Day 176: MAGA Grifts Itself

 

What a summer of discontent!  The summer of 2025 is similar to last summer in that the weather is running ahead by a month.  June was very hot, much as July usually is, and July has been warm with jungle humidity, something more reminiscent of August. I would like to know if this trend will continue as it did last year, where August felt like September and October...felt like September, too! 

Be that as it may, I am not enjoying this season, as I never do. Every fool out there who has "I love summer!" on their lips should be boiled in their own pool water and buried with an air conditioner through their heart.  

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When I last wrote, Trump was having a rare good day. His strike on Iran came off flawlessly, and his love affair with Russia seemed to freeze over as Trump began to take shots at Dmitri Medvedev.

However, as I said then, this happy place for Trump 2.0 would not last, as this is a remarkably incompetent and incoherent administration.  

As for the former, it immediately became clear that while the strikes on Iran's nuclear research sites were successful in terms of accuracy, the long-term success of those strikes is far more doubtful. This became abundantly clear in the subsequent presser, where Trump refused to answer hard questions about the battle damage assessment that initially suggested that Iran's program was severely damaged but not destroyed. Trump, in his usual manner of thin-skinned bluster, first tried accusing the reporters of asking questions hurtful to the feelings of the pilots - who knew the USAF was made of such snowflakes! - and then concluded by declaring that there is no need for further engagement with Iran, that the murderous mullahs were now "honorable" people, that it was "fine" that Iran attacked US airbases in retaliation, and that the Iran matter was closed for good. 

This is classic Trump, a man who specializes in creating messes and then leaving others to clean up his mess. That is what Trump has done here. The problem of Iran's nuclear program has not been solved in the least. Rather, it has been set back, certainly, but not destroyed permanently, something that would require the regime's toppling.  After being sneak-attacked by Israel and then backstabbed by America (recall that Trump gave a two-week deliberation period before immediately kowtowing to Netanyahu's demands for an immediate attack, a turn that Iran considered deeply insulting on a diplomatic level), Iran now has every reason to race for a bomb and never look back at diplomacy again. 

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As for the latter, Trump's break-up with Russia continues apace. Again, this is not hard to understand as Trump has a remarkably simplistic reasoning capacity. Putin has played Trump time and again. As Trump himself recently said, he would have nice conversations with Putin on the phone, and then have Putin completely ignore whatever understanding Trump thought they had, and proceed to pound Ukraine with drone and missile attacks.  This rope-a-dope scenario played out so frequently that, at long last, even the dimmest of the dim, which is to say Trump himself, finally understood that Putin was playing him for the fool. So, that is why Trump is reluctantly parting ways with Putin.

I say "reluctantly" because even now, Trump is giving Putin an arbitrary 50-day deadline to change his ways. This, of course, is not going to happen as Putin is up to his neck in the blood and guts of war and cannot deliver anything short of a clear victory to his people without having an unfortunate fall from a fourth-story window. When this 50-day period expires, what will happen? No one knows for sure, as Trump is prone to TACOing when someone calls his bluff. We might be right back where we were at the start of Trump's administration, where Putin was portrayed as the good guy and Zelensky the villain. Guess we will see.

Be that as it may, Trump has now decided to invest in a Rube Goldberg scheme to get weapons to Ukraine without looking like he is giving weapons to Ukraine so as to not upset his Russophile base.  So, his team has come up with a convoluted scheme where NATO countries can individually opt to give weapons to Ukraine and buy replacements from the US. Of course, the logical course of action would be to simply do what the Biden administration did and just, you know, deliver to Ukraine the weapons it needs from the factory floors of our powerful munitions industry, but Trump, as a perpetual grifter and skimmer, likes middlemen complicating simple transactions with needless steps and extra fees. 

There is also another factor to consider as well: as relations between America and the NATO countries deteriorate due to Trump's antediluvian tariff policy, Europe has begun to shift away from purchasing US weapon systems and has started to bootstrap its own weapons industry so as to not need to rely on the US ever again. This convoluted Trumpian shell game for arms for Ukraine would seem to be a ham-handed way to encourage Europe to continue to purchase US weapons. Of course, Europe may simply hand off US weapons to Ukraine and replace them with domestic counterparts. As is typical for this comically short-sighted administration, this scheme may well accelerate Europe's divestment from the American military-industrial complex.

