I give all credit to Josh Marshall for getting down to the bottom of things. Back when the attempted assassination occurred in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump told the press that he was “shot in the ear by a bullet.” Media outlets took him at his word, nobody bothered to even attempt to get the facts from the local ER. But Talking Points Memo did and ran a story (which we quoted here) about how four cops in Butler were injured by “flying debris,” and it stands to reason so was Trump.
Even Christopher Wray said during the ensuing congressional hearing that Trump was “probably hit by shrapnel.” Man, did THAT meet with pushback. King Donald was “violently struck” (Melania’s words) by a bullet and that was that. Now how said bullet didn’t remove any portion of his ear or even leave a scar or deafen him or any of that has never been explained. It’s part of MAGA lore, you believe whatever King Donald says just because, like 8-year-olds say on the playground when they reach a point where they have no answer. Just because. I’m right, just because.
In any event, I put a lot of stock in what Josh Marshall publishes on his platform, because he makes an effort to get basic facts, and here’s his insight on what you and I can expect in the merry merry month of May.
What I am definitely not saying is that things are about to get better. I think they will get worse. On some fronts they’ll get much worse. Indeed, one of the basic dynamics of Trump’s (second) first hundred days in office is the way in which Trump and DOGE have taken numerous actions, not easily reversible, which take some time to take effect. Tariffs are only one example. We’re only now seeing the final arrivals of container ships sent to get ahead of the tariffs. Last week, the product arrivals were actually up year over year because of that. Over the course of May, according to shipping records, shipments from China basically flatline. That’s already happened. It just hasn’t hit our shores yet. It’s maybe a thousand miles out into the Pacific. And supply chains, once halted in a haphazard fashion, don’t snap back quickly. We learned that five years ago.
We just got a new executive order last night in which Trump wants to take over local police departments or even turn them against the elected officials who run them. We’ll be covering all these things, including the numerous other examples. It’s all bad.
But I see the signs all around. He’s doubling down on things people don’t like. He’s fomenting a growing political backlash. The more signs we see of the limits of Trump’s power, the more people show signs of bucking that power. All power is unitary. We see signs of it everywhere. You simply cannot impose an autocracy if a clear majority of the country opposes what you are trying to do at the outset, when you are trying to do it.
They are now reacting to initial resistance by doubling down on things that are not popular. They appear to be upset that they’ve managed to have fewer deportations during Trump’s first hundred days in office than Biden had in his last hundred. Now they’re going to crack down on local officials and are threatening more indictments of judges and other officials who get in their way.
Good luck getting 12 jurors to convict any of these people. These trials will end up like the fugitive slave trials in the North in the late 1850s.
Another caveat or “to be sure”: I don’t take this as a spur to quietism or to a sense of inevitability. Indeed, much of what I’m saying here about what I see happening is based on seeing the rising tide of opposition. I’m assuming that, factoring it into my assumptions. It’s a core part of the equation. I spent most of this weekend brainstorming how to stand up and hand off the DOJ-in-Exile. And just to throw a few more bones to you doomers, this will all leave a whole lot of things destroyed, things that countless patriotic Americans, civil servants, forward-thinking elected officials built over many lifetimes. Simply destroyed in ways that won’t pop after a new election. We can build new things in their place, with time. But the scale of the destruction is vast and it will increase.
Our path on the global scene will be very different, more restricted, more bad. This has always been my greatest fear about all this. We can’t undo things abroad in the way we have at least the possibility of doing at home. You simply cannot trust a country that is one bad election away from this kind of global tantrum. We’ll be paying the price for that for a long time.
Two basic takeaways: 1. Act now to get your toilet paper, facial tissues, any other goods that will start to become scarce once the panic sets in and the grocery shelves start to empty out. This may be what Musk was calling “temporary discomfort” and rest assured that the discomfort will be all yours, not his or in the circles in which he runs. He’ll still be able to bathe in champagne if he feels like it and drink liquified pearls, as Caligula used to do, if the spirit moves.
2. Get ready for America’s new place in the international pecking order and a global realignment. Europe will take care of itself now that it has learned that it cannot depend upon the United States. Europe will hold the line in Ukraine, a task which would have fallen to the United States, in a different era. The America that the yous and mes grew up in, the joyous, post WWII land of milk and honey where inventions like credit cards and no down payment financing made what used to be luxuries affordable for everybody will be a fond memory. Be happy that you lived the majority of your life in the Good Ole Days.
The economy “will go through some things” as we are already seeing. I don’t claim to know how the world order will rearrange itself, only that it will. It’s ironic that so much of speculative fiction and dystopian fiction for the past half century has depicted a cataclysm of some sort in the 20th or 21st centuries, leading to a new world order. The nature of the apocalypic event varies, anything from nuclear war to a devastating plague but the result is the same, a fundamental reshifting and realignment of economic, social and political reality on a global scale.
No novelist or screenwriter ever thought that the cataclysmic event could be something as simple as the election, twice, of the most gawdawful excuse for a human being and a president in the history of America — or any other earthly republic. But that is in fact what has happened. And we are about to deal with the fallout.
The good news — and this is what you must hang onto and never forget — is that Trump only won by a narrow plurality. Fully half of the country is in violent opposition to him and what he stands for. And the world knows that. And they are in alignment with anti-Trump forces. So all is not completely lost. But do not deceive yourself that when the curtain finally rings down on this farce in Washington that things will go back to being the same. They will not.
Sad but true. We’ve been living a number of lies as a culture for our history. Then we codified them into law, pretending the rules, backed by guns, protected the common good, instead of recognizing it protected the rich and their businesses. Now we’re reaping the whirlwind for having no real principles, and, for electing those that have none either. Trump is really the poster child of how shallow and indifferent we’ve become to the suffering of others. There’s always a price to be paid for indifference. You can’t even keep a house plant alive with that approach, much less a democracy that values individual freedom. Time to care.