“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesman with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

— Hunter S. Thompson, 1972

Well, that sure fucking sucked.

Trump is back and 68 million of us feel a whole lot of things, and none of them good. Sick. Numb. Angry. Shocked. Dumbfounded. Embarrassed. Terrified. And every word Roget ever came up for disappointed.

More then 72 million of our fellow citizens decided that a rapist belonged back in the White House. How does one look at their spouse, partner, daughter, mother, sister, aunt, niece, grandmother, or any woman and say, “Fuck your feelings. I don’t care that you were sexually assaulted. I want Trump. I want him to punish people I dislike and fear, to deport them and to hurt them. I want tax cuts he’ll only give to much richer people. I want to pay more for stuff because I don’t understand how tariffs work. You don’t matter. You probably made it up.”

Almost every woman I have known — wives, girlfriends, family, co-workers, friends, etc. — has shared stories with me about their own sexual assault experiences. Some were relatively low-key but scarring, and some were sickeningly violent. The point being, it’s a terribly pervasive experience for women, and some men. Yet 43 percent of Trump’s total vote count were women (mostly white) who opted to vote for a convicted sex offender, one who constantly spews misogyny, to become president of the United States, ostensibly a job that used to be considered the moral leader of the free world.

Yes, the judge made clear that Donald Trump is a rapist. His ponderous Jacob Marley chains include many accusations of sexual assault and other odious behavior with women. And he was Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, so it’s my belief he took advantage of all Epstein had to offer.

That’s to say nothing of Trump’s boasts about ending a women’s right to choose, returning it to the states where one in three women now live under abortion bans that will never apply to him or the ruling class and its coterie of mistresses. The stories about women dying or coming close to death in excruciating pain because they cannot access abortion or must wait until they’re nearly dead are all too common now.

As a society, we’re down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. Empathy and compassion are on life support in this failing republic. We live in a selfish age of crude oafs and vulgar trolls that despise women, equality, and democracy. That’s not an epiphany but I guess I was taken aback that more than half of voters would want a repeat of Trump’s mean-spirited and feckless white nationalist rule that sees women as little more than brood mares. Especially because all he promised was to hurt people and make everyone’s life harder and more expensive.

Nick Fuentes is an open white nationalist and Holocaust denier that dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago along with Kanye West in 2022.

Fuck these people. Forever.

Hunter S. Thompson’s quote atop this essay came when he was writing about the 1972 presidential election between incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic Senator George McGovern, and HST’s fortnightly dispatches in Rolling Stone were collected in the bestselling Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. It remains in print as one of the best political reporting books in history but apparently no one reads it anymore. I did in college thirty years ago and it helped shape my views on journalism and, eventually, politics.

We *are* a nation of vicious used car dealers only now there are almost 336 million of us and 21 percent of the voting public was enough to put a feeble lying sex criminal back in office for … reasons. Just like they voted for an openly criminal Dick Nixon 52 years ago. Nixon, at least, had genuine accomplishments as president, something Trump cannot claim at all. But here we are, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.

Hunter S. Thompson chatting with presidential candidate Sen. George McGovern during the 1972 campaign, shot by Annie Leibovitz.

How Trump came to win, why voting demographics and behaviors shifted, the mistakes Harris may have made, I’ll leave to others to parse. Trump is the worst candidate to ever seek the White House, promising insane tariffs that will skyrocket average household costs by $4,000 a year. He made blunder after blunder, and he’s clearly going senile. And people voted *for* this insane bullshit and his repulsive sad act. These people are malicious and stupid and will absolutely feel the pain he’s about to inflict. I don’t wish it on anyone, but my reservoir of empathy and compassion for such cruel buffoons is empty.

One day, when we’re hopefully past the tragic and farcical MAGA era, many of his voters will plead that they didn’t know he was so bad and that they didn’t think he was really going to do all the terrible things he promised. They will be the new Good Germans and we must never, ever forgive them. They must bear this shame forever.

This bid to create a Confederate Gilead occurred because people want exactly what Trump is promising, and believe his obvious dissembling about helping the working and middle class by cutting the taxes for rich people.

