On an Entirely Predictable Series of Events - Part 2:

The Fallen Kingdom

As we've noted in the past, Trump derived his political popularity and relative immunity from scandal from the fact that he functions more like a meme than a flesh-and-blood human. His political legitimacy comes from his ability to signify the more vulgar impulses and beliefs of movement conservatism. When he made his grand re-entrance into politics (putting aside his previous flirtation with Ross Perot's Reform Party), the Republican party establishment was reluctant to embrace the spectacle at first. But they quickly got over it when it became clear that he was driving mass political mobilization on the right for the first time since Saint Reagan.

This Faustian bargain proved to be their undoing as the populist MAGA movement quickly and completely swallowed up the old guard of conservative politics, with only a few remaining holdovers getting a front-row seat to the hard right turn they had worked to unleash. Trump's first term, however, was not the radical revanchist revolution against the neoliberal state that was promised by his rhetoric. Those establishment holdovers were able to secure advisory roles for the governing neophyte Trump and guide him to a more or less normal Republican administration. Tax cuts at home and bombs abroad.

Trump and his compatriots blamed his subsequent loss to Joe Biden on this relative moderation. The second time around would be different. The time for procedural skullduggery and dogwhistle demagoguery was over; this was the time for action. Plans were made, future staff was vetted and ready to carry out the vision. This time they were just going to do what they always wanted to do, and norms be damned.

Except that what they wanted to do was dumb and bad, and now everyone hates them for it.

The Habitual Overstepper

Grover Norquist has been an influential voice in conservative politics for decades. His main issue has always been tax reform and the size of government. His most famous quote was his desire to "reduce [federal government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Republicans were more than happy to quote figures and "facts" from his Americans for Tax Reform group, accept his endorsements, and project an equivalent desire to shrink the federal government—but when it came time to govern, they could only muster the will to cut taxes for wealthy people and gesture at cutting entitlements when they knew they weren't going to actually screw over their voters like that.

Enter Trump 2.0 and its infamous (at least for the first few months) Department of Government Efficiency. In reality, DOGE was just one part of Trump's effort to cull the government, but it was certainly the most high-profile aspect due in no small part to the presence of Elon Musk (more on him later) at its head. Previous Republican administrations understood that there was a tightrope that needed to be walked, balancing the fire and brimstone of conservative rhetoric on spending cuts and reducing the role of the federal government with the reality that our economy is a house of cards held up by government filling in for the inadequacies of the market.

But reality is no issue for Trumpworld.

So they got to cutting, and they did so with all of the maturity and forethought of a first grader who runs away from home because their parents made them wash their hands before dinner. First came the culture war cuts, eliminating funding for anything remotely related to DEI programs. Frankly, some of that money was going toward ineffective consultants and trendy programs that didn't address the core issues it was meant to solve. But at the same time, some of that money was going to useful research and more serious and systemic programs to increase diversity.

And then came the cuts to university funding. Frivolous research grants had long been a sticking point in conservative discourse, as if a $100,000 budget for some random ecology study was dragging the country down in debt for no reason. The most famous of this verboten research was the "transgender mice" study, characterized by the right as taxpayer-funded sex changes for rodents. This was a huge part of DOGE's public relations effort to reframe its fraudulent and unconstitutional decimation of federal budgets as a heroic effort against woke insanity.

Things began to get narratively problematic when it came to USAID cuts. There are cogent arguments to be made about our soft diplomacy apparatus and the way we use funding to exert control over foreign governments. But again, this was never about having hard conversations about our role on the global stage but rather clawing our hard-earned taxpayer money back from undeserving foreign hordes. It was easy to sell people on cutting funding to international efforts on behalf of the LGBTQ community; it was much tougher to justify the preventable deaths that came from withholding food and medical aid from poverty-stricken populations. It was even harder to justify wasting 500 tons of food aid because they fired the people who might have found a place for it to go.

These cuts to federal spending were based on mischaracterizations and outright lies, and there will be negative effects from diverting resources to these efforts. However, this was a direct expression of the conservative id, exactly what Trump was elected to do, and since the downsides will take time to materialize and would likely be constrained to niche groups seen as outside the bounds of "real Americans," the backlash was limited and mostly impotent.

And had he stopped there, they would have been a success by conservative political standards. But they didn't stop there because this was about more than the libidinal pleasure of seeing Marxist biologists having their trans mice taken away from them. The people who had grown up seeing Grover Norquist as a counterculture hero were now in charge, and they were going to squeeze the federal government into that bathtub.

