Donald Trump

Only Three More Years of This Shit

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Yesterday marked one year of Donald Trump’s second Presidency. To say the least, it has been consequential and insane. The Federal Work Force has been gutted by DOGE. USAID and the Department of Education is gone. DEI is virtually illegal inside of the Federal government. ICE is running raids across the United States and rounding up basically whoever they want, then deporting them, sometimes incorrectly or without due process. Major projects like the transit tunnel between New York and New Jersey are being stopped or canceled. We are no longer helping Ukraine fight Russia. We removed a dictator in Venezuela. We are threatening to take Greenland and the Panama Canal. The President is trying to arrest some of his political enemies. The President called his Vice-President incompetent to his face in a cabinet meeting. He wants to push the Federal Reserve Chairman out of his job because he won’t cut rates.

This was all one year.

The Congress is completely derelict in it’s duties and is barely even capable of appropriating funds. The Supreme Court is so stuck in their obsession with creating a powerful executive branch that they are allowing the President to ignore courts, agencies, laws, and the constitution to achieve his agenda. Now the truth is that the other two branches of the government have been broken and deteriorating for a long time now, and this is just the logical end point. Conservatives beliefs in “states rights” are being shown as bullshit, just a slogan to justify them doing bad shit to people they don’t like. Our foreign policy is increasingly in line with Putin, Netanyahu, MBS, and Xi, and less in line with the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The President is abusing tariff powers that were expressly given to the Congress under the constitution, to hurt our traditional allies much less, and the courts are basically punting on the issue. Our government is broken.

Our society is basically broken too. Seemingly normal people literally decide which celebrities and sports teams to like, what singers to listen to, based on their perceived view of Donald Trump. Siblings argue on social media and eventually don’t talk over politics. People justify behavior that they themselves won’t do, based on the political leanings of the protestors and insurrectionists doing it. People will justify anti-Black racism and outright anti-semitism based on their political leanings. The level of division in our society over politics is at an outright tipping point. All in one year.

Assuming good health (which I sadly must wish him, as it is only right), Donald Trump will not leave office until three days from yesterday at high noon. The Congress won’t even pretend to be a separate branch of the government for at least a year. The court will only be as useful as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett allow it to be. This isn’t going to end by some other miracle anytime soon, and even if it did, J.D. Vance would arguably be a much worse President in power. As George W. Bush once famously said, elections have consequences. We are living them now. You skipped voting over Gaza? Netanyahu now is basically free to do as he wishes. You wanted to crack down on immigration? This is the ICE you get. Joe Biden was too old? Your “new” President falls asleep in cabinet meetings and confuses Iceland and Greenland. Americans picked this. We are not “better than this,” or any other favored slogans of the “resistance.” This is who we are.

Here’s the really dark part for folks who are either left-leaning or just hate Trump- I don’t think the election would play out differently today. As much as voters are unhappy with Trump, conservative views generally defeat liberal ones in polling. Republicans still lead on their old faithfuls, immigration, crime, taxes and the economy, and usually on foreign policy. Democrats will almost certainly win the 2026 midterms, because that is the nature of midterms. Once they take back the House, they will inevitably face the task of governing with Trump, which is hard. The Presidential race will begin, and inevitably left-wing candidates will take far left positions popular in the primary, but unelectable in the general election, and we will see how they deal with that. I guess what I’m getting at here is simple- this isn’t going away easy. No one is rescuing us. God speed.

Americans Hate Everybody

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Americans are some miserable bastards right now. The President? We hate him. The last President? Yeah, him too. Leaders in Congress? Congress itself? We despise them. Cabinet members? Members of the judiciary? Yeah, we hate them too. Some are hated so badly (Schumer) that they’re underwater with their own party’s voters. Almost all of them are hemorrhaging a significant number of voters in their own parties, relative to how many Americans even know who they are (View Pew’s numbers here and Gallup’s numbers here).

The truth is that both political coalitions that have ruled the country essentially since Buchanan have cracked, and we’re all just prisoners in the skeletal remains of the two parties. The old Reagan/Bush Republicans are now a minority in their own party, while MAGA runs the show, with a small smattering of Libertarians somewhere in their coalition. The Obama coalition still essentially rules in the Democratic Party but about a third of the party is somewhere between European social democratic (big government) politics and flat out Marxists and Anarchists. The only unity between these groups is essentially their desire to win Presidential and other office nominations for themselves. A lot of Mamdani backers have nothing good to say about Joe Biden, and can barely be considered a member of a similar political party, let alone the same one. When you consider both political parties are fairly unpopular, and neither can really be assured of getting a majority of the popular vote at this point, it’s hard to see a national figure any time soon that reaches 50% approval for a sustained period of time. People would rather cheer for literal terrorists than a leader from the other party, and that includes some segment of your own party.

