Necessity, the tyrant’s plea.

Milton

As we watch the Trump team’s dismantling of our storied republic, in the name of an ethno-nationalist, theocratic kleptocracy, liberals and Democrats are in a bind. Trump and his Project 2025 hit squad, generaled by Naziferatu Stephen Miller, are pushing all-in for a theft or outright canceling of the 2026 mid-terms. They know that their policies are becoming more and more reviled, with no economic miracle for regular people anywhere on the horizon. Grand ballrooms, billions for Argentina, ongoing tariff punishment, stubborn inflation, government shutdown, and looming health care disasters do not make for a happy populace.

The Trumpers also know that stock market bubbles mainly fluff the elite (the top 10% own roughly 87-93% of all stock wealth), and recent reports show that those same top 10% account for around half of all consumption, lopsidedly driving what would otherwise be anemic economic growth. This froth of luxury does not make for a healthy society, and Team Trump is starting to realize that they are not going to be able to deliver positive outcomes fast enough for people to feel economically secure and confident by the time the 2026 elections (would normally) happen.

So Trump and his minions are pushing all-in on the us-vs-them, demonization of the libs theme, trying to convince everyone that inner cities are dangerous hellholes, super-barbaric enclaves of lawlessness and treason. Because these Democratic centers of iniquity and villainy are beyond the boundaries of acceptable American behavior, these areas should really not be able to vote, or they should at least be heavily surveilled by the military while trying to cast their shady, dubious votes. Red states are also pursuing every mechanism possible to thumb the scales, gerrymandering away votes and destroying every last vestige of Voting Rights Act protections.

This is obviously all aimed at the short-term goal of winning the mid-terms, so that Trump doesn’t have to deal with a Democratic Congress that could derail his personal ATM and vengeance-machine that is now the dual function of the federal government. But who is it all for? Obviously, Trump’s blatant lawlessness and goonish thuggery is going to propel Democratic turnout to stratospheric levels. No liberals or moderate Dems are buying the terrorist ANTIFA bullshit, and my bet is that self-described Independents are also increasingly smelling that fecal aroma (Trump sending troops to Portland after seeing five year-old footage on Fox is typical of the disingenuousness and outright stupidity of these troop deployments).

So is all this performative tough-guy shtick just designed to increase the turnout of his base? Despite all the talk, including my suggestions above, of cancelling the mid-terms, the federal government does not really have the power to do that. It would require that each state get in line and all decide to cancel their elections, or they would all have to ignore the popular vote and go with GOP-controlled elector slates, etc. Despite that tactic being against many state constitutions, I could certainly see some huge attempt by red states to do something like this, considering the contortions many states are going through right now to suppress votes and disenfranchise people who aren’t “American enough.” However, the sheer number of people who now identify as Independents does not bode well for states trying to put in large-scale election fixing. And even though the Supreme Court is in the tank for Trump, the state Supreme Courts, no matter what their states’ political alignments, are not going to be too eager to say, “Yah, we can’t manage our own election shit by the usual rules of our state constitutions, so we’ll just fake everything and hand it to the Republicans.” There is still substantial power in the subsidiarity of the state judicial system, power that can be used to resist outright fraud and tyranny.

But all of this Trump circus action presents a conundrum for liberals and Dems. The GOP has gone all-in on the short-term horizon, caring nothing for the long-term damage they are doing to our institutions and our social fabric, all just to appease a grifting, tacky, dementia-addled, wannabe dictator. And despite the seeming thoroughness and wide-ranging nature of Project 2025’s social engineering program for creating a theocratic kleptocracy, the whole thing is ultimately doomed to fail. No matter how much they want to birth a new Gilead in America, the vast, diverse, active population of the United States is not going to be transformed into a giant, white, patriarchal Shangri-La. Concrete reality does not bend easily to the fever-dreams of cosplaying warrior-kings. New wine always bursts old wineskins. And as Edward Thomas remarked, “the past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.” But it’s still dead.

The current Trumpist iteration of the GOP is riddled with short-term delusion. As the harsh reality of ecological collapse plays out over the next couple decades, their neo-fascist, theocratic fantasies are going to age badly, as they will never be able to deliver on any of their promises. This is not surprising, as religious apocalypticism has been failing to come to fruition for two-plus millennia, and Jesus isn’t coming any tine soon to magically deliver high-paying factory jobs for high-school grads and to smite the evil, liberal cities into oblivion.

So what should the Democrats and liberals do? How can they compete with the same scorched-earth intensity as the GOP for the short, 2026 election horizon, but also have something more long-term in the works? Because one of the main lessons of the Trump era is that the liberal vision of the future is not seen as credible by the masses. Even though the public has become more “progressive” on specific questions of policy and belief — universal health care, heavy taxation of the rich, a living wage, support for gay/trans rights — they are also NOT buying the overall vision of the future presented by liberals: a Green New Deal, mass re-training for the jobs of the future, free day care and college, high-tech solutions to social problems, etc.

The result is that many people have rejected the grand liberal project, choosing instead the cold comfort and instant vengeance of Trumpism, which is a fungus that feeds off the death and decay of our institutions and traditions. Trumpism utilizes the age-old tactic of out-group hostility as its animating force, so it has no need to present a better future for all. It can simply say, “Things will never be better for everyone until we get rid of all the worthless people who don’t deserve to be part of that ‘everyone’ in the first place.” This means that Trumpism will aways be a dream deferred, because there will forever be internal enemies to purge before anything substantive can be done for all. In practice, that means that the good life never comes. It’s all postponed, the delay blamed on the Other, while the grifters, hucksters, and plutocrats continue to monopolize everything for their own benefit. And… News Flash: this is all by design. Trump and his sycophant remoras are only in it to make their nut and then get out. The Project 2025 true believers, and the entire base of Trumpism itself, will be left to inherit the wind.

So again, where does that leave the Dems and liberals? Well, I must confess, I don’t really have much to offer regarding the 2026 mid-terms. My best guess is that Dems will just need to highlight, over and over, the damage done to regular people’s lives by the Trump administration. In many ways, Trump will be his own destroyer, as his policies will continue to trash every highway and byway of America. Dems can likely make a lot of hay in 2026 just by pointing to the unfurling destruction going on everywhere.

But for the long-term, a radical new vision for the future will be needed, and it will need to leverage some of the same ancient brain mechanics that Trumpism itself rests upon. Next time, we’ll look closer at that project.