The revolution’s about to be televised
You got the right time but the wrong guy
– Kendrick Lamar, Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show
When the revolution comes
Afros gon’ be trying to straighten their heads and straightened heads gon’ be trying to wear afros
When the revolution comes
When the revolution comes
When the revolution comes
(WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES!)
But until then, you know and I know niggas will party, and bullshit
And party, and bullshit
And party, and bullshit
And party, and bullshit
And party –
Some might even die before the revolution comes.
– The Last Poets, “When the Revolution Comes”
So, America…
How’s your 401k?
At least Donald Trump had some good news this week. We passed the Ides of March and he wasn’t assassinated by Senators.
Other than that, about two months into His Majesty’s Glorious Restoration, we are in the worst of both worlds where he is being stymied at every turn yet still managing to undermine (small r) republican government by his mere presence in it.
For example, it had seemed that when Trump hired Keith Kellogg on his foreign policy team and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, he had adults in the room again. But his thuggish arguments with Vladimir Zelenskyy in the White House over Ukraine aid made it clear that Donnie is no longer hiding his forbidden love for Vladimir Putin. He is out, proud and sashaying down the catwalk. Yet about a week after that, for some reason he decided to switch course and endorse a Ukrainian initiative for a ceasefire, thereby putting the onus on Russian leader Putin to accept. (Notably, the agreement was made in Saudi Arabia with Rubio and the Ukrainian foreign minister, with neither Zelenskyy or Trump on camera to make the event into ‘great TV.’) Why the change? Who knows? It might be because the leaders of European nations are making it more clear that they’re willing to support Ukraine whether Trump likes it or not.
It’s been suspected that Trump is orienting away from Europe so that he can create his own little empire on our continent. Probably because he has confused Diplomacy with Risk and thinks if you get all the Canada provinces, Greenland and Central America in addition to Alaska, Western United States and Eastern United States you get the whole set and more cards next turn. We know that Trump isn’t planning for a peaceful takeover despite all this blather about Canada being a “51st State.” The reasons why are obvious to anyone with half a brain. Obviously that does not include Trump, but it might include Elon, when he’s sober. For one, Canada is the second largest country on Earth by area. For another, Canada isn’t one “state”, it’s ten provinces, which if lawfully accepted into the Union would comprise ten states. Even if you added all of Canada’s population into one super-state it would skew the Electoral College permanently against the Republicans. I don’t suppose anyone’s ever told Trump that. Or maybe they have.
Which is why Trump isn’t planning a peaceful assimilation like with Texas or Alaska. He’s planning an occupation.
For now, he is trying to escalate tensions with huffing and puffing about tariffs against Canada and Mexico, only to “delay” some of them, at least twice, after advisors gently inform him that other countries can apply tariffs against us too. For example, against the bourbon industry, which is about the last growth industry Kentucky still has. No less than The Wall Street Journal called this policy “The Dumbest Tariff Plunge.” The stock market seems to agree. But for now Trump seems to be making his economic policy an extension of his foreign policy. A foreign policy which apparently consists of leaning against a tree and squealing louder than Ned Beatty in Deliverance.
Trump had also been defeated 5-4 in the Supreme Court when they ruled that he must allow some 2 billion dollars in USAID payments already allocated, but this weekend, the Trump ‘administration’ defied a lower court order against deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador on the grounds that their plane was already in the air.
And just this Sunday night the Sun King announced that all of the pardons Joe Biden made on the way out of the White House are null and void because “I am your Lord and God, the Earth turns at my command, and only I get two scoops of ice cream after every dinner. So NYAAAH.”
America cannot survive four more years of this bullshit.
I’m not sure we can survive four more months of this bullshit.
I know for a damn fact NATO won’t.
The rub is, even if the situation has gotten disgusting enough to lead to open revolt – and I’m not saying that it has, but I’m also not saying that it can’t – it raises the question of what would replace Trump’s ‘administration.’ Because let us not forget, we are in this mess because Democrats once again failed to do the easiest thing in the world: Prove that they’re a better choice than Trump and the Trump Party.
They’re still operating on their old model like nothing’s changed. I’m still getting emails asking me to send Democrats money to campaigns that won’t be decided for over a year. I’m like, “Guys, I was sending you money all through the 2024 campaign and now everything is worse. Maybe I can send you $50 this month and watch Trump declare himself Emperor.”
The latest humiliating example of their weakness occurred last week, when Mike Johnson’s Republican House managed to pass a continuing resolution that authorized executive branch/DOGE control over spending. Then they went home. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had managed to get all but one Democrat to vote against the CR, largely on the belief that in the Senate, where Democrats still control more than 40 seats, they could demand modifications over the prospect of a filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-New York) had said as much. But on Thursday he decided to vote for cloture in order to avoid a government shutdown deadline.
Nine Democrats (including Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez-Masto) ended up voting for cloture to allow the measure to go through, at which point it passed on a mostly party-line simple majority.
As an MSDNC reporter put it: “The continuing resolution the House approved on Tuesday slashes funding for nondefense spending over the next six months but does so stealthily enough that swing-district Republicans could support it. More significantly, the normally anti-CR House Freedom Caucus jumped on board after Trump and Vice President JD Vance promised that the White House would simply cut whatever spending the resolution authorized that they didn’t like. That alone should have been enough to make clear to congressional Democrats that the language they were demanding to curtail Trump’s illegal impoundment should be required for any support in passing the bill.”
But rather than contest the matter, Schumer bought the bluff and did what he always does: Caved for the “good of the institution”, even when the institution is being gamed for its own destruction.
Schumer is feckless. He is totally lacking in feck. One could argue that it was a lose-lose prospect either way, and a shutdown would have caused Democrats to be blamed for the results, but if the Senate Democrats had held with their House counterparts, they would have forced more negotiations to claw back some of the Musk-Trump government’s impoundments. As it stands now, they don’t even have that, and a lot of current government functions are going to get shut down anyway. And House Democrats now know how well Schumer will back them up.
This is in fact only the latest example of Chuck’s passivity in the face of MAGA radicalism. At this point I would be happier with Amy Schumer as Senate Democrat leader. And yes, they are related.
So at this point there is no real organized opposition to the Musk-Trump regime, which means Trump will get to grab America by the pussy indefinitely. And America will become a country like Russia, Venezuela or Hungary, which are republican in name only. I consider this likely because Americans are by and large weak, lazy and unwilling to give up their convenience or creature comforts for a difficult goal. There’s just one problem for Trump: He and Elon Musk are doing so much to wreck our integrated economy and our place in the world that it threatens our conveniences and creature comforts. And as with COVID in 2020, the more people are made unemployed by Trump’s policies, the more people will have no reason not to be out on the street. And in fact, there is a recent example of a country that managed to overthrow a Putin puppet governor when he tried to align his country away from the West: Ukraine. And in that case, the puppet in question actually had jailed his political opposition, so it’s not like they are strictly necessary.
It would be better for the sake of transition if the Democratic Party organization could come along for the ride. The problem is, revolutions have a habit of not waiting for the nice, sensible people to get in front of them.