When it comes to Trump 2.0, things are never as simple as they first appear. There is always an angle, a grift, a coercion at work. 

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Lastly, for today, we come to the delicious Jeffrey Epstein story, where countless MAGA suckers and losers convinced themselves that Trump was going to blow the "deep state" pedophile cabal wide open and expose all those dastardly (and no doubt for MAGA, all Democrat) child molesters to the world. 

Republicans have often relied on various secretive lists to get that couch potato demographic to the polls. Joseph McCarthy most infamously did so with his fake list of State Department communists. Then there was Nixon with his legitimate "Pumpkin Papers" obsession. This is just more of the same, but instead of "red-baiting," they are now pedophile-baiting.   

What is particularly absurd this time is how the GOP has chosen a sexual predator as their avenging angel against other sexual predators.  Recall that Trump is a man who:

• Joked about sexually abusing women and getting away with it because he is rich
• Joked about walking into the dressing room for the Miss Teen USA pageant, where girls as young as fifteen were getting undressed, and getting away with it because he owned the pageant
• Has been accused by twenty-five women of unwanted sexual advances, including a legal finding of sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll 
• Partied with Jeffrey Epstein throughout the 1990s, opined that Epstein was "a terrific guy," and commented about how Epstein also liked beautiful women (as opposed to all those guys who hate them?) and made a point of explaining how Epstein was into younger girls, something that seemed to amuse Trump. 

The fact that anybody would think this was the man to crack open the world of sex predators is lunacy, but so is the alternate reality of MAGA, I guess. So, here we are, with a hot civil war raging between those who truly did believe he was going to release "the list' and those who are happy to bend the knee to the whims of the mad king and declare that they see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil when it comes to Trump.  

There is little left to be said of the hypocritical latter, but of the former, there is something worth pointing out. Of those who truly did believe Trump was going to take down the "deep state" and its satanic cabals, I suspect about 40% are those are of the couch potato demographic, which is to say, low information voters who know next to nothing about Trump but voted for him anyway because he amuses them with his reality TV antics and his platform of political gibberish.  I suspect, however, the larger share of jilted MAGA cultists were voters who knew that Trump was an evil man, but were more than happy to vote for him because they convinced themselves that they were choosing the lesser of two evils (wise men know that is the devil's favorite bargain because he always wins!). That is to say, they eased their guilty consciences by convincing themselves that by voting for a man who was going to expose the Grand Council of Pedophile Pizzarias, or whatever wild fever dream was the rage that month, they were doing a good thing despite voting for a bad man.  This was the same rationale many evangelicals embraced in 2016 when they turned a blind eye to Trump's bilious life in exchange for ending abortion in America (a corrupt gamble that must be admitted did pay off in the end!) I believe a similar Faustian deal was made with Trump in 2024, only this time it was votes for taking down elite pedophile sex clubs or what-have-you. So, when Trump reneged on this deal, as he most assuredly has, he deprived guilty-minded Trump voters of applying that salve for their consciences.  

This is why I suspect that, of all the outrages Trump 2.0 has been guilty of, it is this one peculiar issue that is proving to have the power to tear MAGA assunder.  People who do bad things don't like to be reminded that they are bad people. This is why Trump is so eager to bury this Epstein issue, as well as why his golden calf-worshipping dupes are so outraged by his treachery.  Trump got what he wanted, but they got little more than a horde of demons dragging them down into hell, where they can forever contemplate the foolishness of their Faustian deal with a devil. 

In short, the MAGA faithful thought they were making a righteous trade, evil in the name of justice. But they weren’t just deceived. They were willing participants. Now, as the curtains fall and the smoke clears, they have lost the joys of heaven not because the devil lied, but because they believed what they knew to be lies. 

The fires of hell burn hot, and they are now feeling the heat of self-betrayal. 

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer... 

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