions of a country too big for its britches, devolving into a dangerous world leader. Thus it came to pass that a regressive 2024 minority rose up because they just couldn’t stand things as they were, certainly all prior presidents but one. The rampaging, radical gang demanded recognition, then control, then domination, as if a strongman autocratic theocracy was just what highly skeptical founders envisioned.

But that mission takes more political savvy than backing a vulgar and thoughtless, scandalized criminal, propped up now by more losers than even cyncial observers thought possible. Clueless that overweening pride sets up a fall, the self-righteous wanted change for change sake, whatever the destructive downsides. How predictable the willfully anointed, strutting as if infallible, fall the hardest (and fastest).

MAGA berzerkers badly underestimate the backbone of liberty-loving (if neglectful) citizens who still harbor dreams of freedom, decency, and some sort of functional, diverse community with common ground. What subversive values! MAGA Trumpism, in its manic quest for a lost, fantasy golden age, didn’t embrace a fresh new face with bold new ideas – perhaps without a bloated criminal record and career full of scandals.

Nope, despite a first term marked by economic and diplomatic blunders, scores of needless Covid deaths, and body blows to US prestige, 49% again swallowed new, preposterous MAGA lies and phony promises from its smash-mouth renegade. Rather like, having shot one’s foot, the second gets blasted to test one’s pain threshold. Suicide isn’t painless. Pity historians who must explain rampant destroyers burning down a system they refuse to understand, echoes of wickedly murdering “evil” witches to “banish all evil from the land.”

Democracy not immune from mob rule

Who said gullible voters couldn’t be just as cracked-brain as your average flat-earth fundamentalist – or those who lie about humans riding dinosaurs – or that vaccines aren’t safe? Who said mass bigotry (vilifying a minority, Bidenesque woman from a liberal state) would never target justice, fairness, and civil rights, all the while ruining trade, jacking up inflation, installing ICE, and committing war crimes by bombing an Iranian girls school, among others? An unchecked, vainglorious decider is a world decimator. To paraphrase Voltaire, schemers “who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Leveraging gut instinct alone, blind to the dysfunctional personality of the irate top dog, is the MAGA absurdity that facilitates today’s atrocities. And also its downfall. Rash change that defies logic and history makes things worse, reducing complex tasks to soundbites; yet enough chronic failures now drive a justly aggrieved mid-term majority to defy lunacy – though a new Congress will not be a cure-all, just a brake.

And yet America can still learn two invaluable lessons: 1) presidents, especially when vengeful outlaws using judicial delays to enact illegal, subversive disruptions, have enormous power to mess up; and 2) four-year regimes last a long time, prompting forcefully educated voters to avoid the next defective yahoo. Still, hardcore MAGA don’t question the untethered ICE war against human rights – as that was exactly the plan. Should decades of Trump’s tariff-madness not inform today’s blunders, nor the sky-rocketing prices and chaos that result? Is chronic contempt for law a shocker considering first term blackmail, theft of state secrets or the J6 treason? Is an unbelievably unqualified cabinet not key to the Trump war against functional government, operating as enemy of the people? What terror has MAGA Trump done since January 2025 that’s out of character, enabled by corrupt lackeys equally without character, competence or trustworthiness?

The folly of re-electing the first anti-American president

No Trump voters can now blithely deny what they willfully endorsed – the smug arrogance, gross ineptitude, and self-absorption of the world’s most infamous malignant narcissist. Who denies the MAGA menace was not broadcast by insurrection, felony convictions, Epstein corruption, medical stupidity and admiration for enemy dictators? Only a few estranged rightwingers even admit the sequence for today’s horror show. That things would go from bad (first term) to worse (last 20 months) were wholly predictable, just like the exploding blowback at the evil-doing achieved. If mass voters in the next decade don’t honor reason, forget much headway against an array of broken systems, from the Supreme Court, Electoral College, daily corruption showboating, battered civil and voting rights, and subsidizing MORE fossil fuel pollution.

We must admit, pace Lincoln, that MAGA did fool enough of the people (in key states) enough of the time. Worse still, if Russia or China wanted a Manchurian candidate (a brainwashed stooge who betrays his own background and constituency), could they have surpassed the tariff-spewing, law-breaking, NATO hating, Canada-abusing dolt without a clue about managing the military or war-making? What historic top leader (except bona fide Communists) would ever be so pro-Russian, betray Ukrainian allies and their sovereignty, or let Israeli genocide proceed without any restraints? No other modern president (notwithstanding all the Peace Prize buffoonery) would have attacked Iran, blind to its religious reign or ability to readily counter far more costly, high-tech barrages? Not even Dubya was that dumb.

The triple-witching of America

Never obscured are the four wicked witches of Trumpism: criminal corruption (crypto scams, stock profits tied to government largesse, play-to-play pardons, blackmail both domestic and overseas), manipulation of religious zealotry to back the crudest of nationalism (with empty threats, loss of prestige, tariffs, and broken alliances), overt white-is-right racism (ICE, DEI abuses, denial of church/state separation, buying South African immigration), and crude, John Wayne showdown foreign policies, that gain American nothing but lost prestige, lost commerce, lost affluence and greater military humiliations.

If midterms don’t exile backward fundamentalists plus militant gun owners plus libertarian oligarchs from their current power, then expect more sabotage of a legally-based secular government capable of doing good for good reasons. If midterms don’t decimate today’s reinfection of Confederate-style supremacy (on immigration, voting, housing/transport decisions), then intolerance, injustice and hypocrisy command the public forum. And yet enough endlessly bad news right now – crowning Reaganism, the Powell memo, Silent majority/Tea Party extremism, spinelessness by both parties and all presidents since WWII, empowered billionaires (thanks to Citizens United, repealing Glass/Steagall, 1996 Telecommunication Act) – instigate the necessary pendulum that aims to redeem the best values of America.

We still have a chance to reverse MAGA perversions towards even more broken, more self-serving government, and recommit, if not towards greatness, than at least “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as worthy, democratic goals.