I’ve long thought the worst mistake this country has ever made was ending Reconstruction just a dozen years after the Civil War ended. Real progress was being made when it came to human and civil rights for all Americans. But it took me a long time to understand that our Civil War didn’t end in 1865. It simply took on other forms, becoming a racial and gender cold war, and it seeps through all of our society. Enslavement and Jim Crow are within living memory. Reconstruction should have continued for decades and perhaps still should be going on, and not just in the South. But it ended and we got stuck with these rednecks peddling the bullshit “Lost Cause” myth and parading around in their pointy white hoods, lynching and terrorizing Black people, and shaping culture through insidious racist organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I live in Michigan, a state that sent 95,000 men to fight for the Union in the Civil War, and 15,000 didn’t come home. Yet I still see people around me flying the Confederate flag (specifically the common battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, to the pedants that may be reading). It’s a flag that represents one thing: slavery. The entire point of the war, despite what legions of online middle-aged white men will insist otherwise, was preservation of chattel slavery on behalf of the Southern planter class’s economic and cultural interests. End of story. And the ripple effects of that conflict remain unresolved, and the Age of Trump and Elon Musk-owned Twitter has allowed legions of sadistic trolls to be openly racist and bigoted. They cheer Trump and Musk as so-called champions of free speech, when the only speech they want to use is the N-word and other slurs without consequences. And to peddle antivax bullshit that leads to death.

In the case of Kamala Harris, her race and gender played a role against her with some not insignificant swath of the voting public. Trump himself rolled out his racism greatest hits on the campaign trail, questioning if she was really Black. Do you think she would have been permitted membership at Augusta National in, say, 1990? Of course not. She is a woman and not white, making her a second or third-class citizen, less than fully human, in the eyes of millions.

Again, with feeling and so those in the back can hear, fuck these people forever.

I have nothing but contempt for Trump voters in 2024, and the malignant, sleazy cabal of democracy-hating Silicon Valley technofascists and parasitic soulless private equity oligarchs that greased the rails for a corpulent, rancid gas-station ham sandwich to reshape America into an Orwellian right-wing kakistocracy, a paradise for malicious racists, leeching grifters, and boot-licking totalitarian dipshits unencumbered by law, ethics, and morality. They deny basic science and medicine, peddle medieval quackery, eugenics, blood purity and genetic virtues, and arrogantly boast of what amounts to abject stupidity. Trump, this crooked Atlantic City Hapsburg swindler with his oily legions of book-burning incels and greasy white supremacist goblins, is a direct threat to our multicultural pluralistic democracy. And he has an openly corrupt Supreme Court running interference for him, making rulings unmoored from logic, democracy, and precedent.

These detestable meatheads worship the smallest, meanest gods.

I believe they mean what they say and what they promise. You should, too. How we deal with it this time, I do not know. Pray our feeble democratic guardrails hold up? That seems Pollyannaish, and the guardrails seem like an easily bypassed Maginot Line now. I deeply fear there will be violence this time. Rounding up 20 million people for concentration camps and deportation absolutely will be a clusterfuck, especially with these stooges in charge, and they’ll invariably sweep up actual U.S. citizens, too. And their loved ones and friends will push back, through the courts and failing that, violently. You or I would do the same to protect our families, and I worry that a few shot-up federal agents are the excuse Trump and his brutal lackeys hope for so they can use the military against American citizens. That sets up the scenario of troops refusing orders to shoot unarmed civilians, and other troops then shooting at those refusing.

That’s how a civil war begins. And all because of an obscene dunce of an ex-game show host and serially bankrupt businessman. What a dystopian, low-rent nation we’ve become. “Shining city on a hill” my ass. The beacon turned out to be a 60-watt yellow bug lightbulb in a trailer park.

I do want to note there were some victories on that especially shitty Tuesday, which give a little hope. Trump won Michigan, but his hand-picked senate candidate and all-around shithead Mike Rogers lost to Elissa Slotkin — voters clearly voted only for president on many ballots, or those voted mixed tickets in Michigan. And a number of states enshrined abortion rights while voting for Trump, and Florida would have done that and legalize weed if not for the stupid requirement of a 60 percent threshold. Such a dickhead state (except Key West).

Anyways, back to Trump. He is a fascist but he’s not Hitler, despite what J.D. Vance once said. The Austrian corporal actually had the courage of his monstrously shitty convictions, didn’t dodge military service, and was able to write and publish a thick book of evil but at least coherent ideas. Trump can’t get through a McDonald’s order without his atrophied iguana brain wandering off into a fever dream of unhinged weird bullshit, and even as a younger man he wasn’t intellectually curious. And while Trump is certainly cruel to his core, I don’t believe there’s much depth to him. He’d abandon MAGA in a nanosecond if it could seriously enrich him or keep him out of prison. His entire existence and relationship with the world around him is transactional, which is why he’s unencumbered by self-awareness or empathy and why he cannot understand why men and women join the military and risk their lives for something bigger than themselves.

