“The only thing that every successful coup d'état in human history has in common is that before it succeeded, there was a previous failed attempt. Would-be future coup leaders learn from those failed attempts in order to make the next one a success.”
I know that it’s considered gauche in intellectual circles to quote yourself, but I don’t really give a shit right now. The above quote comes from a piece I wrote during the 2022 January 6 Congressional hearings. Things have only gotten worse for the country since I wrote it, and, more importantly, since Donald Trump was reëlected.
I’m going significantly off-topic this week — although a few movie references slipped in, because I can’t help myself — because our country and our society are falling apart. And, as Rachel Maddow observed in the latest episode of her show, we’re not in the realm of “what if” now. An authoritarian state, with Trump at its center, is no longer coming. It’s here. I felt moved to wrestle with why this is happening through the lens of my own personal experience. The result of that wrestling is below. I’m back to my regular beat next week.
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When I was twelve or so, my dad took me to a little arts and crafts fair in our small, rural East Texas town. If memory serves, this fair was held in the parking lot of the local junior college (Forgetful Film Critic, PJC class of 2000). Each of the booths featured some version of a homemade good, like quilts, paintings, or baked goods.
In one booth, a little old lady plied her wares – I’ve forgotten long ago what she was selling – while her cassette tape player kept her company between interactions with prospective customers. The tape contained a collection of songs now known to music history as oldies, from the ten-or-so year period of the mid-1950s through the mid- ‘60s.
They were songs you’d most likely be able to find on the American Graffiti soundtrack, like Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & the Comets, Why Do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, Runaway by Del Shannon, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by The Platters.
I loved these songs (and still love these songs) because of how much my dad loved/loves them. They were my entry into pop music. Until at least a year or two after this stroll through a small art fair, when I discovered the local rock station out of Dallas (94.5, THE EDGE!) and started forming independent thoughts and tastes about music that were distinctly different from those of my parents, I thought that the oldies was the greatest music ever created.
We stopped at the booth and my dad chatted with the proprietor. They bonded over their love for the current song, and how great this period in music history was. The woman then looked at me, in order to include me in the conversation. She impressed upon me the fact that what made these songs great was the fact that most of them were love songs.
She then gave me a look that is the reason you’re reading about her. It was a look of anger mixed with disgust and a dash of hate thrown in for good measure. I can no longer remember the exact words she used, but she told me, in no uncertain terms, that the oldies were far, far preferable to the absolute sickening garbage that was considered music today.
To be clear, the music she was referencing most likely included contemporary hits of the day like Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot and I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) by Whitney Houston. (Granted, this was also the era of 2 Live Crew, so I’ll give her that.)
I jumped into the wayback machine for this story because I think it’s illustrative of our current horrifying moment as a country and society. If you’ll indulge me a little longer, it also serves as a counterpoint to an even older story, one that happened decades before either I or my dad was even born.
In 1925, a Tennessee public school teacher, John T. Scopes, dared to teach the heresy of evolution to his high school students. He was taken to court in what is now popularly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. He lost the case and the statute used to prosecute him – the Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of human evolution in public schools – was held as constitutional by the US Supreme Court in the aftermath of the trial. Prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools was subsequently ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1968; the ruling proclaimed that such a ban violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The religious fundamentalists won the day in the Scopes Monkey Trial, but the sensation created by the case had a peculiar effect. Conservative fundamentalist protestant Christians retreated from the dominant political and cultural scene for the next half-century. There are two differing opinions on what caused this.
Historian Randall Balmer concludes that the cause was based on Christians feeling out-of-step with the political and cultural mood of the country, since their anti-evolution/anti-science stance was heavily ridiculed in the media frenzy during the trial. (Sound familiar?) It also might have had something to do with the fact that, while the Butler Act was upheld as constitutional, Scope’s conviction itself was set aside due to a technicality; the US Supreme Court found that the jury should have levied the $100 dollar fine, not the judge.
Author Mark Edwards contends that it was the death of William Jennings Bryan, who spoke for the prosecution in the case and was the sole luminary of the fundamentalist movement at the time, that caused the retreat. Bryan dropped dead unexpectedly five days after the conclusion of the trial. Edwards believes that the leader’s death created a void in the fundamentalist Christian movement that no one else at the time was charismatic enough to fill.
Whatever the reason, the fundamentalist Christian collective unconscious made a decision to be in the world, but not of the world. They would keep their deeply held religious beliefs close, worship their god in the sanctity of their churches and homes, but they would leave the running of the country and the domination of the culture to those who were leaving them behind.
Then came Jerry Falwell in the 1970s and ‘80s. With him came the Moral Majority, the Regan Revolution, and eventually Donald J. Trump. Falwell and his bigoted ilk crawled out of the sewers as a reaction to desegregation in the mid-1950s. When they lost the culture on that front – and let me be clear, what I mean by that is, when the rest of the broader (white) culture started to realize that Black and brown people were human beings who deserved basic human dignity and respect – they moved on to abortion.
They got angry.
They went in the opposite direction from the reaction to the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. They raged against the disgusting popular music of the day to a guileless twelve-year-old kid. Now, they have a taste for blood, and they’re vibrating at the chance to punish all those people who are trying to leave them behind by showing basic decency to people of color, the poor, the queer and (especially) trans communities, and immigrants looking for a better life. You know, the fucking least of these.
