[See editorial notes at bottom]
It’s no mystery what they want to do. In their Project 2025, they have written in painstaking detail their plans to liberate the American government from rules that prevent corruption and abuse of power. They will drum seasoned experts out of the federal government and replaced by sycophants chosen to their loyalty to a malignant narcissistic who is all but promising an end to institutional constraints on executive power. They will capitalize on 60 years of hysterical demonization of the government to justify a radical remaking of American life. You can hear it in their apocalyptic rhetoric, which presents the government as an enemy of the people that must be rooted out in one swift and punishing blow.
You are a fool if you think a second Trump administration will be a repeat of the first. Trump knows that he’s on course to die bankrupt and locked up in prison. For the first time in his long and sordid career as a conman, he faces true accountability—and he is panicking. He’s always been able to use daddy’s money to bail him out, but now he faces dozens of felonies in jurisdictions up and down the East Coast.
But Trump knows that he has a lifeline. If he can just get back into the White House, he can make all his problems magically go away in a snap of the fingers. He and his psychopathic allies have regrets. They were too timid last time. They made the mistake of listening to the lawyers and bureaucrats. Next time they’ll swing for the fences. They have no choice. These trials and investigations must end or Donald Trump and accomplices will be exposed twelve ways from Sunday. The walls are closing in. And I bet he’s not the only prominent politician whose sphincter is puckered right now.
It always seemed so strange the way conservative attitudes about Vladimir Putin turned on a dime after Obama’s reelection. Before the election, the conservative party line was that Putin was a dangerous thug who meant to harm our nation. Then, suddenly, dead-inside ideologues like Tucker Carlson began sharing borderline homoerotic photos of a shirtless Putin riding a horse. Their message was childish: OBAMA IS TOO MUCH OF A PUSSY TO STAGE SHIRTLESS PHOTO OPS.
That they were amplifying obvious Russian propaganda didn’t bother them in the slightest. In the aftermath of the Romney defeat, a brilliant and charismatic multi-racial Democratic president was poised to fix the destruction left behind by the failed Bush presidency. The Republican National Committee released a “post-mortem” report to identify lessons learned for the Republican. The report presented the Republican Party’s struggles to attract support outside of the party’s declining base of rural white men as an existential threat. It recommended that the GOP develop a more inclusive message to broaden their coalition.
The base of the Republican Party drew a much different conclusion. For them, ideological purity trumped everything. They were not the least bit interested in trying to broaden their coalition. They were not interested in deviationism. They believed that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. In 2018, at the height of Trump chaos, David Frum had become alarmed about the growing conservative infatuation with right-authoritarianism:
Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
In 15 years, David Frum had gone from coining the phrase “axis of evil” to joining the sprawling Deep State conspiracy arrayed against our rightful god-emperor.
It’s a curious sentiment for a high-ranking Republican to suggest that his party no longer cared about democracy. In his writerly way, David Frum was screaming at the American public to pay attention—but, like so much since 2016, his warnings were quickly swallowed up by the Spectacle. Republican true believers gleefully shared these photos not just because they loathed Obama with the hatred of 1000 suns. Their passion for Putin was real. Unlike Obama, who they (insanely) denounced as a Marxist, Putin’s Russia was open for business…if you had the right connections. Putin knows how to handle liberals who attack God and country. Go burn the Russian flag on the streets of Moscow and see where you end up, buddy. Ask Pussy Riot how Putin handles mouthy liberals who bash religion and criticize the state. Eight years ago, the House Majority leader was recorded musing whether Trump was on Putin’s payroll. but I’m a paranoid stoner when I express similar questions now?
Can someone please explain to me the Republican party’s curious obstruction of Ukraine’s war effort against Putin’s naked territorial aggression? Putin’s wars of conquest in eastern Europe are every bit as criminal as Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990 that prompted this nation to send a half a million troops to the desert to undo. But here is open racist Tucker Carlson flying to Moscow to lick Putin’s boot and ask him softball questions. I keep trying to explain to my wife my crazy theories about how the war in Ukraine and America’s political dysfunction are linked, but she’s tired of my obsessive rants. I tell her how profoundly bored I am with fucking politics and how much I’d love to not want to punch things every time I read the news.