While he’s obviously a racist and bully, Trump isn’t willing to go all the way because he’s lazy and easily distracted, although his sycophantic rabble of enablers in the White House and Congress will push some of their brutally awful agenda through. Trump is more interested in firing Jack Smith, but also may do easy cosmetic white nationalism. He wants to return Army bases to their Confederate names — Fort Cavasos in Texas was originally named for Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood, who my great- great-grandfather helped soundly defeat at the battles of Franklin and Nashville in 1864 — because Trump admires and respects slaver treasonists. But I have far more respect for Hood and Confederate President Jefferson Davis than I do Trump. Why? Like mentioned above, they had the courage of their evil convictions and were willing to sacrifice their own lives for that terrible cause.

Trump? He’s an immoral physical coward. He makes noises about strength, but he’s feeble and elderly, and as a younger man he famously dodged the draft five times, out of fear rather than any moral opposition to the conflict. Odds are, at least one of the five men that went to South Vietnam in his place didn’t make it home alive. If there was true justice in this universe, Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past would show him that young man’s headstone in Arlington, and the final ghost would show him his own grave, and the throngs of millions joyously cheering his death.

“If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man’s death,” said Scrooge quite agonised, “show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!”

Trump’s trough-pig lifestyle and the actuarial charts suggest he may not live out his final term. Hell, he could drop dead before his inauguration. I firmly believe, based on the footage out there, he suffered at least one mild stroke in his first term. He’d be 82 at the end of his second term, the oldest president, and there’s nothing healthy or normal about him. His parents lived to age 93 and 88, so his genetics are in his favor. His steady diet of McDonald’s slop is not.

If he does croak in office, we’re left with weirdo POG J.D. Vance. That’s cold comfort, but like Trump he’s proved that he’s loyal to nothing. It’s not clear what he really believes, but deeply anti-democracy billionaire Peter Thiel (a disciple of the truly evil monarchist-nerd Curtis Yarvin) is his paymaster so it’s likely we’d face something as bad or worse as Trump in different ways. On the flipside, Vance isn’t popular. He nor anyone else in the MAGA Cinematic Universe have anything close to Trump’s unique brand of charisma. Trump can occasionally crack a joke or say something that makes you chuckle as you shake your head. Shit, he was an amusing third-tier Twitter personality for awhile, making goofy observations about celebrities. Which I wish he’d have stuck to.

Anyways, whatever comes after Trump will be awful but none of the MAGA satellites currently in his orbit can replicate Trump’s shitty rizz, and they don’t enjoy the decades of celebrity cachet he built up dating back to the 1980s. The various sycophants and characters around him will vie for the MAGA throne but none will be able to fill it. They’re all various replacement-level assholes and ghouls, and when they try to copy Trump’s style of schoolyard bully, it doesn’t resonate.

In other words, MAGA has a shelf life and it dies with Trump. Yes, there will be an ugly and stupid interregnum while these third-rate goofs go at each other’s throats to replace him, some of which will be hilarious, but it will end and fade. I have to believe that. Yes, a majority voted for him, and social media has coarsened much of society to emulate Biff Tannen, but there are good people out there. Obama won twice, so we know better things are possible.

I hope we find out, sooner than later. Until then, if you voted for Trump, let me say again with all the conviction I can muster: Go fuck yourself.

But what about civility? WILL NO ONE THINK OF GOOD MANNERS?!?!

Fuck that. ACAB applies to the civility police as much as it does violently corrupt L.A. cops and fat-bellied redneck sheriff deputies with a badge and a heart filled with racist hate. MAGA weirdos are all over social media, and in the real world, trolling and gloating. Being magnanimous isn’t in their DNA. Being cruel shitheads are central to the entire Trump cult.

I have no plans to be nice to Trumpers. And I hope plenty of them lose spouses and partners over their slavish, credulous devotion to this ugly cult.

I don’t want to write anything more about Trump and MAGA until moved by shitty events (his obit will be a fun exercise in vitriol), so this it it for awhile. Coming up soon will be my thoughts on how to do journalism reporting, based on my thirty years in the business, and a short piece on the various people, both real and fictional, that have piqued my interest over the past half century.

Thanks for making it this far.

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