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Welcome back.
I forgot to tell you I was going to be off last week, so sorry.
Today’s essay is a bit of a departure — I just wanted to make super clear where I stand vis a vis the next eleven months.
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IF THIS, THEN WHAT ELSE?
If Donald Trump is one of the worst people alive, a logical person would ask how the hell he got elected president in the first place, and why — despite nearly a hundred felony charges and losing his re-election bid — he’s swept the GOP primaries already and is an extremely viable threat to regain the presidency.
The answer(s) are myriad and complicated, but working from the bottom up, it’s absolutely vital to remember that Trump was/is the manifestation of all of the years of increasingly-right wing Republican talk.
He is their Stay Puft marshmallow man.
The same people that created him have been desperately trying to walk the “return to the middle ages” walk for a very long time — they were one infuriating John McCain thumbs-down away from repealing Obamacare and have only become more “The Last Duel was a rom-com” ever since.
And while you say a quiet thank you for John McCain, and argue that the right-wing has seemingly only been partially successful at the national level, as young people, college-educated people, and of course, Black women have salvaged some otherwise-unwinnable races for Democrats, understand this:
A decision like Dobbs — even one cast down from Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court — has much less of a practical effect on women’s health if those same right-wingers hadn’t spent the past twenty years accumulating most of the governorships and state legislatures, and then using those to not only pass their own horrifically draconian state laws and refuse Medicaid money, gleefully killing their poorest constituents, but also — simultaneously, it’s all part of the plan — to gerrymander the House to within an inch of it’s life.
In every single case, you have to understand that they have had a comprehensive plan all along and that it is still, in Jeff Bezos’s words, “day one”.
In the words of Dennis Green, they are who we thought they were.
So if Obamacare, immigration, and wetlands, if Trump, if Dobbs, if Mike Johnson — then what else?
And what comes after that?
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