I don’t ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years. Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next…. It is really shameful. And I am honestly just disgusted by the non-stop flip flopping on the right.

Laura Loomer (X post from July 25th, 2025)

They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47. You could be next. I hate to say it, but I have a sick feeling we will be seeing more targeted assassination[s]. The Left are terrorists.

Laura Loomer (X post from September 10th, 2025)

It is difficult to look at Trumpers’ reaction to the Charlie Kirk killing without thinking that they have just been waiting for something like this to happen, so that they could massively ramp up their liberal demonization rhetoric, shouting more loudly than ever about violent left radicals and terrorists. Never mind that reality never seems to live up to this sinister billing. The would-be Trump assassins and the Charlie Kirk murderer are not radical lefties at all, and in fact hew more to the conservative side of the spectrum, which is where, smoky-eyed JD Vance claims notwithstanding, the vast majority of political and cultural violence comes from.

But this has been the in the conservative playbook for many years. The right-wing media and its MAGA followers are forever ready to pounce on events to confirm the horribleness of liberals. They cherry-pick anything and everything they can find, real or imagined, to highlight the depravity and corruption of the socialist, Marxist meanies in our midst. As I have mentioned many times before, the United States is an enormous, sprawling, diverse country, the third largest in the world in both population and geographical area. If you want, you can find examples of virtually everything, from all corners of the nation, to demonstrate anything about anything. So you will always be able to find fodder for proving the lunacy and malevolence of your enemy, once you decide that as your mission.

But in this post-Charlie Kirk overreach, what Trump and his political ramoras are doing is pure stagecraft. Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s harmless. Far from it. There is no question that all the Project 2025 and other administration actions are doing incredible damage to the fabric of the country. But it is, at bottom, all an act, at least on the part of Trump himself and his inner sanctum.

Take the case of Trump’s new obsession with occupying and “liberating” American cities. Does anyone actually believe, even diehard true believers, that the parachute in, tromp around for a few weeks, and then have a photo-op of Trump safely having dinner in said city, will actually address ANY problems in any urban areas whatsoever? Picking up trash and telling dudes smoking on their stoops to “behave” is not a particularly effective tactic for urban law enforcement. It’s all just theater, designed to either cancel the mid-terms due to out-of-control Democratic chicanery and crime in these lawless cities, and/or to remind the MAGA base that cities are dark (yes, that kind) and dangerous places, home of the subhuman enemies of God and country.

The problem is, there is no other endgame to Trumpism 2.0 beyond the stagecraft, the shameless grift and exploitation of high office, and the extortionate bullying and looting of any and all liberal institutions. While the Project 2025 architects and the true believers think that there will be a glorious conservative utopia — where America becomes the glittering world of the halcyon 1950s again, with manly breadwinners, fertile females (white ones), and a Bible in every schoolroom — reality is not going to cooperate. How would it actually work? Would colleges and universities convert over to teaching Creation Science [sic] and slavery-apologist history? It’s hard to see universities attracting many students with faith-based curricula and rigid loyalty tests (also, this would mean a lot fewer young people getting laid, which wouldn’t be good for the battle against the Great Replacement). Would cities, contrary to all recorded history and the laws of social science, somehow be cleansed of crime, free thought and expression, and all manner of sexual experimentation? Cities everywhere are hubs of economic dynamism and personal freedom. All the money sloshing around in urban areas attracts criminals, grifters, drifters, and all manner of odd and idiosyncratic behavior. That’s just the way they are. The intense population density forces tolerance of diversity by necessity. The only way to get rid of what conservatives view as the “problems” of the city is to abolish the city itself — not something that is coming any time soon, as that’s where most people generally live.

And in the big picture, how would it be possible to sustainably run an enormous country and economy on the comic book, junk-theocratic idea that tens of millions of American citizens are sick, leftish lunatics, enemies of all that is good? This is manifestly not something that has any basis in reality, and the growing discontent of Trump’s luke-warm supporters, the people who voted for him because they just wanted lower prices and some better jobs, demonstrates that they are not quite ready to embrace the full-throated fascist fantasy of ideological cleansing and thought police. Trumpism and Project 2025 are being exposed as merely cosplay stagecraft for the siloed echo chamber of far-right polarization vendors, a desperate attempt to buy enough time to distract people from the collapse of the system as a whole, and to lay the groundwork for cancellation of the mid-terms.

There is one other giveaway to the tyrant-behind-the-curtain game: at the same time that the delusional, likely dementia-addled Trump is moaning and groaning that no one is talking about how awesome the economy is, his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick has conveniently moved the goalposts, saying that 2025 is all still Biden’s economy; so it’s not really Trump’s economy until next year. Well, which is it? Is this supposedly awesome economy Trump’s or Biden’s? As usual, when you are creating stagecraft, the truth doesn’t matter. “There’s good news? That’s all me! There’s bad news? Well, that’s either bad data, or if the data is fine, then it’s not my fault, it’s the other guy.”

As regular readers of this blog know, the overriding problem in the US is part of a larger global impasse: consumer-industrial civilization itself is not sustainable. It literally cannot continue on much longer, as it is ecologically ruinous (every major natural support system on the planet is in decline), economically fragile (because of plutocracy-driven inequality), politically explosive (because that inequality has to be explained away by blaming it on an internal and/or external enemy), and psychologically bankrupt, as declining global mental health demonstrates. Our current iteration of capitalism is highly acidic, destroying all forms of traditional community, stability, and non-market value.

In the midst of this morass, the accelerating madness of Trumpism is a sign of desperation and exhaustion. This is a worldview that is only built to divide and destroy, exploiting the collapse of an unsustainable system to allow a small cadre of connected Trump allies to make their nut, while the rest of us are left to rage at each other and declare new civil wars. As such, Trumpism is not so much a parasite as it is a fungus, feeding off the dwindling nutrients of a dying, decaying society.

As a political project, Trumpism is built on geographic bedrock: rural vs. urban. It has taken the understandable anger at the economic collapse of rural areas, and then piled on layer after layer of social and cultural discontent: anti-elitism, racism, misogyny, anti-science, religious intolerance, homophobia, transphobia, etc. This coalition has been solidified by the Polarization Industrial Complex, which has mobilized and fused these disparate strains under the potent psychological tactic of out-group hostility, endlessly repeated, mantra-like, to form a red-hot rage machine, pointed squarely at anything vaguely liberal or (horrors!)…. woke.

Needless to say, a project like this struggles to actually create something positive. When all your energy is focused on cosmic, theocratic vengeance against the agents of Satan, it is very difficult to pivot to inclusive community building or the creation of novel solutions to the huge meta-crises we are facing with the collapse of consumer-industrial civilization.

We must confront this destructive force with a creative one, but that cannot just be tweaks to the methods of achieving the old liberal goals which are no longer possible: green energy transition, revival of union membership, more training support for the “jobs of the future,” sustainable growth (an oxymoron), free college and daycare, etc. More and more people, liberals included, sense that this slate of Epcot Center goals is bogus, only existing as possibilities in the minds of people who have already made their own nut.

Next time, we’ll take some of the things that I usually flog on this blog, but we’ll put them in a different context, one explicitly about transcending the rural vs. urban divide with practical, constructive solutions to our present quagmire.