Everyone Who Was Supposed To Protect You From This Failed Miserably [View all]

Everybody in a position of power failed to protect you from this. Many of those same people and leaders are now cashing in, paying millions in protection money, or laughing about what has happened. Others are pretending there was nothing they could do to stop it — and preemptively surrendering now. On this cold Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, a twice-impeached convicted felon will be inaugurated in the very building where his attempt to steal an election four years ago left pools of blood. Donald Trump beat the damning federal criminal cases against him because the Supreme Court, and then will of voters, snuffed out any possibility for those historic trials to commence. He was elected, this time with a plurality of the popular vote, on a platform that is somehow more rancidly authoritarian and anti-democratic, proudly corrupt and abusive, and ethnic-cleansing-prone than his and his party’s platforms were in 2016 and 2020. His personality cult and iron grip on the GOP only grew in the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he instigated, as it did in the years since his first administration produced a four-year-long arterial spray of scandal, barbarism, and abhorrent mismanagement, including during the mass death and economic implosion of the coronavirus pandemic.

He and the Republican Party now have trifecta control of the federal government. Trump retakes the White House with a largely demoralized Democratic Party as his opposition, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority entrenched. The country is theirs, and we will be ruled by the meanest nerds and most nihilistic dorks, who now pretend to speak for a working class they despise. Every cultist, clampdown zealot, and deliriously boring psycho who Trump appoints to perches of seniority and influence are leering at the American people the same way the protagonists in Natural Born Killers looked at patrons of a diner in the middle of a desert.

To them, this is all very funny. The day before his swearing in, Trump held a “victory rally” party for his super-fans at the Capital One Arena in the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Kid Rock performed, and everybody bawitdaba’d. Several middle-aged, MAGA-merch-donning ladies bopped and sang along to Kid Rock’s 2022 song that features the lyric “a whole generation is mentally ill.” Kid Rock charmed the crowd with the line about how “the mainstream media can suck my dick,” though he sheepishly self-censored the best word.

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When Team Trump crows on and on about how their guy mounted the “greatest political comeback” in American history, they are not entirely wrong — though there is a casual depravity to talking about it, like it’s part of a Friends-replacement TV show that Trump used to star on, instead of the abomination that it is. But no matter how venal or fascistic Trump is, he was never the sole author of this violent tragicomedy that we’ve endured for a decade, and will continue to endure for years. One morally vacant aristocrat could not have accomplished today on his own. This is all happening because everyone — every one — who was supposed to protect the American people from this failed in the most miserable, unforgivable ways. It was a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure that many millions of people at home and abroad will be living with, now and long after Trump is no longer leader of a nominally free world. Every institution you may have believed had value revealed itself to be for-sale or out-to-lunch. The highest court in the land, and its right-wing supermajority that Trump cemented, can just decide that laws aren’t real if they inconvenience the larger and more important agenda of keeping Trump out of prison and above the law so he can be president again. The elite news media — yes, I am aware that includes me; I’ve always been open to the idea that I am part of the problem — that craves the decadence and the mammoth ratings and readership that President Trump previously unleashed has found itself with diminished audiences and a rebellion by former subscribers who see us for what we too often are. That is: ineffective at best, and giddily abetting at worst.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-inauguration-2024-win-democrats-failed-1235241327/