So they started cutting government workers. Haphazardly and likely illegally. These job cuts weren't meant to seriously address the debt and deficit; they were meant to deteriorate the functional capacity of government. The fact that government employment has historically been a major pathway for Black people to reach the middle class provided some political satisfaction for the more western chauvinist parts of the MAGA coalition. But you know who also works for the government? Trump voters.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of people from all over the political spectrum who really need the government to function. Seniors need their Social Security checks, people who live in areas subject to extreme weather need advance warning of catastrophic storms, and people need planes to be safe.

This all leads to the One Big Beautiful Bill, the only non-executive order policy achievement that the Trump administration is likely to accomplish this year. A bill headlined by tax cuts but built upon a number of major funding cuts to major government programs like Medicaid. It's here where a devotion to extreme conservative economic ideology was mistaken by Trumpworld for something that could actually exist in real life without dire consequences.

It's one thing to kick the bums off government handouts; it's quite another when local hospitals serving rural communities have to close because they were reliant on their patients' Medicaid payments to stay afloat. It's another thing still when that rural hospital is also the largest employer in those rural areas.

I'll give you some time to look at how well Trump did electorally in rural communities.

A Matter of National Purity

If the avalanche of budget cuts, tax cuts, and cuts to the size of the federal government were meant to appease the part of the conservative id represented by the Grover Norquists of the world, Trump's immigration agenda served a darker desire held by even more odious people. Xenophobia is as American as apple pie. Hating the non-white other did not start with Trump—none of these things did—but Trump represents this particular conservative tradition in its most pure, unmoderated form.

Pursuant to this agenda, the One Big Beautiful Bill expanded funding for Trump's deportation regime to an unprecedented degree.

The problem was that Democrats had long ceded the ideological battle on immigration. The partisan fight over undocumented migrants was not over a difference of worldview or priorities, just over a few degrees of cruelty. Obama had put kids in cages and earned himself the moniker of "deporter in chief" by immigrants' rights groups. Biden had deported more undocumented migrants than Trump managed in a similar time frame, using courts to speed up the hearing process.

Even though it was a decade ago, you might remember the bipartisan immigration bill that Biden pushed for toward the end of his term. A bill that had significant Republican support as it included much of what Trump wanted to do with immigration in his first go-around. Trump correctly understood this as an attempt by the Democrats to take his biggest issue off the board going into an election year, and he put pressure on Republican lawmakers to kill the bill.

Democrats felt quite proud of this three-dimensional chess move. They expected that this story of Trump spiking a bipartisan bill that would have addressed the immigration "crisis" just to win an election would prove to his voters that he didn't really care about the issues and was only concerned with his own success. Obviously, this was a silly belief to hold about people who were ready to believe that Haitian immigrants had an uncontrollable urge to barbecue their family dog. But it did have an effect. Making it so that there was little daylight between the Democrats and Trump on what needed to happen at the border meant that Trump needed to demonstrably differentiate himself on the issue.

Which is how you get Salvadoran Dachau and Alligator Auschwitz.

However, much like Democrats underestimated how much Republican voters were on board with white nationalist rhetoric, Trump 2.0 overestimated just how much appetite the median swing voter had for these ideas to be put into practice. For all the righteous indignation that conservatives have when compared to the Nazis, indefinitely interning people in torture camps and harassing people who look a certain way for their papers isn't exactly un-fascist behavior.

As with the justification for federal spending cuts, the immigration debate was also built on a foundation of lies. Mainly that Democrats under Biden and even Obama had intentionally allowed a flood of foreign criminals to invade the country to commit crimes, steal taxpayer money, and romance our women. On the deep end of this belief, you had conspiracies about great replacement and illegal voting schemes, where a certain religious/ethnic minority was using its considerable influence to sacrifice innocent Americans to the brutes for the sake of power. But there were significant numbers of voters who simply believed that liberal good intentions toward trying to help economic migrants were simply backfiring and that getting tough on the border was a necessary evil for safeguarding American citizens.

Those voters thought Trump would just be targeting violent criminals for immediate deportation and closing the border; they didn't expect him to send hairdressers to concentration camps. And they sure as shit didn't expect him to make ending birthright citizenship a priority.

And maybe these voters could have swallowed constant ICE raids, broadcasted by citizen journalists, where heavily armed, masked, and ununiformed agents drag people off the street, including the occasional American citizen. But Trump had to go one step further by making immigration not just a matter of violent crime but also ideological purity, notoriously deporting documented legal residents for nothing but their speech.

It's flown under the radar how much of a political blunder this was for Trumpworld. By targeting students engaging in pro-Palestine activism for detention and deportation, Trump tied his strongest issue to one of his weakest. Suddenly immigration wasn't about protecting Americans from Spanish-speaking gangs, but suspending constitutional protections for free speech to protect the interests of Israel.

