Let's blame the enablers

I don't particularly care what Trump has threatened to do, thought about doing, or actually done. Trump is a vessel of resentment, self-entitlement, animosity, and vengeance. What we're seeing these days is that Id brought to the forefront and given free rein to do whatever it wants in all its nasty, anti-social glory. Trump is a creature driven entirely by spite — spite against those who stood in his way during his first administration, who now need to be taught a lesson. This extends from comedians who made fun of him to foreign leaders who obstructed him, to say nothing of individual civil servants, judges, lawyers, or anyone else who told him "no." When you understand that root psychology, nothing about the man is shocking or surprising.

So, I don't really care what he does — he's going to do what he promised he would, and that he has shouldn't surprise or appal anybody. Trump will burn the world down out of petty, myopic narcissism if he's allowed to do so.

Instead, I care about those who are enabling this. Much can be said about the Republicans in Congress entirely abdicating their responsibility for the legislative functions of the government and I don't think their feckless subservience bears anything more than contempt. They've been on this authoritarian slide for forty years and it's been obvious that their motto has been "power at all costs" for half as long.

But the day to day people enabling the worst of Trump's impulses? The useful idiots in DOGE who think Musk is a genius and don't realise the criminal behaviour they're engaging in? The cowards who have rolled over at the first hurdle — or even earlier — rather than stand up for their previously-professed principles? These are where the finger should be pointed.

Trump is Trump, this is apparent now more than it ever could have been. He's doing what he promised to do.

But everyone else doesn't have to go along with it, and when they do you must ask why. Not everyone is operating from a place of fear — enough are, certainly, but enough are just chickenshit, or self-serving, or gleeful collaborators. And plenty of people are just disconnected from this until it becomes a problem they, personally, cannot ignore. You're going to have to get involved a lot earlier than that — at bare minimum, the apparatus enabling Trump is trying to break as much as it can before it's properly stopped, ideally at a point where stopping them doesn't make a difference, and people are going to have to decide how much of that they wish to put up with before they become their own impediment to this chaos, too.

History will judge, etc, etc, but nothing's stopping us from shaming all involved in real time now, too.