A MAGA Voter (No Worries) Other (Worry a Lot)

A MAGA Voter (No Worries), Other (Worry a Lot)

Or a Trump voter who really didn’t think he’d go all the way

Prison Guard Captain: “What we've got here is... failure to communicate.”

From the 1967 Motion Picture, Cool Hand Luke

“President Trump is committed to lowering costs for all Americans, securing our borders, unleashing American energy dominance, restoring peace through strength, and making all Americans safe and secure once again.” 

Whitehouse.gov

“Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most U.S.-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.” 

James C. Ho, 2006 (then-future federal judge)

“No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship.” 

James C. Ho, 2024 (Justice on the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals)

It’s what happens when even the most basic efforts towards understanding in a heavily polarized United States are distorted by blame, rejection of empirical facts replaced by false but convenient alternatives, an unwillingness to listen, or peer pressure to accept any description that is not founded into a common understanding. When words/facts are either dismissed by one side or the other, marginalized or simply accorded new meaning… when new descriptive terms (“Nazi” or “woke”) present the vector of feeling but are otherwise devoid of empirical foundation, merely saying the nasty word is enough to void the opposition into meaninglessness.

The result is a paralysis of democracy, a reality quickly coopted by those with media or political power, willing to apply pejorative meanings in exchange for tangible benefits. I’ll blame those you hate or label them “woke”… and you support my quest for deregulation and tax cuts and look the other way as we move to eliminate “entitlements” to pay for those changes. If you vilify the “other side” enough, suddenly in a viciously-applied ends-means test, you can justify serious extremes (separating children from families; raiding churches, courtrooms and schools looking for brown-skinned maybe-undocumented people; rejecting US-born children where their parents were not US-born; encouraging gun ownership yet pardon violent perpetrators against police officers… if they support your belief system, etc.)… Notwithstanding that Americans have traditionally fought wars to eliminate such cruelty and harshness.

A MAGA adherent and a traditional liberal can look at the same people and the same events and see polar opposites in the spectrum of good and evil. One fascinating rising dynamic is the use of destruction of institutions and denial of factual reality to eliminate barriers to fundamental political change, from the Constitution to the centuries-old expectations Americans have held dear … all to construct a new order, one that establishes an efficient (a dangerous word these days) system to implement the goals of an extremist minority. You can witness this dismantling of America, days into a new administration, by simply attempting to visit old government websites that no longer exist. Agencies designed to protect consumers, education and the environment are facing extermination or defunding.

Mark Wilson, writing for the January 22nd FastCompany.com, explains: “Visit Whitehouse.gov today, and you’ll be greeted with a full-bleed video of President Donald Trump stepping back into the White House as fighter jets fly overhead. When it ends, you’re left with a big photo of Trump smiling and pointing toward some unseen fans with big text: ‘America is back!’ Neat. There’s just one little thing missing: The U.S. Constitution web page—which, as Redditors have noted, is now a 404 error.

“Intentional or not, the moment is a symbol of Trump’s new world order that’s been realized overnight—not in our cities and towns just yet—but across some of the most important spaces in the online world.” Indeed, that Whitehouse.gov excerpt has already been negated by Trump’s own admonition that he cannot control basic prices, that we have been at peak oil extraction for several years already and that safety and security have already been seriously undermined by Trump’s pardoning or commuting virtually all the January 6, 2021 Capitol ran sackers, including many who physically assaulted and injured (resulting in the death of one and the serious injury to many more) uniformed Capitol Police officers. There are a whole lot of violent felons, whose sentences have been commuted or convictions pardoned, ready to march as Trump’s private army, knowing that their excesses can be deemed legal by the stroke of a pen.

Government apps intended to inform asylum seekers of their rights and how to access the process legally have become literal “roads to nowhere.” The Constitution is ignored or presented under the most tortured legal reasoning to justify the unjustifiable. The clearest words of the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship, without qualification to children born in the United States, are met with distorted reasoning, fortunately rejected by a federal judge in Seattle… effectively saying, “well, the framers of the 14th Amendment really didn’t mean that.” Add the words “invading aliens” to the same set of facts (seriously, are there “baby” invading aliens?), and you justify the unjustifiable, as the above quotes from Federal Justice James Ho, himself an immigrant, suggest.

Today, as Meta has decided against external fact-checks, as MAGA Republicans scream “censorship” as bona fide fact-checkers find conspiracy theories and fabricated statistics to be false narratives (wonder why Dems, who have been known to fabricate as well, generally accept the fact-checked result), you probably should ask yourself how “truth” moves back as the legitimate bipartisan underpinning of democracy… Because if truth dies, so does representative democracy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I have faith that the majority of Americans will in fact figure out that they have been had, I worry that they may never again have a vote to reverse their error.