America's Jonestown
I often wonder what America will look like 25 years from now when I might be Donald Trump’s age, staring backward at the wreckage of this era from the far side of history.
I wonder how Americans yet unborn will talk about Donald Trump, the worst president in the history of the United States.
How will he be remembered?
The answer is simple.
As a grotesque figure.
As a shameful one.
As a world historical liar whose relationship with truth belonged not to democratic politics, but to the diseased propaganda traditions of men like Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.
There will be outrage at the comparison, of course. There always is. There are people who can’t bear the moral clarity required to describe evil plainly. But history isn’t sentimental, and time strips away euphemism. It leaves only the truth.
And the truth is this: Donald Trump was a constitutional cancer upon the American republic.
One day, being compared to Trump will become the cruelest insult in American politics. Editorial boards will erupt in indignation when some future politician is accused of “Trumpism.” Thousands of words will be written insisting the comparison is unfair because there was only one Trump. Only one man so vulgar, corrupt, destructive and malignant that his name itself became synonymous with civic rot.
How will his henchmen and women be remembered?
How long will the stench linger?
Forever.
The names may fade in public memory eventually, but the disgrace never will.
They will be remembered as collaborators in America’s most decadent political era. Cowards who traded the Constitution for proximity to power. Opportunists who watched the republic bleed, and asked only whether the polling remained favorable.
One day it will become extraordinarily difficult to find anyone willing to admit they supported it.
“Who me?”
That will be the refrain.
Future generations will ask how Trump ever won elections if nobody they ever met claims to have voted for him. MAGA itself will retreat into a state of permanent denial.
The red hats will disappear into attics and closets like old Confederate relics hidden from grandchildren.
Because deep down, even they know.
They know what this is.
Trump has built his Jonestown, and now comes the Kool-Aid.
Now comes the moment where every Republican who surrendered dignity for ambition discovers the price of climbing aboard a madman’s movement. Every Republican gets to become John Cornyn now — humiliated, degraded and consumed by the very beast they spent years feeding.
There’s an old expression about riding the tiger in pursuit of power only to wind up inside.
That’s now the story of the Republican Party.
Every one of them lined up. Every one of them bent the knee. Every one of them surrendered.
Now they own all of it.
Trump’s desecration of the White House.
Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom vanity project.
Trump’s absurd spectacles staged in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump’s Proud Boys slush fund — the single greatest theft and taxpayer abuse scandal in American history — a grotesque transfer of $1.8 billion from the Treasury into the hands of extremists and political enforcers loyal not to the Constitution, but to one man.
The corruption is staggering. The vulgarity is total.
What we’re witnessing isn’t merely the suicide of a political party.
It’s the attempted suicide of a nation.
And it’s an appalling spectacle.
The bill is coming due now.
Things are going to get very bad in America in the coming months because reality always arrives eventually. Propaganda collapses. Delusion expires. Arithmetic matters.
This is Trump’s lost war.
This is Trump’s broken economy.
This is Trump’s national disaster, and that’s how it will all be remembered.
Not as greatness.
Not as patriotism.
Not as strength.
But as madness, corruption, cowardice and ruin.
Twenty-five years from now America may finally be nearing the end of the excavation effort.
Maybe.
Maybe by then we will finally be almost done digging ourselves out of the hole Donald Trump and his collaborators blasted into the heart of the republic.
Maybe.
“These are the times that try men’s souls…”
This entire debacle saddens me and hurts my heart. I still cannot wrap my head around all those who voted for AND continue to support the orange madman who is dying. Now we are going to obliterate Oman!