Oh, and the children. We have to protect the children. Except now – I’m assuming you’ve been waiting for me to get here since reading the title of this piece – it seems more and more plausible with each passing day that the man these people have entrusted with meting out the retribution and punishment they are so eager for nonbelievers to taste is actually involved in the horrors they claim to despise.
Certain influential thought leaders on the right are already twisting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to explain why the Trump regime is dragging its feet on releasing the Epstein files. Maybe Trump himself is afraid of the same people who got to Epstein, they muse. They seem to forget that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and – as far as the official story goes – died by suicide in isolation while being held in a New York prison in 2019, when the office of President of the United States of America was held by the one and only Donald J. Trump.
The majority of rank-and-file MAGA, as of now, seem unconvinced by all of Trump’s attempts to distract them from one of their primary animating features: they were convinced that Trump would release every last document tied to the child rapist and sex trafficker Epstein. He was going to do that, MAGA was sure, in order to purge our society of all the evil demon-crats, Hollywood elites, and other shadowy forces who abused adolescent girls with Epstein’s help.
But now they’re being reminded – they can’t reasonably claim not to have known, since this information has been public knowledge for years – that Trump was one of Epstein’s closest friends for at least fifteen years. Some are trying to ignore the fact that Trump has made numerous kind comments about Epstein over the years. Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy,” and remarked that, “[i]t is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." (Jesus Christ, what a creepy way to say that.)
So, the MAGA faithful are faced with a paradox. The Epstein files are the one non-negotiable item on their agenda. They believe that the revelations brought forth from these files will be the catalyst causing the great purge of all those they hate to finally begin. But what if Dear Leader is among those damned by the facts?
(And here’s the big difference between leftists – like myself – and MAGA cult members: if people who are (even nominally) on the left, like Bill Clinton, are revealed to have participated in sex crimes against children, I’ll be the first to call for their arrest and imprisonment.)
Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, the 2021 book by award-winning Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, includes the description of a harrowing civil complaint brought against Trump in 2016 by a woman alleging to have been a victim of Trump. In her complaint, filed in a California federal court, the woman claimed she was raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen years old, in 1994. The following is from the woman’s statement for the complaint:
“I loudly pleaded with Trump to stop. Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.”
She claimed in the lawsuit that Epstein had invited her to numerous underage sex parties at his mansion, where she met Trump. She goes on to detail being forced to have sex with Trump multiple times, including once with a 12-year-old girl.
I am of the personal opinion that the MAGA sheeple will find a way to make peace with the fact that Trump will not honor his campaign promise to open the floodgates on the Epstein files. They’ll figure out how to look away, because it’s Trump. He offers what so many of them want: a white, Christian ethnostate where anyone who doesn’t fit their preconceived notion of what a RealAmerican™ is will be transformed into second class citizens, or worse.
They’ll do that because Trump represents their best hope in bringing to fruition their wildest desires: Black and brown people forced into silence and obedience, the queer community punished for their wicked lifestyles, atheists made to profess belief in their Magic Invisible Sky Wizard.
And they’re prepared to let him end US democracy to get what they want.
Trump is currently in talks to transform the White House with the construction of a $200 million, Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom that has little-to-no hope of being finished before his second term ends. He has threatened, numerous times, a federal takeover of Washington, DC. The “free” jumbo jet Trump accepted from the authoritarian state of Qatar will likely require close to a billion taxpayer dollars in order to prep it as the new Air Force One. This process will also likely not be complete before Trump’s second term ends.
Knowing what we do about Trump, does any of this make it sound like he’s planning on leaving the White House in 2029? I’ve made this assertion in this space previously, and I stand by it: as long as Trump is in office, we will never hold another presidential election again, at least not a free and fair one. And we’re all on the knife’s edge waiting to find out if MAGA will support him, or if Epstein-gate will be the final straw for them.
I’m willing to bet they’ll find a way to get to “yes” on supporting Daddy Trump as a totalitarian dictator. I think their desire to make those who are not like them suffer will be too enticing to abandon the Trump train.
There has been a great amount of ink spilled pontificating on what MAGA’s true motivations are, like economic insecurity, and why they are so hostile towards those who don’t look, live, or worship as they do. I spent the first two decades of my life in a small, rural setting, so I feel qualified to add my opinion. I’ll do that by way of one more personal story.
A few years ago, I went home to visit the folks, and I joined them for a fundraiser for an organization of which my mom is a member. I sat near my mom, who was furiously grilling hot dogs and opening cans of soda for the fundraiser. An older gentleman whom I had never before met, probably in his 60s, was talking to another attendee about his daughter.
This man’s daughter lived in Dallas, which was a matter of contention in and of itself. (I had another attendee at the fundraiser offer her condolences upon discovering that I myself reside in Dallas, you know, because of all the godless heathens and rampant crime – at the hands of “those people” – in major cities.) The man described an argument he had with his daughter about a septum ring she chooses to wear:
“She asked me if we could get together for lunch or dinner. I told her not to bother coming back here as long as she had that bone in her nose.” This man had such little regard for his own daughter that he wrote her off because of how she chooses to adorn her body with jewelry. If that is not the apotheosis of what MAGA ultimately stands for, I don’t know what is. Like their leader, they want control over people’s lives, and they’ll do anything to get it.
These are cruel, ignorant, small-minded, intolerant people who delight in their cruelty, and they’ll excuse anything – including their leader being accused of child sex abuse – in order to continue hurting those they hate.