Trump is losing

It may be difficult to find optimism, as we navigate a seemingly endless sea of new pro-fascist and anti-civilization-in-general horrors, but barely a year into the reign of Donald and the Mar-a-Lagonauts there are a lot of reasons to have hope.

True, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with many of the worst human beings this nation has on offer. But even as they wreck a great many things in ways that will be hard to fix and do lasting damage, what they're not succeeding at is coalescing it all into the Heritage Foundation's and Claremont Institute's imagined Fourth Reich, one in which state violence and corruption will be cemented into United States government for the next hundred years.

That's not to say it still can't happen. But Trump and his acolytes have been spectacularly botching every one of their dreamed-of priorities, except the part where Trump grifts and steals every penny he can. Oh, and putting his name on things. Possibly so he can steal those things too.

If we look at the honest state of Republicanism/Trumpism in these last months, things do not look good for the Dear Leader & Friends movement. And there's a clear, growing sense of panic in pro-Trump ranks.

ICE and Immigration

At least as of today, the ICE "surge" and occupation of Minneapolis is likely the single biggest error the Trump regime has made—and it is a huge one. Nestled inside their own created far-right bubble, a place where government accounts are encouraged to post neo-Nazi memes, eliminationist figures abound, and Trump aide Stephen Miller controls the majority of all government policy for reasons none of us outside the bubble are privy too, Trump's cabinet of deplorables truly thought that the American public would welcome open displays of violence in its supposed anti-immigrant fervor.

In Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Minnesota, paramilitary-styled federal incursions were meant as displays of supreme federal (white supremacist) authority. They were designed to incite terror, and were fitted out with dedicated video crews tasked with making "content" out of the federal violence. Each operation was premised mostly on finding legal immigrants to detain and deport, part of the Miller-led push to reclassify fifty years worth of refugees, asylum seekers, and green card holders as illegal via the process of Executive Backsies.

The goal has been to produce scenes of violence and packed detention camps—what Trump's immediate circle most wanted to see, and what they therefore thought the rest of America wanted to see.

It backfired. Big time. It turns out that the American public are, broadly, not sociopaths, and aside from a devoted rump of giggling sadists most of the nation was infuriated by footage of door-to-door paramilitary thuggery, street kidnappings, assaults, child kidnappings and seemingly gleeful federal violence against anyone else who just happened to be in the neighborhood at the same time. In Minnesota, neighborhoods organized. Previously uninvested Americans came together to surround the federal instigators, thwart their patrols, and document literally hundreds of acts of unnecessary violence and apparent crime.

Trump's fascist core had convinced themselves that Americans would not just stomach, but welcome fascist violence in service of "cleansing" the homeland. Not only were they proven very wrong, but that public violence has now led to an organized, visible, and easily expandable campaign of resistance. Americans hate seeing footage of distraught children, of crying mothers, of federal thugs smashing car windows to get at U.S. citizens who an anonymous gang of cosplayers thought might not look white enough.

It's a catastrophic error for the Trump regime, because it gave birth to a new aesthetic of resistance. It's now considered acceptable, and even noble, to follow, mock, and create petty public inconvenience for federal agents acting as the enforcers of a fascist government. Blowing horns and whistles is a trivial act of resistance—but an effective one, and one that requires no ideological lift greater than as an American, I do not like this.

The consequences are already significant. Border Patrol "commander-at-large" Greg Bovino, one of the primary advocates for the large-scale violence, was booted from the post. Tom Homan was dispatched to Minneapolis to concede defeat; while the announced draw-down of federal agents may yet turn out illusory, the administration has been forced back into a pattern of trying to hide arrests and deportations from the public, rather than belligerently promoting them.

And now all of America knows that no matter what preening bullshit the Trumpers and their billionaire, press-owning allies might push forward, the vast majority of American does not support Trump's grotesque version of what the nation should be. There is no far-right majority, and the "real" America that pundits and political strategists so obsess over is so repulsed by this new fascist violence that they are willing to confront federal agents rather than abide it.

We've seen Trumpism and MAGA defined, in part, as a "vice signaling" movement. The Minneapolis resistance proved that "real" America is willing to fight for decency and compassion.

The Epstein scandal isn't going away

Despite all the best efforts of a now shockingly corrupt Department of Justice, the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his enablers have broken containment. There is a broad public consciousness not only of Epstein's depravity, but of the wider circle of fabulously wealthy figures that either looked the other way, actively assisted him, or participated in his sex trafficking and abuse.

It is now common public knowledge that our billionaire class is made up primarily of gross criminal perverts who abuse children, and that is not something you're ever going to shove back down the memory hole without first presenting the public with the pound of flesh even hard-right figures are now sputtering for.

This is a scandal that will stick. For decades, in fact. There is nothing that the human brain likes more than a conspiracy theory, and there is now ample enough evidence for even the most sensible brains to conclude that yes, there was indeed a conspiracy behind Epstein's crimes and the subsequent cover-up. More than a dozen past or present Trump administration officials have Epstein connections, suggesting that Trump did indeed prioritize the same group of wealthy vulgarians that Epstein himself subsisted off of.

The widespread public assumption that our nation's elites are grotesque people who need to be punished good and hard is not something that those elites, no matter how many television stations they may own, can propagandize their way out of. The pressure to investigate and punish Epstein's allies is nonpartisan; Trump has lost allies such as the crackpot-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and a now-livid Rep. Thomas Massie.

In the United Kingdom, the arrest of the former "Prince" Andrew indicates that the probe of Epstein's likely accomplices is likely to speed up from here.

