Every day, it’s something more obscene, more perverse, more evil from Donald Trump and his bleak and vindictive court of scheming viziers, plotting eunuchs, and humorless jesters.

Today, it’s him posting AI renderings of “Trump Gaza” with him cavorting with junkie oligarch Elon Musk and Israeli prime minister/war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu in a vulgar futuristic Vegas-style Gaza Strip ethnically cleansed of its native people. It’s crude, tacky, ugly, and inhumane on every possible level.

This appalling cruelty comes as Trump extorts Ukraine for its mineral wealth in return for that brave nation’s right to maybe defend itself against Russia’s bungled but deadly extermination campaign. Trump’s deal is simply a protection racket masquerading as foreign policy.

Under Trump, it’s now the formal policy of the United States to curry favor with Moscow and other unsavory nations, swindle Ukraine, undermine NATO, annex Canada and Greenland, seize the Panama Canal, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people so their land, devastated by American-made bombs, can be repurposed as a gaudy playground for the idle rich.

Maybe the people of Gaza can get jobs with housekeeping and janitorial staff in the neon dystopia built upon the rubble of their former homes. But maybe not, since Trump wants them deported elsewhere in the Middle East (a brain-dead and horrific idea he’s since apparently lost interest in forcing on Egypt and Jordan).

Every one of us is now the Ugly American. We live under a regime of mobster colonialism.

The entire Trump administration is a gangster racket, and all of them from the prolapsed meathead-in-chief on down are nothing but a pathetic gallery of ham-fisted Fredo Corelones. But right now they have the nuclear codes and the purse strings. We’re stuck with these pigs for now.

Trump’s brutish and stupid 19th century foreign policy is intended to enrich the very top of the ruling class, especially himself. It’s not intended to benefit everyday Americans, Ukrainians, our traditional allies, or anyone else. It certainly has less than zero to do with making the United States “great” again – it’s the very opposite of that. It’s for a small cadre of assholes to horde even more wealth and power. The rich care about foreign policy only as a method to open fresh markets for parasitic wealth extraction when domestic markets are not enough. It’s why the monstrous Cecil Rhodes said, “I would annex the planets if I could.” And it always requires some form of totalitarianism.

“He’s just trolling” – I hear that from the mindless zombie sycophants that try to justify whatever Trump says and does. People that excuse him, enable him and try to burnish his squalid moral bankruptcy with a sheen of respectability are shitty people. It’s that simple after a decade of Trumpism.

The president of the United States is president for all Americans, and traditionally at least tries to cushion policy that some dislike with reasonable words and concessions. The president is supposed to be a statesman (or, ideally, sometimes a stateswoman). That’s how a pluralistic liberal democracy works, despite what right-wing state media has been blubbering about for almost 40 years.

When the elected leader of the free world trolls people like some teenage Reddit goblin or 4chan pervert, it peels back the curtain to expose the ugliness of some of humanity. Is that what we want from the president, someone that “owns the libs” and sells self-indulgent cult merch from the Oval Office? This is a compelling question because when it’s MAGA conservatives being trolled or in any way held to account, they mewl and whine that they’re the most suppressed, subjugated, marginalized, and oppressed people in history. Then they demand the Army kill everyone they dislike. And now that they’re back in power, they’re promising vengeance.

The funny thing is, in a just world they would be marginalized. Unrepentant fascists deserve a boot on the throat, forever. But MAGA, the most privileged people in the history of humanity, is in charge and still moans and whimpers about everything. They’re permanently frightened.

That people cheer Trump’s despicable statements and actions gives us modern insight on how the autocrats and dictators of the past rose to power – with cheers and trumpets and votes before the arrival of the goon squads and concentration camps. They use democracy for their sinister ends, then choke it off. Those excusing and cheering Trump excesses are absolutely no different from the Germans of the 1930s or the Americans that cheered on secession (and later the Klan and Jim Crow). Today, the right-wing mob champions what’s functionally an unconstitutional junta led by an elderly, senile mob boss who’s also a convicted rapist and multiple felon.

