And now - Jimmy Kimmel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmF0xt9fzs
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Bottom Line Up Front for the Hardcore Activists (BLUF-HA): The GOP has spent 50 years building a machine to end democracy, funded by oligarchs who will outlive any single president. They want us to believe this ends with one man. It doesn't. We don't need false comfort right now, we need real clarity. That means acknowledging that as long as the seditious and openly criminal Republican Party exists, we are fighting the same machine that built him, protected him, and will replace him the moment he's gone. We have spent ten years personalizing a systemic crisis around a single figure. That personalization is itself a form of control. It lets us imagine that removing him solves the problem. It lets us fantasize about accountability and a soft landing. It lets us wait for rescue instead of doing the work. Robert Reich recently argued that Trump's end is imminent. The MAGA base is falling apart, he wrote. Congressional Republicans are finding their backbones. The ground is finally shifting. I respect Robert. He's been a consistent voice on the proper side of this fight for decades. So let's take his argument seriously. Let's look at the evidence he's citing and ask what it actually tells us. The polling decline is real. Trump's approval has hit 36% in Gallup tracking, his second-term low.¹ A CNN poll found 61% of Americans say his policies have worsened economic conditions.² These numbers are bad. But context matters. Trump's all-time low was 34%, right after January 6. His first-term average was 41%. He never once reached 50% approval in his entire first presidency.³ The mid-30s is not a collapse. It is his floor, and the floor is holding. But context matters. The Republican Party's project is not to be popular or win elections. It is to make elections unnecessary for holding power. Gerrymandered maps, voter suppression, a captured judiciary, and the procedural stranglehold of the Senate filibuster all serve the same function: insulating Republican rule from democratic accountability. Trump's approval among the broader public matters only if that public can translate disapproval into political consequences. The party has spent decades building the infrastructure of preventing democratic functioning. The November 2025 elections were a Democratic sweep. Spanberger won Virginia's governorship by 15 points.⁴ Sherrill carried New Jersey by 13.⁵ Mamdani became New York City's first Muslim mayor.⁶ Exit polls showed 55-69% disapproval of Trump across every major race.⁷ These results are significant. But this is swing voters responding to chaos. This is the suburbs recoiling. This is not the MAGA base defecting. The coalition that carried Trump to victory in 2024 has not abandoned him. Voters at the margins have. That matters electorally. It does not mean the movement is collapsing. Reich points to Republican fractures. Some are grumbling about the budget. Some reject the tariff dividend proposal. Some want to extend ACA subsidies. Hawks dislike the Putin courtship. But grumbling is not governing. When it came time to vote on the Big Beautiful Bill, two Republicans out of 273 voted no. That is a 1% defection rate. The tariff dividend was never even brought to a vote. The ACA subsidy debate remains unresolved because leadership won't allow a floor vote. The fractures are nonexistent in practice. The grumbling itself is the performance, a way to maintain the fiction that Republicans aren't voting in lockstep while they vote in lockstep. And then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene. After Romney. After Cheney. After Kinzinger. After the party systematically destroyed every Republican who broke ranks. After years of enforcing total loyalty, his most devoted defender finally walked away. One more name on a short list that keeps getting shorter as the party purges dissent. She was his most loyal defender. She voted with him 98% of the time.⁹ She spent millions on his campaigns. She flew from her father's brain surgery to vote against his second impeachment.¹⁰ And when she broke with him over the Epstein files, he called her a traitor within days. She also announced her resignation timed to within a few days of her congressional pension beginning.¹¹ This is not a crack in the foundation. This is the foundation demonstrating how solid it is. The apparatus that destroyed Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney's political future did exactly what it was designed to do: enforce total loyalty and obliterate dissent. So let's say Reich is right about all of it. Let's say the polling collapse accelerates. Let's say Republicans lose the House in 2026. Let's say Trump's health fails, his mind deteriorates further, or he simply dies. He is 79 years old. It could happen tomorrow. Here is what does not change: The 43 Republican senators who acquitted him after he incited an insurrection remain in office or have been replaced by others who would have done the same. The Supreme Court that ruled him above the law serves for life. The federal judiciary packed with Federalist Society judges will shape American law for decades. The 47% of Project 2025 already implemented does not reverse itself.¹² The 200,000 federal workers fired or forced out do not return to their jobs.¹³ The gutted agencies do not rebuild overnight. The dismantled regulations do not reassemble themselves. The Varieties of Democracy Institute, the world's leading authority on measuring democratic health, identified the United States as undergoing the fastest episode of autocratization in modern American history.