Hope in a Hopeless Place

Can't wait to say 'I told you so'

Let’s be clear: We’re screwed.

We made our bed and now we’re about to lie in it for (at least) four years. Half the country fucked around and the entire country—including the half of us that didn’t fuck around at all—is about to find out. Right now, as we stare down the barrel of the second Trump presidency, it’s hard to see any hope.

But there is some. Sort of.

It’s all going to crumble. Eventually.

They will fail. Spectacularly. They will fail the country, the world, each other, and even their most loyal subjects. The absurd cabinet nominations and staff appointments make this abundantly clear: put a bunch of criminals, reality TV stars, and wackjobs in positions of power and they won’t have that power for long. These people aren’t qualified for these jobs.

The Republican takeover of the government is a house of cards built entirely of jokers. They’re gonna fail, and they’re gonna fail big.

We all know this. They’re not actually going to fix things, not that they have any real interest in doing that. They aren’t interested in saving America or helping you; they are out for themselves and themselves only. And they’re gonna do whatever they can to grab whatever they can as quickly as possible. All while pretending that they’re fixing things for the people who voted for them, when all along they’ll actually be corrupting, depleting, and undermining the very institutions—and the very people—necessary to keep the country stable and strong.

But it’s going to take time, and we’re going to have to endure a lot of misery—which hopefully won’t include pandemic, the botched response to the last one was largely a result of the first Trump administration’s idiocy and incompetence (and the fact that they disbanded the pandemic response team Obama had in place)—and it’s going to take some major bullshit to force the other half of the country to face the reckoning and see the light. But they will. Eventually.

Which isn’t to say they won’t have their wins. They won already, literally, and they will win again, at least some of the time. They have all three branches of government! They’ll get richer, their friends will get richer, and they’ll continue to grow and abuse their influence and power. And the longer they keep it together, the longer they suppress resistance, the worse it will be and the more damage they’ll do.

The good news is that the institutions they’re going to destroy are big and sturdy, and the bad news is that the public they’re going to abuse is ignorant and brainwashed and angry. So while it’s going to take a lot of nonsense to bring those institutions down, it will take even more nonsense for the people who voted for them to wake up and realize how bad things are going. Hopefully it won’t be too late by then.

The question is whether the damage can be contained enough that we can rebuild when the storm passes. Because in the worst case scenario, America as we know it will be forever altered, mangled, and stained, even worse than it already has been by this toxic circus, and there may not be all that much left to salvage.

In the worst case scenario, Trump’s arrogant bluster and tactless bullying will damage our relationships with our allies, provoke our enemies, and further inflame global tensions.

In the worst case scenario, the environment continues to be ravaged, crossing dangerous threshold after dangerous threshold without any meaningful guardrails or protections.

In the worst case scenario, the gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to expand, thanks to awful economic policies and rampant corruption and cronyism. Decades of social progress will be undone, civil rights, endangered, dissent stifled.

In the worst case scenario, Trump gets to nominate even more corrupt Supreme Court judges beholden to lobbyists and dark money with extreme Christian Nationalist agendas who do their best to implement policies and philosophies that make the country unrecognizable for generations to come.

Sorry—this was supposed to be optimistic.

Even if they accomplish their agenda, such as it is, that won’t forestall their demise. Eventually, the dam will burst, the tire fire will explode, and people will wake up.

It won’t happen immediately but it will all happen inevitably. Because make no mistake: they’ve pretty much peaked. They’ve gotten everything they wanted, and they’ve fooled half the country into thinking it’s what they want too. But be careful what you wish for, because it’s clear to the rest of us that this is all going to blow up in their stupid, corrupt, incompetent faces, sooner or later. We just need to push for “sooner” and hope that when it does blow up, we can dodge the shrapnel.

Until then, it’s on us to hold it together—to hold the country together—while the people selling us out fall apart.

And then it will be on us to pick up the pieces. Like the democrats often do: just enough to make things bearable again, to make the country recognizable again. (Just not enough to change things so that we’re not in danger of being back here again. Never enough for that!)

Sitting back and waiting to pounce with a hearty “I told you so!” isn’t all that satisfying when the stuff you’re crowing about involves the destruction of our country’s longstanding identity and values, but let’s not pretend there won’t be at least a little joy in watching these clowns self-destruct.

Our moment will come. Sure, it would be a lot funnier if we weren’t so incredibly screwed, but it’s still gonna be fun when it all comes crashing down.