When Trump lies awake in bed at night, two visions dance before his eyes—one hellish and the other heavenly. In the first vision, he sees himself in a jumpsuit in chow hall with the other inmates. For a man who values money and nothing else, such accountability is unthinkable. He prefers to dwell on the heavenly vision. He daydreams about his hero Vladimir Putin and the great fun they can have corrupting the planet. By some accounts, Putin—a lifelong government employee—is the wealthiest man in Earth, with an estimated fortune of up to a quarter trillion dollars. Trump has long fanboyed over Putin. Putin is Trump’s ideal leader: strong, ruthless, dishonest, rapacious, and (most importantly) rich. It matters not a whit to Trump that Putin robbed and immiserated his own people to achieve such stratospheric wealth, for they are both dead-inside psychopaths. If the leader of Russia can become the richest man on Earth, he thinks, what could the president of the United States could accumulate if things were properly set up?
Trump will not make the same mistake twice. All he has to do to shake off constitutional constraints is ignore them. If the corrupt, illegitimate Roberts Court issues an adverse ruling, he will simply issue an executive order nullifying it. If Congress tries to restrain him, he will ignore them too. He will ratchet up the emotional temperature of the country, generating a constant background feeling of emergency—and then he will find convenient targets for this hysteria: immigrants, “wokeness”, trans kids, socialists. They have spent billions since 1972 to generate this anger, which has become like a ringing in ears so constant we don’t even notice it anymore. He will dial up and down the temperature as needed to distract, confuse, and enhance his cult of personality.
He has already telegraphed his intentions to capitalize on the GOP’s decades-long game of blocking immigration reform so they can claim that Democrats don’t care about border security. In 2007, George Bush proposed comprehensive immigration reform. Now I admit that I loathed President Bush. Even so, this proposal was honest and humane and sane. The bill would have created a national work authorization card and allowed businesses to request guest worker visas to deal with labor shortages. It would have also created a path to citizenship for people who played by the rules. This bill died when members of Bush’s own party ditched him, just as Republicans in the Senate recently blocked Joe Biden’s attempt to forge a bipartisan solution after Trump interceded.
Trump and his ilk needs immigration broken, because how can you stir people up about a problem if you solve it first? (Deep State conspiracist Mitt Romney groks the strategy.) He will announce all sorts of wonderful measures to combat the lawlessness at the border that Joe Biden encouraged. In the name of securing the border, he will erode civil liberties and reinforce the political power of his base of aging rural white people.
To achieve their ends, Trump and his corporate backers must generate constant earsplitting noise in vast quantities. This noise is raw fuel for the Spectacle that makes rational discussion about collective problems impossible. They last thing they can allow is for Americans to sanely talk about policy issues like grownups. We cannot be allowed to stop and catch our breath, for vast fortunes are being made keeping us at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, our psychopathic owners continue to quietly centralize ever more power into their grasping little hands. Life must be sweet as a playboy billionaire: you get to set off stink bombs and then rob the world blind in the din.
Trump will go much deeper next time. With Project 2025 in hand, he will execute a massive purge of the federal civil service. He will replace seasoned experts with ideologues and hacks savvy/connected to demonstrate their “loyalty”—the one trait Trump says he values most. “I am doing this,” he will say, “To get government off our back.” Millions will cheer the destruction of their own liberty. He will promote anti-wokeness as a national priority and will issue executive orders to clean the federal government of its taint. He will announce that his number one civil rights priority is to protect “religious freedom,” which he will describe as under constant attack by socialists, globalists, atheists, and activists of all stripes. He will suppress dissenting organizations and promote MAGA alternatives, and dust off a variation of the old Nazi gleichschaltung policy, daily hammering the nation towards a one-party state.
A kind of war fever will take hold. Like war, revolutionary change is an intoxicant that requires ever increasing hits from the pipe. These galloping changes will elevate the senses and lift millions above the tedium of their workaday lives. Adrenaline will flow and pulses quicken. The passion they feel will make them feel fully alive for once, and nothing else will quite fill the void. They will demand more, and the regime will deliver and withhold it to suit their fleeting needs. Trump will use this reserve of emotional energy as an asset to directed and exploited.
He will master the firehose of falsehoods technique, pioneered by the very same KGB where Putin learned his craft, to generate ever greater volumes of disinformation. In his first term, he proved how easy it is to overwhelm an already shallow news media simply by generating constant noise and spectacle. Every week there was a new crisis and a half dozen new scandals, the likes of which would have brought down any other president during normal times. Whether he learned the firehose of falsehoods from Putin or is simply a natural conman, Trump knows how to generate chaos to serve as a smokescreen for his corruption.
