Everybody’s worried about the future
Don’t take that vaccine, man
They’ll turn you into a computer
Well out here in your local jungle, ain’t nobody vaccinated
We spend our time throwin’ shit at each other
And hangin’ out masturbatin’
- Viagra Boys, Return to Monke
Thursday was May 1, which most of the world celebrates as International Workers’ Day. In America workers’ day is Labor Day in September. Which was specifically invented to avoid any association with May Day. Because while May Day is more a left-wing or European socialist thing, it was actually marked to commemorate the May 1 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago in which labor protestors were killed by police.
It is testimony to how much of a phobia this country has towards the Left that we hardly know anything about our own history. But some of that phobia is justified. Based on the example of Leninist countries, Americans think of “socialism” as a system where the government is run by one party, and that one party is controlled by one man, and that one man can tell businesses what they can trade, can tell teachers and libraries what they can teach, can tell newspapers what to print, can tell you who you can marry and whether you get to live or die.
And the irony of so many leftists going out on May Day 2025 to protest the Trump regime is not just that they are protesting a man whose policies are everything non-socialist Americans have been taught to hate, it’s that he has the “right-wing capitalist” party backing him up because of those very policies.
And as for those liberals who cry that Trump is trying to destroy everything FDR was trying to do, FDR is half of the reason we’re in this fix. To be sure, Franklin D. Roosevelt is the real Founding Father of the modern United States pre-Trump. And it is his model of social democracy and redistribution that Trump is ultimately trying to destroy. But to get the powers he needed to remake the government, Roosevelt did more than anybody before him (or before Trump) to turn the federal government into one where Congress follows the President’s agenda, and not the other way around.
Nevertheless, if “small government” Republicans actually cared about that fact, they would be doing more to restore Congress’ powers under Article I of the Constitution, as opposed to only caring about them when a Democrat is in charge and giving the President that much more unaccountable power when he’s their guy. Which of course bites them when a Democrat gets back in charge. Which is why it seems like their project for the next two years is to make sure a Democrat can never win an election again.
All of which helps to explain the current situation. Ultimately, there are two reasons for Republican servitude, which are equally prominent:
One, they live in fear of the literal Mob that Trump commands, a mob that would take any legal and constitutional effort against Trump as “the Deep State” trying to overthrow their favorite reality TV star and incidental president;
Two, the Republicans who are not themselves part of that Mob might be more intelligent than Donald Trump but are no less evil, and they see Trump as their vehicle for absolute power, which they would not have without his magic mind control skill for selling total bullshit.
If you don’t believe me, consider the stuff that the Republican Congress has come up with in 2025 on its own initiative.
The House passed the SAVE Act, ostensibly to curb illegal voting by noncitizens, but does so by requiring any voter to produce their original birth certificate, which most of us don’t have, and such information would not apply to any woman who married and took her husband’s name. Trump had signed an executive order to similar effect, but it can be challenged in state court. This is an action by Congress to change the election rules on a federal level. Apparently this is being blocked in the Senate by Democratic quorum to filibuster, which was uncertain given that four Democrats in the House actually voted for this.
On the other hand, for the same reason Senate Republicans would not approve the bill from Rand Paul (R.-Kentucky) to end Trump’s emergency declaration justifying his global tariffs.
The House Judiciary Committee sent approval on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” for the coming budget, but Politico reports the committee added a new wrinkle: Their version of the bill would hand Trump more power than he’s (a) already been handed and (b) taken without asking. The new version takes the power to write major regulations from agencies and gives it to Congress — and hands Trump what Politico calls “sweeping powers to erase existing federal regulations from the books.” (Hat tip: The Fucking News. )
So the point is that even left to their own devices, Republicans are not just refusing to assert the Article I powers of Congress, they are using them to give the current president more authority than he even asked for.
And that is because, despite their name, they do not believe in preserving a republic, unless the government is a banana republic.
When Americans say, “we have no kings”, well, Canada technically is still under the King’s Governor-General, and they just rejected a Trump wannabe in their federal election, so they’re doing a better job with this democracy thing than we are. Republicans might call themselves “conservative” or the current catch-phrase “post-liberal”, but what they are is pre-liberal; they don’t want to restore the monarchy of King George III, they want their Leader to have more powers than the British monarch could have after signing the Magna Carta. And they want this because they have the culture-war goals that they directly stated in Project 2025 and they need to undermine democracy so that the government only represents the people who are on board with that agenda.