Trump and his cult are beneath contempt.

Even if these freaks tossing up Nazi salutes don’t specifically subscribe to all the tenants of National Socialism, them doing the salute says, “We do not care if you think we are Nazis or not.” It’s chilling to see Americans do that, in the open and to the delight of some pundits and news networks.

A hallmark of the online MAGA universe, both on social media and on the shouty cable television shows, is their constant demand for debate. They insist on equal time to rationalize and defend torture and colonialism and race science and fucking Hitler salutes. As someone on Bluesky noted, this is the “right wing concept intended to normalize their disgusting and contemptible beliefs, which deserve nothing but contempt and to be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.”

None of this is trolling as meant as a distraction. It’s not even trolling. It’s fascist theater, and all part of the same MAGA project that’s worse than the moral and intellectual dry rot found in Project 2025 (and its historical right-wing economic philosophy antecedents). It’s all of that but with chaos and incompetence at every stage. It’s bungling maliciousness for its own sake. They don’t give a fuck if you think they’re Nazis or not. They’re proud to dehumanize others. It’s a lark to them.

The tweets, the posts, the off-hand comments and meandering senile thoughts, the executive orders … It’s *all* policy, and they’ll run roughshod over the courts and Congress to inflict their policies on the rest of us. Trump clearly has always viewed the presidency as imperial, and his word must be obeyed as law. His age, laziness, and intellectual limitations have led him to outsource much of the day-to-day work of institutional maliciousness to younger men like Musk, but they’re eagerly carrying out his orders. They are keen to prove they’re loyal, servile henchmen. As Howard Lutnick, the new commerce secretary, said while Trump peddled new red hats from the Oval Office on Tuesday: “Always say yes to the president.”

This is the sort of thing you’d see from party apparatchiks in the Soviet Union, not from U.S. Attorneys that should know they serve the Constitution and people of the United States.

The “Trump Gaza” post is part of the brutal reality they envision, with A.I. filling in for Albert Speer today. Even if some of it is purely fantasy, it’s the world they lust after. It’s a world where three animating ideologies are evangelical prosperity gospel, white nationalism, and global manifest destiny. It’s a sordid, morally grubby world where they cheerfully make room for Nazi salutes, Gestapo tactics, internment camps, and tossing aside civil rights and the Constitution.

Conservatives, by their very nature, can never be satisfied. Conservativism, especially the MAGA strain, requires both endless profits and an endless litany of enemies, bogeymen, and scapegoats because if the masses are not kept filled with fear and loathing, they cannot as easily be motivated to vote against their own self interests. The beast must be fed fresh enemies to keep the “dark Satanic mills” running, the donations flowing, the votes tallied. Otherwise, the fascist machinery collapses upon itself.

With eager help from Vichyite collaborationist media and knee-bending corporate media, the ruling class controls the masses via reports of sinister and disloyal enemies to be conquered and expelled or jailed or killed, from immigrants to trans people to Democratic politicians to environmentalists, and everyone in between. Everything is Marxist and communist and radical Leftist. If it’s not CRT then it’s DEI. The Right loves acronyms almost as much as it loves segregation. By using letters as shorthand, people don’t have to think as much about what they’re against. Having to say aloud that you’re against diversity, equity, and inclusion makes you sound like a Klansmen or Nazi, doesn’t it?

One area where MAGA and traditional establishment Republicans are indistinguishable is when it comes to federal budget priorities. On Tuesday night, Congress passed a budget built around $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy while directing $2 trillion in cuts to Medicare, veterans benefits and health care, Medicaid, and other programs for the working and middle classes.

This is comically evil. Except it’s not funny. Such budgeting comes atop Musk’s clearly illegal and inept DOGE purge of every federal agency and budget, which is not only wrecking government services that directly benefit citizens but also literally killing people by denying them the life-saving HIV drug program funded by USAID in Africa.

It’s the shameless death of empathy.