During his first term, our shallow media was completely overwhelmed by Spectacle. The press couldn’t simultaneously focus on Trump’s history of sexual assaults, mob ties, shady dealings with Russian mobsters, authoritarian regimes showering him with free money, unending ties to and contacts with shady Russians, routinely destroying government records, more obstruction of justice than you can shake a stick out (including outright instructing a subordinate to lie to the FBI and firing the FBI director to “make the Russia thing” go away), starting his presidency by with a decapitation strike of State Department leadership, chilling shout outs to white nationalists, demanding pledges of loyalty from officials like a mob boss, benefitting from the NRA which had become a “Russian asset” before the 2016 election, describing neo-Nazi scumbags as “very fine people,” Jared Kushner’s amazing good luck in find a generous Qatari prince to save him from financial ruin, encouraging rally attendees to rough up protestors, suppressing climate scientists, benefitting from stolen Facebook data used to successfully guide Russian meddling in our elections, racistly telling Democratic congressmen to “go back to their country,” his weird Oval Office meeting with a known Russian spymaster where he passed along sensitive intelligence, passing along nuclear secrets to foreign adversaries, hard hittin’ New Britain’s own Paul Manafort’s shady $10 million debt to Russian mobsters, calling hard working immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” claiming that his celebrity gave him to right to grab women by the pussy, his scam “university,” idiotically proposing a deal with Denmark to swap Puerto Rico for Greenland, meeting with lunatic QANON bloggers who advocate for martial law, attempting to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching a fake investigation, illegally paying hush money to a porn star using campaign money, constant “jokes” about serving as president-for-life, Fancy Bear’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails, Trump’s praising of autocratic rulers and thugs so blatant his staff found disturbing, racist and unconstitutional Muslim travel bans, his odd reverence for Hitler, the Trump campaign continually playing with Nazi imagery, telling his chief of staff that Hitler wasn’t all bad, his family’s suss dealings with the Chinese government, dead-eyed racist Stephen Miller getting his jollies seeing images of brown kids in cages (1000 children still orphaned), the far-right activist who “found” Hunter Biden’s laptop and gave to them to Rudy Giuliani instead of the FBI, warnings from panels of renown psychiatrists that our president was dangerously mentally ill, urging Putin to steal Hillary’s stupid fucking emails, corruptly pardoning his national security advisor for lying about his Russian contacts (the compromised thug who led chants of “LOCK HER UP” because of Hillary’s stupid fucking emails), the curious spate of dead Russian diplomats, Mitch McConnell destruction of the Supreme Court’s already shaky legitimacy, justice Kavanaugh’s uninvestigated magically disappearing gambling debts, Ginni Thomas texting with coup planners and her husband’s open corruption, pardoning his former chief political advisor for not squealing on him, his insane tweaker debate performance, ignorantly advising Americans to take horse dewormer to treat Covid-19, his racist attacks on an attorney general performing her official duties, forcing judges to issue protective orders to prevent jury intimidation and harassment, whatever the fuck was going on with actual pedophile conspiracy ringleader Jeffery Epstein, over 34,000 documented lies, etc., etc. etc.
This list barely scratches the surface of unending attacks on American laws, customs, processes, norms, and values. The last eight years have been nothing but nothing but a smash-and-grab operation by criminals, liars, swindlers, traitors, hustlers, theocrats, and fanatics. As stupid as Trump is, he is undeniably a world class conman. He is like the lion tamer practiced at dividing the lion’s attention by presenting him with the four legs of a chair, except he throws up clouds of incessant bullshit.
I haven’t even yet addressed Trump’s inept attempted autogolpe. It was stupidly obvious to me, a loner weirdo living in un-glamorous Prince George’s County (the ugly stepson of DC suburban counties) what was going to happen on January 6, 2017. Because Trump is as subtle as an airhorn, I watched his dumb self-coup attempt unfold in real time. It was obvious to me—an absolute nobody—just by following r/politics. Every insider in DC had to know what was coming. Party before country every time, these swine.
When he began pushing the false narrative of election fraud even before the election, he was crudely laying the groundwork to de-legitimize Joe Biden’s victory. When Pentagon General Mark Milley made a point to tell the media that the military plays no role in elections, I felt a wave of paranoia. You would think that it would go without saying that the military doesn’t get involved in elections. On January 5, 2021, Donald Trump musked that Mike Pence could just toss out electors willy-nilly. This stupid motherfucker is actually going for it, I thought.
