#50 AMERICA BEGINS TO OPEN ITS EYES

Wonder Woman with her compelling Lasso of Truth

Hollywood has treated us to a regular stream of comic book movies wherein the hero/heroine/heroes (&LGBTQetc.) save America, or, more often, the entire planet from malevolent actors, homegrown or from outer space…and we sure could use a hero right about now to save us from ourselves.

I vote for Wonder Woman, particularly because of her “Lasso of Truth” that when it’s caught you forces you to speak honestly, probably not something Donald Trump’s done since he was a very small child. I imagine her coming into one of those White House cabinet meetings and throwing it around Trump and Musk, then dragging them in front of the cameras to make them spill on what they’re actually doing LIVE, BEFORE AMERICA. Then maybe she could do all the cabinet heads the same way, right after they’ve completed their deep groveling, kiss-ass speeches to the man who runs “the country and the world” (at least in his own mind).

A further big plus for the Lasso of Truth would be how it compels the person under its power to accede to Wonder Woman’s commands, thus putting Trump’s chauvinistic nose under the high heel of one of her sexy, knee-high boots. Finally power comes into proper hierarchy.

Ah, well. A guy can dream.

But superheroes recently have been fairly thin on the ground. Maybe that’s primarily Bernie Sanders, 83 years old and most of them spent fighting for the working class and social services. He’s turning out the biggest crowds (36,000 in L.A. recently) because he can stand credibly behind his own words. His criticism of the Democrats for abandoning the working class I can only hope is finally getting a hearing in their Washington circles. As unbelievably stupid as it sounds, until recently the working class has had no strong voice other than Trump’s. That he means to shaft the constituency on which he rose to power is maybe a bright light only starting to penetrate some of them.

But fortunately, it’s not so much the Democratic leadership that’s standing up for us (Corey Booker and J.B. Pritzker, notwithstanding), but regular American citizens appalled at the Trump Administration. This was always going to be the power source that most mattered. As regular people have taken to the streets (peaceably, I might add) in big cities and small towns, blue and red states, there’s the groundswell without which we would have no hope of taking America back from the far right extremists and their barely controllable attack dog, Donald Trump.

There are really two agendas here: Trump’s and extremists like Vance. The extremists hate American democracy, blindly believe that the government is an evil controlled by communists and the far left, don’t like the constitution giving rights to everyone, feel like they should be writing the laws all in their favor regardless of who else they might hurt, are deeply racist and sexist, and in the unspoken part of all this, want to institute an evangelical Christian nation. The other unspoken part is that they want to set themselves up with absolute power, line their own pockets while they’re doing it, and otherwise open the spigots of cash the government commands into the checking accounts of a few billionaires.

This dovetails somewhat imperfectly with Trump’s seat of the pants scheming. Actually, the rightwing whackjobs provide him a more holistic sense of how to take over and destroy the evil American government, as they’ve spent many, many decades contemplating it. (Just a word to the wise: DON’T ELECT POLITICIANS TO RUN THE GOVERNMENT WHO HATE THE GOVERNMENT.)

Regular citizens who think “something needs to be done” and “at least Donald Trump will bring change” to how stuck Washington has become, now get to see how this never had anything to do with their own interests. In fact, it’s been damn edifying to learn how you might want to preserve Social Security and the efficiency of its operation, or Medicaid or national parks or oversight of nuclear weapons safety. That doesn’t seem so crazy and wasteful, now that it’s getting taken away or at least crippled on the way to being shot.

Musk’s infamous “Department of Government Efficiency” points to the truth of the whole matter. None of this at all has made government run more efficiently. The very brutal destructiveness of his approach has made things more inefficient. Blindly throwing people of expertise out of their jobs for no apparent reason other than “efficiency” reflects unfamiliarity with how efficiency actually works. The rightwing apparently has little sense of how the government runs, and the ways in which it is already built to be efficient. No one on any side of the spectrum thinks that there’s no waste or redundancy or misuse of funds, but since they can’t be bothered to look for such things, they proceed on a purely ideological basis, a matter of heartfelt, fanatical, utterly blinkered, dogmatic belief, that the whole thing deserves to be dragged out to the dumpster and set on fire. Who’s going to ask thorny questions like, “Why do we need to waste money studying bird flu?”

Right at the heart of it all burns the cherished Republican hatred for social services and government protections for the citizenry. If you’re poor, you don’t deserve help; you deserve to rot unless you can somehow make yourself into a thriving businessman (try selling fentanyl—that would raise your business profile). Certainly you don’t deserve medical care or higher education or even lower education. In the ugly, rotten heart of the whole rightwing enterprise, there’s a poisonous, abiding aggression toward human beings. Ultimately it amounts to an incredibly bitter class warfare seeking to elevate a few (white people, preferably very rich men) over the filthy masses of the hoi polloi. It’s as stupid and typical as that.

