United States of Armageddon

If American current events were a dystopian TV series we would all be saying this is over the top, no one can be this diabolically cruel and evil and dementedly stupid at the same time. Let’s just hope it’s cancelled after one season.

Trump is the main cheerleader for the us vs them philosophy. Politically it is that his supporters can do nothing wrong and are worthy of pardons for the moist heinous crimes while political opponents can do no good and are evil and horrible people. More dangerously he sees Americans as normal white cis gender straight right wing Christians vs foreigners from shithole countries and perverts, a categorization that anyone who knows history can see the parallel to. And the only role of women is to mandatorily produce babies.

Those of us watching from the outside do not even know who to blame. Certainly renowned snake oil salesman Trump is at the top of the list and he is (or was) the ideal front man.

But one person does not make this all happen, it takes a movement.

At the top of the list is organized religion, call it evangelism, fundamentalism or the Christian right, but it enables it all. I have always said it is easy to get bad people to do evil but it takes religion to get good people to do evil, because it is not evil if god (or those you believe speak for him) says it is what he wants.

And then there are the tech billionaires that financed Trump’s election victory (even if it’s legitimacy is questionable). There is a conundrum here because technology is based on science and the Trump regime is, if anything, anti-science. But the tech industry has long abandoned science when they decided wasting large amounts of water and energy to perform meaningless mathematical calculations can create value or that the all of the garbage on the Internet can be used to make a software machine intelligent.

So we have current situation where there is apparently no line the fascist Trump white supremacist regime cannot cross that will enable it to be stopped.

Those of us in parliamentary democracies are amazed, while probably not amazed as we know the American system is different, but disappointed that the legislature (Congress) could just not get rid of Trump by voting non-confidence in him, assuming at least a few Republicans are sane.

Separation of powers does not seem to be providing the safeguards it is supposed to. The procedures to remove a president for misconduct or incapacity are too cumbersome to be useful. While Congress supposedly controls government finances and theoretically should be able to just refuse to fund ICE or refuse to approve Trump’s tariffs, with a one man executive who refuses to abide by the law and the constitution and a corrupt Supreme Court willing to let him do whatever he wants it seems there is no solution.