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If there is a single statement that sums up what American life can feel like under President Donald Trump’s second term, it may be this: “We control everything.”

That’s what Trump said Wednesday during a speech at the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library. Trump is correct in some ways — it certainly does feel like the president, his authoritarian regime, and its enablers possess vast control over the government, the economy, and the media. But like all fascist movements, this power is brittle. Trump and his people may feel like they control everything because they live in a hyper-curated echo chamber where even the remotest dissent from anyone within their ranks is not allowed, but their movement is broadly unpopular.

That’s because it’s obvious to anyone who is not a committed member of this movement that Trump and his people are no better than the corrupt Washington insiders they were elected to ostensibly replace. The Epstein stuff, the war in Iran, the constant self-dealing, the wasting of taxpayer dollars on frivolous construction projects to feed Trump’s ego — there remains a large swath of conservative American voters who look at all of this and, at minimum, will decide to stay home in November. Some of them may have even had enough of the corruption, waste and incompetence of Trump’s second term to go out and vote for Democrats.

This group of voters will doom Republicans for one very simple reason: it is becoming quite clear that Trump and his people are getting obscenely rich off the backs of everyday Americans. Deluded by the belief that the white rage that fuels their fascistic policies on immigration gives them a free pass to loot the government, Trump, his family, and his administration have developed a massive blind spot that is preventing them from seeing what’s coming.

But it’s coming, and that’s because of very clear and obvious things like this:

What you see here is the result of deep reporting from Reuters, showing that Trump and his family’s crypto ventures are nothing more than a scam that enriches those at the top. In a way, this graph perfectly illustrates American life under Trump because it shows the decline of the many — and the rising prosperity of the few.

Making gobs of cash is as American as apple pie, as they say. But this is something different than your run-of-the-mill, hyper-capitalist cash grab. As president, Trump has enacted policies that have helped the crypto industry gain a foothold in global markets. (He’s also directly helped other industries in which he is heavily invested.) The crypto company run by Trump’s sons, World Liberty Financial, has benefitted from investments from the United Arab Emirates, a regional ally, and the founder of Binance, who Trump pardoned.

These are the exact type of swampy, jet-setting conflicts of interests that fueled Trump’s political rise. Now they’ll help usher in his movement’s downfall.

Still, instead of this being a universally-accepted understanding of the perversion of American values that it is, a solid third of the country sees nothing wrong with the profits Trump, his family, and the world’s richest people have made directly as a result of Trump’s election to his second term.

But a recourse is probably coming — this time in the form of a sweeping rebuke of Republicans in November.

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Trump, the billionaires who populate his cabinet, the tech industry titans that have cozied up to Trump’s authoritarianism, and anyone and everyone who has access to the president and is cashing in on federal government contracts are the few who have gained massive profits since Trump took office. Americans making less than six figures a year are no better off — at best. There is simply no amount of immigrant fear-mongering that can make up for the fact that the lives of working class Americans look no better now than they did before Trump took office.

Of course, this should have been obvious to them from the very start, but we’ll have to take what we can get. The many millions of white, working class voters who will likely stay home in November will do so because they will have finally learned that Trump doesn’t actually give a solitary fuck about them. Between now and then, Trump will probably only make this dynamic worse.

The golden age is not already here and it is not coming because it never was. It’s here for Trump, his family, and the richest people in the world — but not for me, you, or any of the white working class masses who thought that kicking out immigrants would solve all their problems. By November, if deportation levels keep going the way they are, there will hardly be any undocumented immigrants left to blame.

That’s why, in recent days, you’ve seen Republicans shift to a new scapegoat: “communists” running for office against less left-wing Democrats. Trump has called these “communists” — also known as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or just plain old Democrats — the “biggest” threat the United States has ever faced. Bigger than World War II, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Trump has said.

This makes the leftists currently winning elections across the country just the latest “biggest threat” of the Trump era. China, Mexican immigrants, immigrants in general, the news media, Democrats in Congress, judges — all have had their turn as the biggest threat facing the nation. After 10 years of proclaiming whatever person or entity Trump was able to focus on for more than 10 consecutive minutes the “biggest threat,” what are Americans to actually believe?

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Even some of Trump’s supporters understand that, at a certain point, you can’t just keep claiming that everyone else is ruining things for the president you elected to make your life better. After 10 years of this, and with Republicans in control of “everything,” even some Trump voters will begin to question why it is that Trump can’t seem to make things better for the white working class. Then, those voters might catch a glimpse of some news that Fox or their algorithms aren’t feeding them. Something like, since taking office in 2024, Trump’s net worth has doubled, from $2.4 billion to $6 billion.

Even some Trump supporters who would otherwise brush this off with, “he’s a businessman” won’t be able to countenance the news of Trump’s obscene profits during his second term.

They elected him to make the country richer, to make them richer, not himself. Recall that, from the beginning, one of Trump’s biggest selling points was that he couldn’t be bought — he was already rich, so he wasn’t in it for the money. Tens of millions of Americans elected him on this very idea. Now, even with the powerful forces of right wing media and Trump-slanted social media algorithms, they won’t be able to avoid the truth that Trump has bilked his voters and everyone else to the tune of godly sums of money.

Some of these Trump supporters will feel lost and confused. And in that moment they’ll have to decide between what are really the only three choices in life: freeze, fight or flee. The ones who freeze simply won’t show up in November. The ones who fight will buy the new line about “communists.” The ones who flee will come to the other side or go farther to the right.

The MAGA movement will end because of its greed, hubris and brittleness. They don’t actually control everything — at least not yet. Trump and Republicans’ constant lies about election fraud are proof of this: they don’t have complete control over elections because that’s not how our founders set it up — but they sure do want that control, and are doing everything they can to try to get it.

That’s another reason they’ll lose in November. Not only will lots of Trump’s people stay home — bored with his nonsense, fed up with the corruption, the lies about Epstein, or the war he started — but many, many millions of Americans who aren’t particularly politically engaged will come out of the woodwork to stop what is the actual biggest threat to American freedom: Trump and Republicans themselves.

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You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

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I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.

And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.

Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.

Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.

Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)

Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.

All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.

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Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me t…

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