"Grump Chaos Fatigue"

A "personal" account of the Trump rally shooting over the weekend that speaks to feelings my go-to journalistic-historical sources just cannot quite reach. It's not precisely my take but I recognize in it immediately a kindred soul, the familiarly frustrating predicament many of us share, perhaps even a 'silent majority.' We're partially shutdown by the relentless gaslighting mendacity of the Republican assault on democracy and the rule of law, and want, wish for, hope for above all else nothing more than that this Trump national nightmare finally end and we can return to our regularly scheduled-- peace loving, if mundane-- lives. 

Anyway, some choice excerpts to give you the flavor. Find the whole piece at the hyperlink.  

Do you remember what Trump said at CPAC two years ago, about the horrific plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan that the FBI foiled? He said: “It was a fake deal. Fake. It was a fake deal. Gretchen Whitmer was in less danger than the people sitting in this room right now, it seems to me.”

Donald Trump was in less danger on Saturday night than the people sitting in the stands right then, it seems to me. Two of them are in the hospital. One of them is dead. Trump was on the golf course the next day.

That, too, was a lie [his claim in 2016 that he would stop the "American carnage"]. The carnage did not stop. Trump saw to that personally. And in a second term, as Project 2025 makes clear, it will only get worse. Donald could snap his tiny fingers right now and have the Senate approve one of the gun control bills—but he won’t. He is an arsonist who lives to throw gasoline on fires. And his whoremaster Vladimir Putin would rather we keep shooting each other, because it makes the United States an international embarrassment.

But we were asked on Saturday night to ignore all of this and show sympathy for this monster—to keep him in our own thoughts and prayers—even though he is, as both the head of the Republican party and a recidivist instigator of violence, a primary author of this persistent but preventable American carnage.

On January 6, 2021, remember, Trump “expressed support” for his army of MAGA besiegers hanging his own vice president, Mike Pence. Read that last sentence again, because the media has completely normalized putting a hit out on a VP.

No one has done more to ratchet up the anger and hatred in the United States than Donald Trump—in the 21st century for sure, and probably in my lifetime. He foments violence. He cultivates it. He cheers it. He lusts for blood.

The most irksome part of the rally shooting is that it forced us all to once again pay attention to this bloated orange bag of venom. Like all dictators, Trump demands all of our attention all the time. There is no let-up, no relent. No safe spaces. It is the sick mentality of a serial rapist, which Trump also happens to be.

The rally shooting reminded us of what an unpleasant experience life during the Trump years was. It’s not going to win him the election, as his fanboys have proclaimed. Quite the opposite.

Despite what MAGA might think, we don’t want Trump killed. We just want him to go away and leave us in peace.

Notes on Trump Rally Shooting, By Greg Olear

More on the history of republican violence:

Repubs at RNC use violent rhetoric, won't stop, Popular Information 

Rough Beast: Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Excerpt from intro to Greg Olear's new book Rough Beast: Slouching Towards Dictatorship: 

Donald Trump’s term in office can be summed up in four words: pandemic, protest, impeachment, and insurrection. He left the White House with 392,428 Americans dead of a plague he exacerbated; with Washington recovering from a coup attempt he instigated; with the economy teetering towards recession; with our standing around the world at its lowest point in a century; and with the U.S. an additional $8 trillion in debt. He had, by far, the lowest average presidential approval rating since Gallop started keeping track in 1938, and was widely reviled abroad. Four of the five largest protests in the history of the country happened on his watch. He was impeached twice. He could have been impeached a third time, in 2019, after the release of the Mueller Report—which, contrary to what Trump and the mendacious Bill Barr told us, did not exonerate him. Even his much-ballyhooed campaign promises fell flat: He failed to build the wall, and he failed to drain the swamp. He did, however, watch a lot of television and play a lot of golf.

In the various presidential surveys taken since Donald left office, historians have consistently ranked Trump dead last, behind even the contemptible white supremacist Andrew Johnson and the hapless James Buchanan. This is not recency bias. By any metric, Trump was a catastrophic failure: corrupt, sociopathic, cruel, venal, disruptive, artless, dumb, and pathologically inept—a terrible president and an even worse human being. He threw paper towels at hurricane victims! He called veterans of our armed forces “suckers and losers!” He invited the Taliban to Camp David! He banked $2.4 billion in emoluments during his four years in office! He characterized the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people!” He nominated an(other) alleged sexual assailant to the Supreme Court! He sat on his ass watching TV as his besiegers stormed the Capitol! He humped a flag! And that’s just off the top of my head.

We have never had a monster like this in the White House. No one comes close. That the country managed to survive four years of Trump suggests that Otto von Bismarck was on to something when he remarked that God seems to have a special providence for the United States of America. With Donald, we dodged a big orange bullet.

In a word, we were spared.

And yet as I write this, Donald John Trump is the presumptive nominee of one of our two major political parties. Only two individuals have a legitimate chance at winning the White House in November—I’ll talk about the myth of third parties and the perils of voting for the nihilistic likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Chapter 9—and Trump is one of them. And he’s not just that political party’s nominee. Donald Trump has subverted the entire GOP, purged it of the disloyal, and taken total command. He installed his daughter-in-law—Lara Trump, desecrator of Tom Petty’s memory and wife of Eric Trump (Donald’s son who ripped off his own cancer charity)— as co-chair at the RNC, and changed the organization’s rules there so that the lion’s share of donations will be used to cover his mounting legal bills. As I explore further in Chapter 8, the conventional, old-school Republicans of yesteryear have either retired, lost, died, or kissed the ring. Don’t be fooled by the cute elephant logo. Whatever the branding, this is no longer the Party of Lincoln. There is no GOP anymore, only MAGA. It is an entire party built around a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions.

If the polls are to believed, that demagogue has a coin flip’s chance of retaking the White House. Like, this might actually happen! People in my family are going to vote for him. People in your family are probably going to vote for him, too. And if, God forbid, he succeeds, there are—as I explain in Chapter 7—a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025. The threat is real. The situation is dire.

This isn’t me, a known “TRUMP HATER,” trying to frame the narrative to make Donald look bad. All of what I’m saying here is objectively true, as this book will make abundantly clear. As the kids say: #Facts.