Discussion
What if post-Trump America is even *worse*?
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/03/broken-arrows/#things-get-worse
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@pluralistic quoting:
What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
In my household we have been making changes since the pandemic to try to minimize the damage of WHEN (not if) the "Usonian Techbros" decide to switch off the world... we've bought radios, antennas, LORA devices and have been trying to learn Python to program microcontrollers and removed all smart devices (streaming sticks, lights, plugs, speakers, assistants). We still have a long way to go but at least we are prepared for the looming crisis.
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect - as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump *is* exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
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These people *hate* each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported:
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They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them *genuinely believe it*.
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It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror.
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