A quick note: Last week, we detailed Trump’s extreme efforts to sow distrust in — and likely try to overturn — the November election. You can read all four parts of the Start the Steal series at Zeteo. In the planning stages, we called these stories Doomsday, Omnibus, Wargame and Intel. I hope you’ll check it out. Also last week, American Doom intern Ava Shook and I detailed Trump’s historic corruption and wasteful spending on vanity construction projects at Public Notice. I’m sorry I didn’t have the time to detail some of those findings here, but your support remains both appreciated and critical to our reporting. Please consider a paid subscription to American Doom to support our independent, adversarial reporting, or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. As always, if you like what you see here, spread the word. - jg

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Trump golfs at Bedminster, protected by by a mobile surface-to-air defense system.

The amount of money Donald Trump, his family and friends are making off the presidency is historic. The conflicts of interest in his administration are unprecedented. The taxpayer dollars he is spending on vanity construction projects is unheard of. His handling of the Iran war is catastrophic. The economy is a house of cards built on rampant speculation over artificial intelligence and crypto, which Trump and his cronies are profiting from. The scale of Trump and others’ efforts to sow distrust in and likely try to overturn the midterm elections has no comparison in all of American history.

Such is the state of the nation less than 100 days from the midterm elections. Republicans across the country are aware of the grim realities facing Americans, even as they continue to pretend as if everything is going splendidly.

Those Republican voters who aren’t simply tired of the daily drumbeat of scandal, failure and corruption are probably checking out. Now, Republicans running for re-election face the most difficult battle in all of politics: convincing an unmotivated base to choose between the polls and the couch.

Depending on how bad things get between now and November, some of those Republican voters might even go as far as voting for a Democrat. They might even vote for some of those candidates who are — despite the best efforts of Republicans and their right-wing media allies doing their best to scare the folks about “communists” — speaking to working class voters.

When was the last time you heard Donald Trump say the words “working class?” Mike Johnson?

That’s why Republicans are scrambling to concoct new enemies for their base of voters to rally against. With more immigrants than ever before locked up or deported, communities across the country have been emptied out of the people that Trump and Republicans have used as scapegoats to climb to power. Now, it’s Democratic Socialists, “communists,” “jihadists,” as Trump said this week, transgender athletes, and Dr. Anthony Fauci that Republicans say their voters must show up in November to save America from.

The list of the enemies that Republicans hope will convince their voters to pay attention to instead of all of the very obvious corruption, incompetence, greed and waste of the Trump administration changes and grows with each passing day. And it is likely not working.

The American right’s dependence on grievance politics has been going on for much longer than Trump has been around, but in the last 10 years, the party has become almost completely reliant on it. Will it work again in November? Here are the facts of life that those culture war talking points and new enemies conceived by Republicans are up against.

Fiscal responsibility? Gone. No new endless wars in the Middle East? Gone. A return to a robust manufacturing economy? Oh whoops, we actually meant data centers. More and better jobs once we kick all the immigrants out? Not materializing. Locking up the “Epstein class” of liberal pedophiles? Shoot, it turns out that Trump and an awful lot of his friends were involved with the guy, and oh by the way no one is getting locked up anyway.

A “golden age” of winning? We’re getting knocked around by what amounts to a guerilla resistance in Iran, who have effectively duped us into depleting our arms supply on a pointless war that has no end. We have a top-heavy economy that caters — more than ever before, thanks to Trump’s open, rampant corruption — to the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations. Our diplomatic and military failures in Iran (and elsewhere, like Ukraine, not to mention all the allies we’ve isolated ourselves from over the last two long years), combined with our complete folding to giant global tech companies and some the world’s wealthiest people — Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg — have made us look weak and feckless not just to the world, but to the generation of Americans actually consuming reputable news. They do exist, and they are watching.

There is only so much lying and distracting you can do before even the biggest MAGA chuckleheads start recognizing the reality around them. Unless I am very, very much mistaken, that reality check is happening right now in cities large and small across the country.

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Doom social:

The overwhelming scale of corruption and…