The violence of January 6th was no surprise to anyone paying the remotest bit of attention. I expected much worse. It is not a good sign of the health of our political system when the Vice-President of the United States fears getting into a Secret Service limo. Nor is it a positive sign when the former Republican majority leader baldly tells us Congress is crawling with literal Nazis. It is a very bad sign indeed when group of historians warn the president that the the United States of America appears to be hurtling towards authoritarian tyranny.
Three years ago a severely mentally ill conman launched a plot to illegally maintain power—ripping to shreds our constitutional order—and is now somehow again sniffing at power. Are we crazy? Yes, we are crazy. Or, more accurately, we have been made crazy. These must be salad days for #alpha psychopathic conmen on the hustle. In the early days of the internet, I remember commentors breathlessly predicting that the internet would put a world of free information just a few keystrokes away for everyone. They weren’t wrong. Indeed, like the invention of the printing press, the digital revolution has been a great leap forward.
We have been the pioneers for powerful new technologies that have amplified information—good, bad, ugly, true, false—far beyond what the human brain was designed to hold. It didn’t take long for an army of soulless psychopaths to misuse these technologies for their own ideological and financial ends. The have convinced themselves that they are world-striding Men of Talent in a world of sheep. They understand that if they can generate enough noise and confusion, they can rob this world blind and continue to quietly concentrate power in the hands of a tiny psychopathic elite.
The noise will be louder and more nerve-wracking in 2025. Then the real fun will begin. If he can politicize the federal bureaucracy and staff dead-eyed loyalists in key positions (priority one: no Mark Milley’s), he can direct the immense power of the modern security state towards preserving his power. The databases that the Trump regime builds will make Nixon’s enemies list look like child’s play. They will misuse artificial intelligence to seal in permanent epistemological closure. They will use data science to identify domestic enemies, which they will pair with massive electoral suppression to effect permanent minority rule. Wait until they empower ICE to deputize citizen militias! Those good ole’ boys are finally going to crack down on these illegals! In the name of border security, ICE will terrorize liberal sanctuary cities. Trump will build his own Night Wolves. Of course he’ll expand the Supreme Court and reward corrupt Judge Aileen Cannon for her “loyalty”, permanently locking in far-right control.
As a weary nation lumbers toward another dreadful election, we must begin to break the spell of the Spectacle and learn to speak plainly. Because America has always been so stable, we struggle to imagine anything except what we’ve always known. Revolutions always go sideways, increasing in factional purity and bloodlust. Once again we face an election in which American democracy seems to hang in the balance. Millions of women have already had their rights stripped away by a corrupt, illegitimate Supreme Court—and the best we seem to hope for is to limit continual erosion of our liberties, which are being sacrificed in favor of corporate dominance and theocracy. The mood of the nation is crotchety and sour. These bad vibes are wonderful news for our owners, who have the money to craft ready explanations for the bad vibes they themselves have authored. They have spent billions over decades to build an army of embittered and gullible fantasists—and now it is time to reap the rewards of their investment. They know their window to lock in permanent minority control of our political system is coming to a close.
Paranoid and violent fantasies that would have once marked conservatives as John Birch-type kooks are now mainstream Republican ideology. It is now perfectly acceptable—even respectable—to call for a Second American Revolution or Second Civil War, depending on individual cosplay preferences. It is, no doubt, the fantasy of man-children with stunted inner lives. But from the perspective of our owners, their paranoid fantasies and confusion represent a priceless asset in their perpetual quest for ever more power. Right now, the confused targets of their incessant propaganda are convinced that the biggest threat to the American people is “wokeness,” a word whose meaning shifts and morphs each day to accessorize with the Fox News outrage of the day.
These lost souls—and there are millions of them—are busy hoarding guns and banning theocratically incorrect books and scapegoating immigrants. The internet is stuffed to overflowing with conmen feeding from the far-right propaganda gravy train. There is always room for one more lunatic to rant angry nonsense about cultural Marxism and wokeness and critical race theory and Antifa socialists lurking everywhere. They are all looking for a billionaire sugar daddy to help them monetize their gibberish, for it’s a wonderful lucrative business that requires no skills beyond an ability to shamelessly vomit out nonsensical rage.
When terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, DC in 2001, they waved flags and demanded retribution—all the while maintaining the crazy-making cognitive dissonance that those cities are not truly American. For a shining moment, their rage at Islamic terrorists trumped their loathing of the liberals living in those cities. It didn’t take long before these cities were once again foreign invaders bent on undermining traditional values. Islamic terrorists living on distant continents are figures of almost comic book villainy. There are more irksome enemies closer to home: gays, progressives, uppity minorities, secularists, and academics. Far-right authoritarians always come bac a variation of stab in the back myth, of course. The German/Prussian militarists who lusted for war in 1914 blamed lefty Jews four years later when the war ended disastrously. Plus ça change.
It's time to cut the shit. American democracy only survived the Trump presidency because he is a supremely stupid and incompetent man. Three years ago, the president of the United States attempted to illegally hold on to power. The Spectacle, of course, makes it near impossible to plainly say true things about what is happening in this country. The Spectacle makes collective knowledge and memory impossible. Our shallow media breathlessly reports on the horse race of American politics as if we still lived in a sane country that isn’t on the precipice of catastrophe. News organizations dutifully check facts and verify sources, which the Spectacle immediately envelops in a cloud of yammering bullshit. Anytime the media reports on Trump’s criminality, they simply manufacture stupidly imaginary crimes to promote the narrative that “both sides” are corrupt. The white working-class voter in Ohio concludes that politicians are all crooks, except that one candidate loves America and the other is a Marxist revolutionary. Go Brandon!
Never in history has so much attention be favored on someone so thoroughly unworthy of it. I knew he was a mobbed-up conman by the time I was 17 just by reading my old man’s subscriptions to The Hartford Courant and Time magazine. His own secretary of state called him a “moron.” His defense secretary said he had the “understanding of a sixth grader.” His chief of staff called him “unhinged” and an “idiot.” His long-time consigliere called him a “racist.” According to reports, another Trump chief of staff call him an “idiot,” his economic advisor called him “dumb as shit,” and his national security advisor called him a “dope.” Omarosa Newman titled her memoir of the Trump White House Unhinged which describes him as a “racist, misogynist and a bigot.” Alcoholic piece of dried dogshit Steven Bannon said he was “like an 11-year-old child.” Other reports suggest to Chief of Staff Kelly considered it his job to keep this nitwit man-child of a boss from provoking World War III. Mitch McConnell said that Trump “provoked” the mob that attacked the Capitol building. His bootlicking attorney general—who bent over backwards to shield Trump from accountability—warned us after January 6 that Trump plans to shamelessly abuse his power if re-elected. Trump media adviser, Brad Parscale, texted on the day of January 6 that Trump was “asking for civil war” and that “his rhetoric killed someone.” McConnell and Barr have since endorsed Trump, natch, and Parscale is once again running Trump’s media operation. Swine, all of them. Trump’s own cabinet considered invoking the 25th amendment to remove him from office, for crissakes.
It’s time for this criminal motherfucker to go bye-bye and cease blasting his noise pollution into our ears. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of recognizing the authority of a second Trump administration no matter what happens this November. It feels deeply irresponsibly to hand over the keys to a malignant narcissist with massive legal and financial problems who is promising a revenge tour without resistance. It doesn’t matter, of course, what I think. I’m just some dumb schmuck who has spent the last 30 years dodging any real responsibility or power. If worse comes to worst, I will withdrawal into internal exile, where I am already so comfortable.
In Ball of Confusion, my account of how Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) led me to a mental breakdown in 2018, I will elaborate on my revolutionary medical discover (the Slazenger Protocol) that I developed to combat the TDS. It tackles the root cause of TDS—anxiety—which has become a weapon of war waged on us by a small group of super-wealthy psychopathic assholes. I have learned to detach from the Spectacle, focusing instead on joy and hope and wellness and genuine human connection—though this last one especially remains a work in progress. Because of the Slazenger Protocol, I no longer doomscroll the news. I firmly believe that brighter days will come when Trump is safely behind bars and we can begin to relate to each other like humans again. If you will it, it is no dream.
Editorial notes
Part 2 through 6 pending - I’m guessing I’ll drop rough drafts once a week.
I had a thought yesterday. What if I turned this as a short book and plopped it on Amazon? I plan to self-publish Ball of Confusion, I might use this as practice. I know it is riddled with typos, and maybe it’s time for me to establish a relationship with an editor and maybe even a designer.
Go for it Marty. You doubtless know you’re not likely to win the Substack lottery so writing a book could be just the ticket. As you suggested, a decent editor/publisher is de rigueur.