A few weeks after the 2016 Election I was drinking in DC with some friends from the Obama days, and I said we were entering a 20 year period of darkness in the politics and government of this issue. Basically I said we’d have four or five Presidencies in that period (numerically we’ve had two people serve three individual terms so far), Congress would swing regularly (we’ve had four Speakers since, and the Senate has swung twice), policy would swing wildly (kind of became obvious in 2025), and political rhetoric would get even more adversarial than it was in 2016 (I underestimated the violent element). My theory was we’d get to the end of that and either be good (so still a functioning, sane democracy) and fine, or bad (I’m pretty sure right now we’re closer to whatever the fuck this is) and fine. Maybe I should not make predictions about the future on a December weekday in a Russian bar anymore. The voodoo really woke up on this one.

I have no idea who or what would be the unifying figure to lead us out of this mess. No one will be well liked enough. As is, I don’t think you can put “the old way” back together in DC after Trump. There may not even be anyone liked enough by our population to even make us stop calling each other scumbags and Nazis on social media.

The Disappearing January 6th Conspiracy

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Sometimes the truth doesn’t matter. And well, this is sometimes. Yesterday marked five years since the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. To be clear, it was an insurrection against the United States. It was done by Trump supporters to stop the electoral votes from being counted that showed Joe Biden rightfully beat Donald Trump. The people in the capitol definitely committed crimes. Trump at a minimum didn’t defuse the situation, and no this was not a conspiracy between Nancy Pelosi and the FBI.

Not one bit of that matters.

Everyone in America fits into one of three groups on the issue of January 6th. The either believe the truth, they’re a conspiracy theorist and denier, or they don’t give a shit. In truth, a lot of people are some combination of one of the first two and the third. Like sure, Capitol Police broke down that day and I’m sure there were some federal agents among the rioters, but in the end it was still an insurrection by people intent on stopping the count. And the majority of people either deny it or don’t care. They either don’t want to be bothered by it or don’t care at all.

There are still people, particularly Democrats and never Trumpers, who mark this day like Christmas every year. I get that it was a really bad event. It’s an event fading from consciousness though. With Trump having pardoned everyone involved, and what will be the passage of eight years by the time he’s gone, it’s over. It’s dead. They all got away with it. The public isn’t mad about it. The issue went nowhere.

We live in a country where a lot of truths aren’t realized until way long after the fact. In 100 years, I bet history majors will call it utterly insane that we let a bunch of half-wits, hillbillies, imbeciles, and Neo-confederates attack our Capitol. That day of judgement will have to wait.

Collective Political Failure

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Donald Trump is the President of the United States and Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York. One, a raging madman that has re-defined conservatism around his cult of personality, hatred towards those he perceives of enemies, and the destruction of both our federal government and the existing world order since World War II. The other, a self-described socialist that won’t say “the Intifada” is bad, wants to open city owned grocery stores, and ran on a platform of giving away a lot of free stuff to city residents that he will need Albany to come in and foot the bill for. If you read my blog regularly, you know that I have no use for either one. In fact, I think the election of both is a sign of a society in decline.

As is true with all things though, Mamdani’s first day was a mixed bag, even if it was almost all bad. He did decide to keep the city’s office that fights antisemitism, even if he weakened it a bit, which is a good thing. He also is showing signs that he is willing to cut through some bureaucratic red tape in the government to help build more housing fast. Other than those two things, his first day in office was a hellscape of terrible. You know it’s bad when the speeches by AOC and Bernie were as much about criticizing Democrats as the Trump Administration, but they were nothing compared to Mamdani’s. One line, in particular, has received almost all of the attention- “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” If Mao or Stalin himself had said this, we would have zero shock. The speech was literally a call to return to at least “big government liberalism,” if not an outright socialist battle cry altogether. As Putin critic and former Soviet citizen Gary Kasparov put it on Twitter, “The “warmth of collectivism” is to freeze while those with heated dachas tell you how noble your sacrifice is.” Mamdani, a man born of economic and academic privilege, is what happens when limousine liberalism gets put on steroids and hyper-charged. There is a reason China rejected Mao, the Soviet Union failed, Cuba is a failure, Venezuela is now a living hell, and no one wants to go to North Korea. This kind of rhetoric leads to failure, because the underlying system of socialism has no grounding in practical reality, it cannot be run in a functional way. Mamdani’s solution is to get the city involved in things the city probably can’t do very well, like run a grocery store. His solution to expensive transit is to make it free. His solution to some crimes is to legalize them. What he doesn’t get is that someone has to pay for it all. Politicians in Albany aren’t going to be excited to raise taxes to pay for his programs, and they probably will just refuse to do it for the most part. To the extent he’s even allowed, he may try to pin that bill on the wealthy in New York City. At least some of them will just leave. No city, not even the greatest city, can survive with no taxpayer base.

My guess is Mamdani will mostly fail to deliver, and that’s my hope. If he succeeds, it will have long lasting impacts on the city, and a few will be good, but the net will be bad. How do you get to Mamdani though? You get there through electing a Trump. How do you get a Trump? You get there by a government that the public doesn’t think meets it’s needs. A world where more people live out of debt, work more hours, and get ahead less. In short, it is a collective failure that gets you to Mamdani. Oh, the irony.