So it’s not surprising that amid the blatant moral and legal corruption, the bribes, the feckless imbeciles and low-rent hustlers and vicious sadists now in government roles, the endless incompetence and chaos and disorder, the rise of Trumpian paramilitaries … we have Christians turning against empathy. Rejecting not just sympathy, but the very empathy that was the backbone of the message and ministry of Jesus Christ. He and empathy are too woke for a growing segment of MAGA.

It’s among the reasons that millions of Americans will vote to fuck themselves over as long as non-whites, women, and LGBTQ citizens, and anyone else they are told to fear and loathe are hurt.

If MAGA cannot be redeemed, then it must be exiled from society. There is no room in a humane, compassionate, and just world for those that would violently marginalize and terrorize the most vulnerable among us, for fun and profit. We are living in an uncivilized age and being forced to deal with the philosopher Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance.”

We do not have to tolerate Nazis nor those being half-assed fascists.

Good people remain the majority of the America’s population. How we regain our compassionate democracy and finally live up to still unachieved grand ideals in our founding documents remains uncertain. But I have to trust that we will. Night ends.

I’m buoyed in these dark times because there’s a palpable vibe shift occurring across America right now. The media has begun reporting on it. I don’t mean just street protests, although those will pick up as spring and summer arrive.

No, dinner table conversations, family group chats, office water coolers, assembly lines, and other places where Americans talk, there’s evidence that a rapidly growing number of people are alarmed and offended by Trump and Musk. And as the regime continue its lawless, unconstitutional corruption, the revulsion and anger among the working class and middle class will continue to grow.

I’m a Gen X child of the 1980s, and I watched the news every day in 1989 as Iron Curtain governments were toppled one by one by the people. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people gathered to protest in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. What had been an immovable sinister force simply dissolved in a few months. The walls and fences came down, both physically and in people’s minds.

I was 15 when I watched the Berlin Wall open in 1989, and the rest of Eastern Europe shed almost 50 years of authoritarian communist rule that seemed so powerful but was actually weak and rotten.

The authoritarian regimes crumbled, mostly without resistance. They melted when faced with the real prospect of public anger. The Soviet Union wasn’t willing to send in troops and tanks like it did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Authoritarianism by its very nature is morally and intellectually rotten at its core. It requires lies, deceit, threats, censorship, fences and walls, guns, watchtowers, secret police, surveillance, moles, quislings, informants, exile, and other sinister measures to survive. And it’s why totalitarians always stifle free expression and media first. Invading armies and reigning despots always target the independent newspapers, radio and TV stations. That’s harder today with social media, but with most of those apps (and many traditional media outlets) under control of regime-friendly oligarchs, it’s not guaranteed that people can always easily resist online.

Despots and their regimes must suppress and distort truth, and the bedrock foundation of MAGA is disinformation no matter how obvious and insane the lie. And it’s pushed relentlessly 24-7 as a wild firehose of sophistry and bullshit aimed at exhausted people just trying to get through the workday under capitalism’s grinding pressures. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Authoritarianism lingers because it saps the human spirit. But it cannot sustain. Its own nature expends itself. Humanity always prevails in the end. That spirit is never truly extinguished. Sometimes good prevails quickly, sometimes over a very long time. It can be a very long road. Victory is sometimes Mussolini strung up dead from a lamppost and the Ceaușescus gunned down. Other times, it’s elderly men peacefully shuffling away quietly in humiliation while the young assume power and extend freedom and tolerance without bloodshed. It’s the Velvet Revolution.

Trumpism ends with Trump, who is an unhealthy old, obese man. There is no true heir to his gold-plated toilet. His halfwit children and the bleak characters in the MAGA Cinematic Universe don’t have his decades in the public spotlight, and they don’t have his particular brand of greasy mob boss charisma. When Trump dies, these fools, lackeys, and supplicants will tear one another apart.

MAGA is doomed. It’s just a question of how much damage the segregationists and their oligarch financiers will do before they’re topped and, hopefully, brought to swift justice.

Ideally it’s by the ballot box and courts but the tragic specter of relying on the cartridge box is a growing possibility. I hope it does not come to that. Eastern Europe still has the lessons of 1989 to guide us.

We will find out soon enough.

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