Most Americans don't support Israel's war on the people of Gaza. Seeing the State Department deny constitutionally protected rights to people in deference to funding another foreign war did more to convince voters that Trump's vision for immigration was serving a darker purpose than the Democrats' capitulation on the issue. And even among his fanatical base, there are a portion of Trump's voters who just started enjoying Kanye West's music a few years ago… for some reason… that also didn't appreciate this policy.

For reasons…

Immigration was Trump's strongest issue, until he actually did something about it. Now he's starting to poll negatively on the matter. Life comes at you fast.

President Deals

Boy, tariffs are fucking stupid, aren't they?

Trump promised to lower prices on day one. He's going to make them much higher right in time for the midterms.

That's all we have to say, right?

With Friends Like These

The thing that many mainstream liberal pundits don't understand about Trump's 2024 victory is that it was made possible by a very unlikely coalition of cranks, religious weirdos, literal supervillains, and some random podcaster dudes who just weren't thinking too deeply about the whole thing. That last group was never a durable coalition partner.

While liberals were busy trying to find the next Joe Rogan, the real Joe Rogan publicly broke with Trump over his deportation regime. Theo Von seemed all but converted to the socialist cause when interviewing Bernie Sanders and Stavros Halkias. Adam Friedland seems to be working on turning the Nelk Boys, and Andrew Schulz is even having buyer's remorse.

If most of the names in the previous paragraph mean nothing to you, that's good. That just means you have a healthy relationship with your phone. Keep doing what you're doing.

Trump took a big chunk of young male voters from Biden's winning coalition, specifically young white men. This was in no small part due to the bro-podcast genre's affinity for him. These shows are huge with that demographic, and their endorsement of Trump made supporting MAGA seem like a subversive act against the repressive liberal status quo. What were these wealthy white men supposed to do, after all? The Democrats made comedy illegal; Trump was the right person to save us from national ego death.

Obviously, this was never a serious ideological stance. These guys were in it for the lulz, and the tax cuts, and the deregulation of alternative health treatments advertised on their shows. These guys wanted the '80s back; they didn't sign up for a fascist police state that can't even balance the budget.

This is not to say that suddenly Rogan and company are going to start treating mainstream Democrats like the new punk now that Trump is in charge. But Rogan was a Bernie guy before defecting to MAGA, and that's not a fluke. Dirtbag Left figures are making inroads with these guys by showing up with genuinely held beliefs and ideologically coherent politics while the Democratic party is busy doing… well, here's how the NYT described it:

"Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.

The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for 'Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan' — and promises investment to 'study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.' It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

'Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,' it urges."

It truly is a mystery why the Democratic party is so unpopular.

Of course, no conversation about Trump racking up former friends is complete without mentioning Elon Musk. As soon as these two titans of bullshit got together to perform a fascist fusion dance, the smart money was on a messy public breakup in the near future. There was no way that two egos that massive could cooperatively coexist without eventually trying to consume one another.

For the first few months, it seemed like that smart money was wrong. Elon was a fixture at the White House, taking questions from friendly press and attending cabinet-level meetings. He wore fun variant MAGA hats. It seemed like the arrangement between Trump and Musk was mutually beneficial enough to persist beyond any petty disagreements.

Trump provided Musk with cultural relevance with the right, where he clearly felt more at home than when he was a liberal darling. Trump also helped him sell his shitty cars and gave him access to federal procurement data through the DOGE "audits," an invaluable resource for someone who owes a large chunk of his wealth to government contracts. For his part, Musk spent a quarter of a billion on electing Trump. He also turned Twitter into a Nazi hellscape on Trump's behalf.

But the house always wins, and soon fractures began to appear between Trump and Musk. Specifically over tariffs and the aforementioned One Big Beautiful Bill. Somehow Musk missed the memo where Republicans don't actually care about the debt and deficit when it comes to tax cuts. Or maybe it was the end of electric vehicle subsidies that really felt like a betrayal to Kirkland Brand Tony Stark. Either way, once the bill was passed and signed into law, the war was on.

At first glance, Musk seemed disadvantaged in this fight. Say what you will about the man, but Trump is genuinely funny and charismatic, even if his edge is noticeably dulling with age. Elon, on the other hand, had to spend $44 billion buying Twitter so that he could force people to laugh at his jokes.

But Musk had one play up his sleeve. One move he could make that might just end up spelling doom for Trumpism as a powerful electoral force. One tweet that could change the course of history.

And that's how we will close this series in part three. Have a nice day, DJT!

Solidarity Forever.