Elon Musk, deeply stung by the protests and boycotts of Tesla, pretty much the one thing regular citizens could do to fight back and make someone feel it, went off on Tim Walz for publicly taking delight in the tanking Tesla stock price. He looked like he’s about to cry, as he’s lost many billions of dollars, and how dare someone mock his emotional turmoil? He doesn’t ever seem to shed a tear for the people whose mouths he took food out of or whose medicine he cut off. He doesn’t give a shit about the turmoil of some old lady whose social security check didn’t show up. And he did after all completely offend his own market, comprised mainly of Democrats. (Doesn’t being a “business genius” imply you know who buys your goods?)

Well, he’s merely one of many thoroughly out of touch people Trump hired to run the government into the ground. But this finally constitutes what no one can escape: it’s all a reflection of Donald Trump’s mind. You see the mark of his “leadership” everywhere. He puts a vaccine-denier in charge of our health, who ignores the re-ignition of measles as a problem that’s spreading (RFK). He gets a head of commerce to tell us that 10% tariffs won’t raise prices (Lutnick). He appoints an alcoholic idiot to head up defense who can’t seem to use secure channels and brings his wife into defense strategy sessions, but does get the Pentagon to put in a make up room (Hegseth).

It’s a long list. But let’s consider Hegseth a little further, as he’s a good point of illumination. Exposed now for multiple security breaches, he refuses to say that he made a mistake and simply blames others or the media for his own failures. Sound familiar? In the past, of course, he’d already be fired. But the guy who got famous for firing people on TV won’t fire him. Hegseth resolutely and angrily denies that there’s any problem with his own behavior, when a reasonable past solution to this kind of scandal involved simply apologizing and swearing you wouldn’t do it again—not something Trump seems in any way capable of, and you see how it pervades his administration. In fact, this seems like a firm policy when so many other things remain wobbly.

Running the World: Showing the penguins who’s boss

Since nothing Trump does ever seems carefully thought out, nothing his administration does either. Even the one area where people (not Trump) did the thinking ahead of time for him—his effort to shred the functions of the American government—ends up full of reversals (“Gosh, maybe we shouldn’t have stopped food safety oversight.”). Sloppy, shoddy, hurried, senseless, and not to say illegal all come to mind when describing his administration’s approach to government departments and what they do. They seem surprised that those departments do anything of value as they go about dismantling them, setting them up to siphon information or cash, but if you don’t know about something, it can pay to learn about it first.

Trump’s inveterately incapable of learning and fully disinterested in knowing how anything in this world works (other than easy money), neither do his henchmen bother with the fine points. Still, when it comes to the legality of things, you can expect Trump to demand his “rights” to the letter; when it comes to anyone else’s rights, that’s of no consequence. Hence that’s how his corrupted justice department goes about fighting it’s many, many losing battles in court. It can always get an appeal, even if it cannot produce any hard evidence for its position, and because it’s the president, by establishment kneejerk reaction, it gets deference in a way nobody else could. That’s what he sees as fitting and right: I get deference, I don’t need to follow rules, but you other people, I will punish you to the Nth degree if I can for not following my policies or criticizing my haircut.

Thus the man convicted of many felonies (who has ducked far more than caught up with him) stands before us to announce his law and order deportations of foreign criminals. That this has amounted to masked thugs nabbing innocent American citizens through secret governmental rendition without identifying themselves, due process, or even faintly caring who it is they’re renditioning, we get down to the dirty little fantasies in Trump’s mind that he can use state violence at will however he chooses. (If we didn’t have a Deep State before, we definitely have it now, and if you’re feeling a lack of apoplectic rage in your life, watch a report on this example of it.)

I haven’t even mentioned his bumbling, stubborn destruction of the economy, that seems almost like a fixated daydream he can’t shake, nor his alignment of us against our allies, accompanied by his fawning subservience to Putin. He puts tariffs on penguins and pisses off all our closest friends, threatening anyone who dares attack him or have some kind of independent opinion (like universities). It’s a monumental effort to make a giant, bloated ego into the All-Controlling Planetary Overlord pursued by a deeply ignorant and utterly careless man who proceeds entirely by telling lies, subjugating enemies, and relying on the idea that he can always get away with it. We must all bow down before him, or risk getting sent off to the Salvadoran gulag he wants to build.

Finally, finally, FINALLY what he’s like has started to penetrate the general public. His approval ratings—since he can’t yet put out fake ones and bask in the glow of a pseudo-adoring public—have plummeted in virtually every category, and general approval of his job as president has started to sink below 40% in some polling. This has the power to start to pull the utterly spineless Republican party out of his absolute control. He’s not so strong yet that he can pursue state violence with full impunity, though he’s playing a game of chicken with the courts around that.

How does this play out in the end? No idea. This whole country stands in his vast, bleakly unconscious, Jungian shadow, where “Make America Great Again” means tearing apart so many of the things it did right and turning it into an autocratic basket case whose ultimate purpose is to reduce the populace to sycophants. But his horrifying, multiplicitous weaknesses have at last come to the fore. They’re in the faces of common citizens now. It’s too late for America to get through this unscathed. The main question becomes: Will Trump’s karma finally catch up with him alone, or do we all go down with him?

Bernie Sanders, a lonely nation turns its eyes to you