It's as if I'm reading an article noting that a growing number of people have started to realize that poking themselves in the eye with a sharp stick might not be a good thing after all, and wondering if that might lead to people making the change to generally not poking thmselves in the eyes with sharp sticks.
I guess that's a good thing, but it seems to miss the more fundamental point...
No - I don't think they can.
Assuming they're at all sincere in the first place (with both Trump and Musk, there's no telling), they're all fired up about it now because they're still on the outside looking in. But soon enough, they're going to be in the same position as every other government body - they'll be cutting deals and making exceptions and trading favors and bowing to pressure and breaking promises and blame-shifting, and they'll fail and end up just another part of the swamp they claim they're going to drain.
The real problem though is the damage they're going to do along the way, since they're all ultimately just self-serving, lying sacks of shit - loathsome even by the already low standards of politics.
I sincerely have no idea.
The narrative that a leftist couldn't win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there's no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.
And particularly since the one thing I'd pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they'd do and say in order to prevent one from winning.
Broadly, it's very simple.
Make a list of everyone, ranked in order of personal wealth from most to least.
That's also a ranking, in order, of winners to losers under Trump.
Though exceptions will of course be made for rich people who piss him off and poor people who suck up to him and can provide something he wants.
Not "now" - I have been for years. Ever since I figured out that the US has no future - that the ruling class is already preparing to put down any opposition (that's why we have a militarized police force and the largest prison system in the world, and that already, before Trump's proposed detainment camps that are supposedly going to be built to hold undocumented immigrants, except that the undocumented immigrants are going to be deported, so self-evidently they're going to hold someone else).
There is no way to make any lasting change in the US. The ruling class is too firmly entrenched and too out of touch, and frankly too fucking insane. They will, and already intend to, go to war to protect their grotesquely destructive privilege, and the nation will not survive that.
So the only hope is that our descendants will build something better out of the rubble we're going to leave behind.
And again - that was already the case. Trump is just accelerating the process.
As if it isn't already enough to have a teen sex trafficker as AG and an overt Russian asset as director of national intelligence, now we're getting a drug-addled anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist as director of HHS.
These proposals are so incredibly bizarre that I can't take them seriously. I'm beginning to suspect that what we're actually seeing here is stage magic - when a magician makes some grand, attention-grabbing flourish with one hand, it's so that you won't watch what he's doing with the other.
So what is it that we're not watching?
No telling specifically, but it's pretty much a given that whoever they are, they'll be corporate ass-kissing establishment hacks who are going to ignore the working class and focus on white suburban professionals, lose elections and blame everyone but themselves.
In a sense, none of them know what they're doing.
Many of them just don't know at all. They've believed the lies and don't realize that they've just elected a psychopath who is going to at the very least do considerable harm.
Some of them think they do know. They're self-serving sacks of shit who look forward to tyranny and the destruction of democratic institutions because they think they're going to benefit and they dont give a shit about all of the people who are going to suffer. But they don't realize that in the end, they're going to suffer too.
We're in a timeline now in which truth is entirely irrelevant.
Trump supporters are necessarily one of two things - deluded or dishonest. Either they've been manipulated into not seeing the plain fact that he's a corrupt and self-serving autocrat and an existential threat to the US, or they know exactly what he is and just don't admit it publicly.
In either case, truth and reality count for nothing.
That's the deal.
Literally.
The most maddening, astonishing and discouraging part of the whole thing, for me, is that that isn't even really debatable. From any reasonable, purely fact-based and unbiased viewpoint, Israel has been clearly maneuvering for decades now to conquer everything from the river to the sea, and to oppress, displace or kill as many Palestinians as it takes to do it.
The Gaza genocide isn't an aberration - it's the direct culmination of decades of very deliberate Israeli policy and strategy. It's not a coincidence that they had exactly one Prime Minister who advocated for Palestinian statehood and they assassinated him - it's because Palestinian statehood has never really been an option.
The plain fact is simply that the only reason there's even any difference of opinion about the matter is that some number of assholes - power-hungry assholes and greedy assholes and hateful assholes and ignorant assholes - have a vested interest in lying about it or at the least promoting the lies that their fellow assholes tell.
I suspect this is the future - media outlets publishing milquetoast critiques of overt fascism and blithering insanity.
Like Trump officials are going to start machine-gunning people in the streets and the New Republic is going to publish an article that hesitantly avers that there's a perception among some that that might be seen to be a bit excessive.