What is the end game here?
Or, When Too Much Is Never Enough
Well, it looks like the “big, beautiful bill” (barf) is going to be our reality.
I often wonder these days if the people who supported Trump because “immigration was out of control” or because they “were better off financially the last time Trump was in office” or because they were furious that trans people were being kind of pedantic about using different pronouns think the results of this Trump presidency so far have been worth it.
It’s certainly been a whirlwind. “DOGE” illegally eviscerated departments and careers, led by an unelected egomaniac drug addict — and who knows how much of our private data they stole for the ability to have a thousand-page dossier on every single one of us if they wanted. Contracts and grants were invalidated and clawed back illegally. After being told that deportations would focus on criminals, the administration has seemed to have taken an incredibly broad view of what a criminal is: someone who entered the country without initial permission or overstayed a visa, or simply someone who’s expressed political views they don’t like (like, that they’re against genocide even if it’s committed by an ally of the US).
Home of the free, indeed.
That’s an incredibly short list of sins…booting perfectly qualified people from their posts and replacing them with less-qualified white guys “because DEI” is, incredibly, the least of it. We’re also making sure already eradicated deadly diseases make a comeback because someone once wrongly claimed that vaccines cause autism and powerful people are digging in, and we seem perfectly happy letting women die of miscarriages now as long as a few sluts get punished with babies for having sex, consensual or no. Children shot dead at their desks or drowned in flash floods are small prices to pay for the holy freedoms of gun possession and disregard for the environment as long as there’s money to be made. These aren’t phenomena unique to the Trump administration, of course, but there’s certainly no will to pump the breaks.
And we haven’t even talked about the economy yet.
This administration hasn’t “drained the swamp”; it just got rid of or de-fanged all the institutions or people that might put a stop to its current impunity. Even the Supreme Court has rolled over and said alarmingly often, “Weeeeeell, I mean he is the president, so we guess it’s okay.”
Jesus Christ. Forget the swamp — this is a shit-filled sewer.
When I was a kid, my dad would say things like, “Sarah, Republicans hate poor people, and they hate racial minorities.”
This, to me, was absurd. I’d seen George Bush, Sr. going on his jogs on TV, after all. He had a warm smile. He shook people’s hands, and not all those people seemed rich. Surely my dad was exaggerating.
Now I know he wasn’t.
Project 2025, which is rapidly speeding through the country like a runaway train, is the wet dream of the far-right come true…literally what they’ve been working on for decades. The right to an abortion rescinded? Check. Unlimited abilities of corporations to make money by any means possible, labor and the environment be damned? Check. Tossing out immigrants at will without all those pesky laws to protect them? Check.
To all the people who assured me, “Oh, it won’t be that bad…” — seriously, what did you expect.
And now with this bill (don’t make me call it big and beautiful again), the crown jewel: reverse Robin Hood. Steal (more) from the poor to give to the rich. Extended tax cuts for people who couldn’t spend all their money in their lifetimes if they tried, paid for, but not really because nothing could pay for it, by slicing up Medicaid and SNAP for already desperate people.
And they’re not even being honest about how they’re doing it. “You can still have it if you qualify, but you need to fill out this stack of complicated forms every month on a platform that only works sporadically and for which there’s no answer on the other side of the help line, and also…answer me these riddles three.”
They’re being clever about it, I’ll admit: the most painful aspects won’t take effect until after the mid-term elections, by which time they’ll have had some time to say, “Those Democrats told you the sky was falling, and look! Everything is fine and they are hysterical.” Once there’s surely a swing away from Republicans, things will get painful, and then it will be easy to blame it on Democrats because people are very stupid and too many think that whoever is currently in the top job is a fucking magician who dictates every aspect of the country on any given day.
The result, of course, will be people suffering through painful illnesses and dying early deaths, in addition to plenty of people, mostly kids, not getting enough to eat.
Who are we?
A country that hates and wants to punish poor people, it looks like.
Even for the greediest, cruelest Mr. Burns-type characters out there, this seems like too much. I mean, just out of pure self-interest, you’d think they wouldn’t want too much of the general public to be too miserable.
And what happened to the Republicans having become the party of the “working man”? Lots of those working people and their families, disproportionately from Republican-majority states, actually, are going to lose the benefits they depend on for survival (as often happens, they have perfectly good reasons for getting benefits, which they’ve earned; everyone else is a lazy loser, and we want them off the government teat, pronto!). On top of that, the promised consumer price reductions never did show up, and indeed, are virtually guaranteed to keep climbing.
So what’s the end game here for those in charge? What is their vision? Getting to live in castles while the rest of us literally work as slaves to increase their wealth and die off when we’re no longer useful?
But history is full of examples of the rich getting eaten, or at least beheaded when things get too dire. Has it been too long since the last revolution? Did they already forget the folk-hero status of Luigi? Are they counting on us all being too distracted by our phones and/or too tired from working ourselves to the bone to have the energy or wherewithal to fight back? Too scared of being kidnapped by the masked gestapo, which, by the way, is set to get a budget the size of the Army’s in this bill?
Well, I guess it does seem that the ruling classes are always taken by surprise: “What do you mean not everyone adores and admires us for being so superior and good at everything?”
The sad, and hopeful reality is that we actually do have enough to go around for everyone. We have enough food. We have enough housing. We have enough skilled people to perform needed services.
They’re just being hoarded at the top, and no amount is never enough; what’s a billion when you could have a trillion? Let’s try for that.
In the movie Mountainhead, the world burns while a group of billionaire tech bros relax in a mansion, plotting how to divvy up the world once they head back out.
We don’t get to see what happens after they leave the house.
But I’ve got some guesses.
What we have here is a president who is unpredictable and someone difficult to read, sort of like an abusive spouse. He also seems to be all about an agenda that is simply dangerous. Observe the latest climate disaster in Texas and the president's cutbacks to the weather service. These are dangerous times.
Very well said and there always comes a point where revolution is necessary !!