Republican "reforms" have left the economy sputtering—just as critics predicted

The American public is mostly a passive entity; it can be mustered into paying attention to politics only in extreme circumstances. This is because most Americans have their own problems, and lots of them, and even taking twenty minutes a day to learn about somebody else's issues is a hard lift for anyone who has a day job, car payments, or likes to eat Food.

Historically, not even "our nation's elites are complicit in a coast-to-coast sex crimes ring" is enough to rouse enough public anger to threaten incumbent politicians. There's really only one thing that does pose such a threat: The Economy, Stupid.

An American who does not compulsively keep up with the news may not know the extent of their nation's pedophile rings. But everyone knows whether they are hurting for money. And everyone has an uninformed instinct that tells them whether that hurt is getting better or worse.

If Republicanism had any economic policy that did not revolve around looting the treasury for the sake of the rich, they would be pulling it out by now. The economy is stagnating. Trump's illegal tariffs have sent entire industrial sectors into chaotic doom-spirals; massive public sector layoffs, spiking electricity prices, soaring health care costs and inflation that's been conspicuously hitting all the petty little items that Americans are most likely to notice have created a deep public pessimism.

That's terrible news for, you know ... everyone on the planet, mostly. But it's good news when it comes to defeating Republican-led fascism, because there is no propagandistic way to hide "Everything Sucks" from an American public that is hardwired to respond to "Everything Sucks" by purging incumbent officials in bulk.

It is the story of fascism. All fascist figures like Trump and his cabinet have to do to retain power is to, in general, shut up and not break things. But fascism is premised on yelling loudly and breaking as many things as possible, just for the sake of doing it.

So here we are, barely a year into the Trump presidency and government services are worse, the economy is worse, prices are higher, corporations are going on new customer-screwing benders, unemployment is rising, Canada is getting cheaper and better cars while our own manufacturers "pivot to robots" or whatever-the-hell, and all of this is before the almost-certain crash of the obscene book-cooking known as the "artificial intelligence boom."

Trump and his Republican loyalists have been acting like they'll never again have to face the judgment of the voters. Unless they plan on locking up the ballot boxes and shutting down the polling places—and if they are, see Minneapolis as the preview of how each and every neighborhood is likely to respond—that's an act of lunacy.

Corruption is becoming a major story

Again, we're only a year into the New Trump Regime. Barely 13 months. And it already seems like half of all news stories are about some new, nearly cartoonish act of fascist crookery.

Trump's alleged "Board of Peace," a new supposed world body on par with the United Nations that will be propped up mostly by dictatorial regimes and which is run entirely by Trump himself, is now reaching "stealing the gold out of Fort Knox" levels of crookery.

And while children in administration concentration camps complain of worms and mold in their food, Department of Homeland Security influencer-in-chief Kristi Noem will be shuttled around the nation with boy toy Corey Lewandowski in Nazi Party-styled luxury.

Oh yeah, gotta have a two-person bed in a jet like that. Because reasons.

This might be a sustainable level of crookery if (1) none of these people had to ever face voters again or (2) the current public zeitgeist was focused near-exclusively on jet-setting rich-as-snot sex traffickers and abused imprisoned children, but the administration is attempting it all in an environment in which both of those scandals are only accelerating.

Politically, it's malpractice. But it is, again, a necessity of fascism: If you're going to put idiots in charge of everything, they're all going to do idiot things. Everyone with enough smarts to know that you have to hide your crookedness got fired—like the people who knew that you shouldn't secretly accept $50,000 in cash in a fast-food bag in exchange for steering government contracts in certain directions.

Trump's sanity is slipping away

I've said this more times than I can count, but Trump is in extremely poor health, is showing signs of dementia, and is not likely to be American fascism's Dear Leader figure for much longer. The man is decaying before our eyes. He appears to fall asleep frequently, in public settings:

Meanwhile, his social media pronouncements are getting even more bizarre and his public speeches even more disjointed.

Someday real soon now he's going to fall asleep, fall off his chair, and be whisked away by federal agents—footage that will be replayed on every network approximately 100 times. This ain't getting better.

Republican poll numbers are still cratering

Trump now has the worst approval ratings of any president since the invention of approval ratings. And the lower he sinks, the more his fascist enablers look like, well, fascist enablers. And stooges. And clowns. And corrupt. And so forth.

None of this means that we've dodged the bullet and the United States will not, despite the orchestrated moves of nearly all American billionaires, nearly all Republican officeholders, and every repulsive sleazebag whose name is now slithering out of the Epstein files, be captured by violent pro-oligarchic fascism. All of those aforementioned sleazebags are still trying very, very hard to make it happen.

But their public support is collapsing. America is angry about what Trump has enabled and what his supposed movement now publicly represents. There's no hiding the corruption, the state-sanctioned violence, or the national humiliation of having a bellowing circus clown wake up each morning, look around, and find something new to wreck. There is now an opposition, and it was Stephen Miller who gave that opposition its form and its marching orders.

It's become cool to oppose federal "law enforcement" agents who act like thugs. It's become mainstream to oppose the things Miller, Noem, Bovino and others thought would be so widely celebrated by the public that they sent each set of goons off with their own video team and set their crimes to stolen music.

That is not the makings of a supposed Fourth Reich. Trump's fascist allies have overstepped, because they presumed the general public would enjoy cruelty and corruption as much as they themselves do.

And now we have video footage of Americans rising up in contempt of those things. And that is a massive, massive screw-up on the part of the goon squads.