Seismic Musings

In case you’d like just one more Christmas or Hanukkah present, check the pictures below. This is what a campaign rally looks like now in MAGA-ville even in a red North Carolina.

Somehow a whole segment of the population thought that, for the first time in his life, Trump wasn’t lying last year. Of course we knew. A tiger doesn’t change its stripes.

But it took a year for those who (a) weren’t trust fund babies or (b) weren’t bigots or (c) weren’t educated to catch on. Trump talks a big game but that’s all it is to him; a game to enrich himself and those who kneel at his altar. This month moderate Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to bring to the House floor a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. Marjorie Taylor Greene quit. A ton of GOP Representatives aren’t sticking around for the last half of Trump’s term. 

The economy and the border were Trump’s winning issues. But he lied through his teeth by essentially promising that Americans would pay nothing and gain everything. Tariffs? What fool plays now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t with economic certainty? That retired in the United States losing manufacturing jobs in 2025. We lost out on tourism. The labor market is weakening. Deficits are rising. Insurance rates are soaring.

And the overshoot on immigration is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in politics. Did we all agree the bad guys should be exiled? Damn straight. But the unending cruelty? With the sadistic arrest of parents in front of their children and of stormtroopers terrorizing an apartment building full of families in the middle of the night, even Joe Rogan called Trump’s immigration policy “insane.”

And then there are the childish antics. Kennedy Center Board, Kennedy Center name, Rose Garden demolition, Jimmy Kimmel rant, East Wing demolition, fake Peace Prize, vanity Cabinet meetings, and on and on.

They have overplayed a hand that never existed. There was no mandate with less than a one and a half percent victory, let alone a mandate for any of this craziness. Next year we take back the House and Senate. Then we take back the White House and the Supreme Court.

Select each picture to enlarge.