¹⁴ Director Staffan Lindberg stated in March that if the current trajectory continues, the United States will no longer qualify as a democracy when they assess 2025.¹⁵ That trajectory is not about one man. That trajectory is about captured institutions and a party apparatus committed to single-party rule. We tried the institutional remedies. We impeached him twice. The Senate acquitted him twice. A jury convicted him of 34 felonies. No judge sentenced him. The Supreme Court granted him immunity. We voted him out in 2020. He came back and won by a wider margin. Four years of Biden changed nothing structurally. The courts remained captured. The gerrymandered maps remained intact. He was able to make marginal progress that was obstructed at every turn, overturned by SCOTUS, or immediately undone by Trump. The filibuster remained in place, allowing Republicans to block voting rights legislation with unified opposition. We followed the rules. They ran out the clock. And at the end of it, we got a second Trump term that has done more damage in ten months than his entire first four years. Trump did not build this. The Heritage Foundation wrote Project 2025. The Federalist Society built the judicial pipeline. The Republican National Committee enforces party discipline. The conservative media ecosystem manufactures consent. State legislatures draw maps that let them choose their voters. Dark money networks fund the whole operation. Trump is their most effective instrument. He normalized what was previously unthinkable. He proved what was possible. He moved the ball further down the field than anyone before him. But he is still an instrument. When he is gone, everything he proved remains proven. Every precedent he set remains set. Every norm he shattered remains shattered. The Republican Party has been building toward this for 50 years. The Powell Memo.¹⁶ The Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society. Gingrich burning down congressional norms. The Southern Strategy. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. McConnell holding a Supreme Court seat hostage for a year.¹⁷ Trump did not break the system. He is the product of a party that spent half a century crafting the tools to end American democracy. As long as the Republican Party exists, our democracy remains under threat. That was true before Trump and will remain true after him. The party must be dismantled. Not defeated in one election. Not moderated. Dismantled and its leaders incarcerated for sedition and corruption. So when the headlines tell you the ground is shifting, maybe something is happening. When pundits tell you the MAGA base is cracking, maybe the margins are eroding. When Trump eventually leaves the stage, it will feel like relief. We will want to exhale. We will want to believe the worst is over. Do not exhale. The day after Trump is gone, we have the exact same work to do. The same captured courts. The same gerrymandered maps. The same consolidated media. The same oligarch class. The same party apparatus that protected him through everything and will find another vehicle for their project before his body is cold. And the next vehicle will be less repugnant. Someone who passes the same fascist laws and strips away the same freedoms but with less spectacle, someone who makes it all look more professional, and then people stop paying attention. Trump's repulsiveness keeps people in the streets. But the Republicans are the ones passing the policies anyway. They're the ones telling him what to support. A polished version pushing the exact same agenda without the daily outrages will be far more dangerous. The next one gets a grace period while the world celebrates, and the fascism continues while everyone exhales. He covered a lot of ground for them. That doesn't all reverse with him gone. The project does not end with him, and if we act like it does, we hand Republicans a free pass for everything they built while we were staring at one man. We have spent ten years personalizing a systemic crisis around a single figure. That personalization is itself a form of control. It lets us imagine that removing him solves something. It lets us fantasize about accountability that will never come through the institutions they have captured. It lets us wait for rescue instead of doing the work. Stop waiting for Trump to die. The fight is the same either way. So what actually works? Three things. First, states must investigate, prosecute, and criminally indict corrupt politicians at every level and refuse to hand those cases up to federal jurisdiction. If we don't hold these people accountable ourselves, no one will. This should be done through an interstate anti-corruption compact where states work together to rid our federal government of criminal actors. Second, states must build social safety nets at the state and multi-state level that actually improve residents' lives, because the federal government has been captured and isn't coming to help. Third, multi-state non-compliance with bullshit SCOTUS and federal decisions. That's it. That's what needs to happen. It takes political will, and it takes us demanding it from every state official we can reach. For more information, I have a free book and two free booklets available right now: 'Conservatism: America's Personality Disorder,' 'Intro to Soft Secession,' and 'Tax Warfare.' All free. No paywall. The Existentialist Republic is also building an activist toolkit for the fight ahead, and gatekeeping it behind a subscription defeats the purpose. We are building a powerful movement, our strength as opposition grows and that's thanks to the folks who show up, make the calls, send the letters, and understand the assignment. References
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