Complicity

I used to study World War II. 

One of the things many people wonder about is just how Hitler came to power, there were a lot of good Germans who must have never seen it coming, right? 

Adolf had been really clear about what he wanted to see happen when he wrote Mein Kampf but nobody thought that he was actually serious.

I don't think the current GOP candidate is a Nazi necessarily, I just don't think he has a lot of respect for the constitution or the rule of law. He is not even particularly ideological, just enormously vested in his own power.

It feels like 1938 to me, honestly.

And owing to an electoral college scheme that rather than protecting the rights of the minority allows it to rule the majority with impunity, I think chances are very good that Donald Trump will be our next president. And then I see a lot of hell breaking loose. Mass deportations of immigrants, many of whom are here legally working under temporary permits, jailing of political adversaries, what else is he calling for?

Elon Musk wants to cut 2 trillion in debt and he acknowledges that that is going to require a lot of pain and suffering for Americans.

Economists believe that Trump's plans to cut discretionary spending while giving a host of new corporate tax breaks and instituting tariffs will be devastating to our economy and completely alienate our allies.  But the ignorant minions don't have the critical thinking skills to understand the havoc Trump II will create, since they remember that he juiced up their economy in his first reign and forget that he left the country with the most debt it had ever incurred, a debt that will be presumably paid one day by somebody else down the road.

“The idea that one can cut $2 trillion in wasteful and unnecessary programs is absolutely absurd,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “There’s a long history of the fantasy that one smart businessman will just identify trillions in waste, but that’s just not how it works.”

More likely, Musk would need to pursue much broader cuts that include what are known as mandatory programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are funded as a requirement of federal law. To achieve his savings, he would need to propose dramatic, structural changes to these and other benefits, from lessening payment amounts to limiting eligibility, perhaps even raising the retirement age.

I predict that by the time Americans, even those that voted for Trump, figure out that their Social Security and Medicare checks will instead be used to balance the budget they will raise holy hell. But it will be too late at that point of course.

The Teamsters, who refused to endorse Harris, who with Biden managed to save their pensions this term may not be so lucky under the next Trump regime. Remember PATCO and Reagan? Musk likes to fire and denude his work staff at will, you think he has any love for labor?

How many people in Trump's own cabinet have denounced him and said that we should take him at his word about his fascist tendencies and jailing his enemies? 

Kelly, Esper, Milley, Mattis, Bolton, Tillerson, Hutchison, Newman, Pence, the list is long. The words they use to describe him are startling and these are his own handpicked people.

Donald Trump's regime will not last forever, thankfully. Perhaps there will be a new Trump one day to take his place, if the normal conventions of electing a President exist in four more years and we do not have a Soviet style President for life in our future.

And while I have anger at Trump for putting us through this, my greater animus is directed at the smart people that knew better and watched the whole thing come down and downplayed the danger. John Roberts, who engineered a SCOTUS immunity deal that let Trump skate and made it illegal to question his motives, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, who once called Trump for what he really was and then went back to purely tribal sycophancy. Speaker Johnson, the folksy evangelical who put a deal in place so that he could question the votes if they came up  short again.

Yes, Trump is a problem but the greater problem are the people that should have known better or dismissed his threats as rhetoric and kept their mouth shut so that their ideological aims could be enacted, regardless of January 6th or Russia deciding to take over its neighbor or even something so un-american as trying to put your political opponents in jail.

I blame them.

And if the worst nightmares of a second Trump presidency do come true, I hope that there will be someone with a light that can say, "Hey, you knew or you should have known and you still did nothing." I hope that they can own it but you know that they can't and they won't.

Ever.