“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Donald Trump must have thought he had it made.
His pet Congress passed his omnibus budget bill to help people in his income range at the expense of everyone else. His pet Supreme Court basically takes every judicial case against him and finds some way to say that the Constitution still exists, but it just doesn’t apply to him. He got a bureaucracy that used to help with disaster relief to create an internment camp for brown people in Florida, and call it “Alligator Alcatraz.”
For lo, Donald Trump is the One Supreme Godhead, in whom, by whom, and for whom all things are made.
He even has direct control of the Kennedy Center, for he is Music, and he writes the songs.
There was actually a pretty good article by centrist Damon Linker on the general trend towards autocracy. The gist of it is that there is a lot of stuff that’s already been in the system (like the 1807 Insurrection Act) that could be used to create a dictatorship but did not because presidents previously acted in good faith. But just as there was no clear line separating the Weimar Republic from Nazi Germany, any change to the system would most likely happen laterally through existing laws and precedents and not by a clean break towards autocracy.
The punch line is: “How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.”
This country is going to have to take radical action to reform its government. That doesn’t mean nationalizing McDonald’s and turning it vegan. And it doesn’t mean writing legislation specifically against Jeff Bezos to punish him for being rich.
It does mean that if Congress does pass some bullshit statist law (like say, banning TikTok) and the Supreme Court agrees 9-0 that the ban stands, then the ban needs to be enforced as ordered, not postponed indefinitely because TikTok bribed Trump, Trump is our president, and in our country, we let the president do whatever he wants, the law be damned.
THAT level of monarchical corruption is bigger than anything the Republicans are doing with ICE. That at least was authorized by the One Big Bullshit Bill. But Trump defies both “his” Congress and “his” Supreme Court because we just let the president do whatever he wants.
But that needs to be changed, not least because all those Republicans who cheer and jeer for their Messiah aren’t going to feel so good when some other president who isn’t Trump (it might even be a Republican) tries to go in different directions and they think they need to stop him. Like Congress or the Supreme Court might raise an objection and then the new guy can just pull out Trump vs. United States and tell John Roberts “You see this thing you wrote here? Where’s my due deference, bitch?”
That’s the problem. The radical agenda to reshape this government doesn’t just assume that Republicans will get to run this country forever, it assumes that Trump will be president forever and he will never die and he will never age, even though everybody can see him getting slower, more tired and more confused every week. But the setup is basically built around Trump and his personalist Mob boss approach to the world, and once that’s gone, it’s not going to work the same way with someone else.
Especially since Trump’s signature accomplishment was an omnibus budget bill that took benefits away from constituents in primarily red states, which he could only pull off because everyone in the cult loves him so much, but then Elon Musk told us that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which apparently nobody knew before now!
That’s the goofy thing. When I mentioned Elon’s post a while ago, the public reaction to it seemed to be kinda muted. I mean, why not? I thought everybody already knew this. Didn’t the cult already know Trump was a convicted felon? Didn’t they elect him anyway? If they didn’t know about Jeffrey Epstein, they must be dumber than I thought. Shows me for underestimating them.
Of course the real issue is that it probably would have blown over if Trump could just play cool and keep his mouth shut. And you know how that always goes.
Like having FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who’d done so much to press for the release of the files before getting into government, suddenly turn around and say there was nothing to see and Epstein didn’t kill himself.
And then Pam Bondi’s Justice Department said there WERE no Epstein Files.
And when questioned about the whole thing at a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump lashed out at a reporter, asking why anybody would care.
And then, on July 12, Trump went on Truf Censhal and posted… THIS thing… https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/1944183426598257091
Wow. With a poker face like that, it’s no wonder Trump bankrupted six casinos.
Trump is the president of the United States. He and Pam Bondi have access to all the documents. He could release the Epstein Files at any time.
If he can’t, it’s because he’s IN them.
And even the paste-eaters in the Church of Trump are not yet so stupid as to where they can’t make basic deductions. They can still add two and two to make four. For Trump to survive, he has to convince them that two and two make five. That the Epstein Files that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did so much to demand, the files that the regime made a big deal about publicizing with White House ceremonies to hand out files to Trumpworld influencers, those files not only don’t exist and never existed, they were all made up by Hillary and Biden and Obama. And in this case it may be too much to ask, mainly because the whole premise of the Church of Trump is that their Lord and Savior is saving us all from the corruption of the Deep State, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he’s part of it.
Now, I personally am not going to believe things have changed until all the Trumpniks hate their Messiah as much as the rest of us do and they go out in the street and protest him like the rest of us do and come out in public and demand that he and his Mob be GONE.
And if it ever does get to that point, we’re gonna need to decide what to do with these people. Trump and all of his underlings who’ve done nothing but break the law under color of authority. Where are we gonna put them all when they’re awaiting trial?
Hey, isn’t there that new prison in Florida?