Dispatch #7: Happy Independence Day: The MAGA movement will end
Between fascism and freedom, Americans have always made the right choice when the bell rings. We'll continue to do so, starting in November.
Happy Independence Day weekend! A few thoughts today on what’s coming as we reach both the half point of the year and are getting closer to the midterms. Also, make sure you check out Chloe and Ava’s reporting on Trump’s recent failures — the Iran peace agreement and the Reflecting Pool debacle. Things aren’t going great! Elsewhere, I was on the American Friction podcast to discuss my book, which you can order here. Listen to the podcast on your preferred platform at this link. Also, my book won an Independent Publisher Book Award, which I am contractually required to brag about. (Kidding — this is exciting!) So, thank you to everyone who supported my work by buying my book and reminder: if you want to support the independent, adversarial journalism we perform here at Doom, consider a paid subscription or dropping a few bucks in our Coffee Fund. In the coming months, we’ll be blowing the lid off Trump and Republican efforts to overturn the midterms, which unfortunately is coming right down the pike. Hold fast… - jg
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?
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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