The movers and shakers of the post-Tea Party Republicans again might be smarter and more in touch with reality than Trump, but only in that they aren’t perpetually spoiled, congenitally stupid and progressively senile. They are that much more motivated to ideological goals that the public will not support, as opposed to Trump, who doesn’t care about ideology and can occasionally do the popular thing for the sake of expediency. What replaces Trump in the Republican Party is not going to be an improvement on the first 100 days. It’s going to be worse.
But just as Democrats coasted on the mass appeal of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while each president lost Congressional representation for his party, Republicans rely heavily on the president to get success for their party. Because that’s what works.
Why? Because you take Trump away and the Republican pre-liberal agenda isn’t that popular outside states where their party is guaranteed to win. Since the Civil War, the president’s party has lost ground in the House in 38 of 41 midterms, with the only exceptions coming in 1934, 1998, and 2002. In the first Trump midterm, 2018, Republicans lost 40 House seats. (In 2010 under Obama, Democrats lost 63 seats.) Even in 2024, voters affirmed state initiatives to guarantee abortion rights against the Republican platform. In 2024, Democrats won Senate seats in states Trump carried because Trump voters either split the ticket or simply didn’t vote for other Republican candidates. With Trump, that much more than Democrat presidents, elections are a referendum on his popularity, and if he’s not on the ballot, nobody cares about his Party.
Republicans can’t sell their goals as good in themselves. These goals don’t even appeal to most working-class folks because they’re just as tied to ideology as the old free-marketeer politics. Their premises are based on a small number of people with minority views that would not succeed on a national consensus, but they need a national consensus to get power. So they need to go outside ideology and ideas, since most voters don’t have ideology and ideas. They need to go on the basis of appeal, which they don’t have. They need somebody who isn’t tied to a philosophy, because he doesn’t have one. Someone who is just as uncommitted and distrustful of “the system” as the average voter.
In short, Republicans need Trump, who can convince everybody from Joe Rogan to Richard Hanania that he’s somehow outside the system and thus a better choice to improve things than a default Republican, let alone a default Democrat.
In any case, they have a problem. Trump is now older than Joe Biden was when he was first inaugurated and there is a non-zero chance that he will die of old age before 2028, making any talk of an unconstitutional third term moot. At which point there are four possibilities: The least likely is that Trump will resurrect after three days and prove himself to be the returned Messiah. Somewhat more likely, he could die normally and then spend the rest of the 21st Century as a zombie while he ties up his case in litigation with God. More likely than that, Trump’s ‘administration’ could pull a Weekend at Bernie’s routine using AI fakes for non-live events and animatronics on his corpse for interviews and fundraisers. If the AI spews out word salad and the body smells like rot and perfume, few will notice the difference.
The fourth and most logical possibility is that JD Vance takes on his constitutional role and succeeds Trump. And at that point Republicans would have to hope that the American public will be as charmed by his Liz Taylor eyelashes as Peter Thiel was. But it’s not looking like it. To review, JD Vance is a very good writer, and he is capable of articulating a social philosophy, which is more than Trump can do, but nobody cares about that. And Vance himself is so personally repellent that he destroyed our diplomatic overtures to nations ranging from Ukraine to Greenland. And so the Republicans will once again be confronted with their dilemma. The Party without Trump is actually more evil and destructive but it also wouldn’t be able to sell the agenda.
If you wonder why Republicans goose-stepped back in line after January 6 2021, when Trump sent a mob of goons to break into the Capitol and kill them, this is why.
And if Trump dies tomorrow, you have Vance. And if anything happens to Vance, his successor in the system is House Speaker Mike Johnson. Who would probably be worse than either of them. Next in succession would be Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) who has a brain but is just as ideological as the rest of them, plus, he’s old enough that Noah owes him money. With the exception of Robert Kennedy Jr. (technically not a Republican but very much a MAGAt) it’s Republicans all the way down.
Republicans couldn’t get elected without Trump, but since they have him, they can do whatever they want. Trump is so radical and incompetent that he’s accelerating the agenda too much, but he’s already been impeached twice, and he’s never going to be convicted in the Senate, because Republicans will always be there for him.
One without the other is doomed. Together they are invincible.
But one is an individual, not an institution. The latter will survive the former. And when the individual is gone, this country is going to have to come to a reckoning with the institution that served Trump, not just because many Republicans saw him as an aspirational role model, but because he was actually the most moderate and popular candidate that the Republican Party had.
Trump is the symptom.
They are the problem.