America has hit the MAGA tipping point [View all]

America has hit the MAGA tipping point
We won't be able to ignore what Trump and his accomplices are doing once it starts to impact us personally

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published March 28, 2025 8:34AM (EDT)


(Salon) When Donald Trump won the election last November, I think those of us who are mercifully immune to the lure of the MAGA cult knew that this second term was going to be bad. If you were following the campaign closely (many people were not) you knew about Project 2025 and you knew that Trump was inexplicably attached at the hip to the weird multi-billionaire Elon Musk. You also knew that he was fixated on starting a tariff war with America's biggest trading partners and was irrevocably hostile to our long-standing allies around the world. But I don't think any of us could have predicted the exact confluence of atrocities being committed at warp speed from every direction. Shock and awe doesn't adequately describe it. It is a cataclysmic political earthquake.

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And yet, most of us are still living our lives in more or less normal fashion. Yes, many immigrants, even those in the country legally, are now living in a state of abject terror. And vast numbers of workers have abruptly lost their jobs, with many more to come. But the vast majority of Americans are still going to work, taking the kids to school, hanging out with their friends, pursuing their hobbies. Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.

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Obviously, we're not in that situation. It's only been 68 days since Trump took office and we still have a way to go before it's clear that the system has completely broken down one way or another. But I think we can all sense that it's much shakier than we anticipated.

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We might have expected corporations to resist being told how to run their businesses, but dozens of them have eagerly complied with the crusade to ban DEI and abandon all attempts to fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights Act. Men at Wall St. firms tell reporters they are thrilled to be able to talk about "p**sy" in the workplace again. Law firms, meanwhile, having been told they will lose their access to the federal government, including necessary security clearances due to their previous willingness to defend some of Donald Trump's personal enemies, have bowed down and agreed to do whatever the president orders them to do. Universities, meanwhile, are now allowing the federal government to dictate their policies under threat of losing federal funding. This was unexpected. These giant, wealthy institutions all have the ability to stand up to Trump and choose not to. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/28/america-has-hit-the-maga-tipping-point/