We warned about Project 2025, which is ever closer to bringing the United States to a genuine,
old fashioned totalitarian status. In the past 10 months diaper boy’s regime and its collaborators
have taken a wrecking bar to the idea of America. It has been a grotesque parade of vandalism:
constitutional, diplomatic, economic, social, moral and even architectural.

We do the country no favors by pretending that the gang of crooks, courtiers and increasingly
spicy authoritarians running Washington today are just another administration with some
“rough edges.”

Start with the thing no one wants to admit out loud: that the Prez-a-Dump now operates a
domestic security apparatus that acts less like a federal law-enforcement agency and a lot more
like a personal gendarmerie, with thugs and goons from Stephen Miller and Tom Homan down
to his roving Gauleiter Bovino.

ICE, once a boring acronym is not fitted out like a Central American death squad, rolling
through cities with secret orders and rules of engagement written by people whose primary
political fantasy is “bring back Nazi Germany”. These are masked, black-helmeted raiders,
secret policy by any definition, assaults on American citizens and defiance of courts.

The point is terror, not order. The point is to show the MAGA base that their enemies suffer
from state terror. That’s not law enforcement. That’s regime maintenance. If you don’t hate
their abuse of power, their cruelty, their arrogance, and their defiance of the Constitution, what
kind of American are you?

To no one’s shock the Congressional GOP, the people who used to at least pretend to care about
limited government, have greeted all this like an open bar at a donor retreat. These last nine
months have been the final, pitiful proof that there is no “good” Republican Party waiting to
reemerge when the spell is broken. The spell is the party.

They watched as Trump wrecked the economy, and the executive branch turned the DOJ into a
revenge machine. They clapped as Trump hocked White House power for cash, crypto, airplanes,
and stock options, and their grand moral response was to go on Fox and utter their old spell of
“trans libs antifa socialist” and tell Trump over and over again that it was the greatest orgasm of
their lives and that he’s the best lover they’ve ever had.

We have been told to ignore the lies, to treat the sewage sluice of disinformation from the West
Wing as “just Trump being Trump” and the cabinet of criminals, goons, and weaponized ass-

kissers as “colorful.”

But the constant lying has a purpose. This administration lies not to persuade but to dominate
reality. They lied about the illegal war with Venezuela (oh, they won’t call it a war, of course; the
euphemisms come tripping out: “limited kinetic actions,” “anti-smuggling operation,” and
“interdicting drug boats”…all lies, the Gulf of Tonkin, only in the Caribbean.

They lie about its legal basis, about authorization, orders, casualties, and about the little matter
of the Constitution requiring Congress to say “yes” before you start dropping ordnance.

And the GOP on the Hill, those strict-constructionist, Founders-fetish faux patriots, grin and say,
“Your word is law, your Majesty.”

All of this is happening while the president has set off an entirely predictable, entirely avoidable
tariff war that is eating the economy from the inside out. His blundering global trade
conflagration with the strategic foresight of a raccoon in a dumpster. He keeps picking through
the trash, hoping for something that isn’t rotten.

Farmers are getting crushed, manufacturers are paying more for their supplies, consumers are
staring at higher prices, supply chains are collapsing and refusing to cooperate, and the White
House’s line is, “This is winning.”

This Bonfire of The Insanities, with farms teetering on bankruptcy, soybean futures at zero, and
MAGA TikTok influencers explaining why it’s awesome that your groceries cost so much more,
because the Dear Leader is “making them respect us.”

You’re allowed to hate people who destroy the economy while building a whorehouse ballroom
on the ruins of the East Wing. You’re allowed to hate people who are building an AI and crypto
bubble that will destroy the American economy like a nuclear weapon levels a city…and while
Trump whines about a pitiful $6 billion for SNAP, he’ll bail out every one of the firms profiting
from this madness, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, to the tune of trillions.

Ukraine is twisting in the wind. The Russians have made no secret of their ambitions, and Trump
has made no secret of his crush on Putin. Time and again over these last months, opportunities
to help Kyiv in meaningful ways were left to die from Trump’s dithering.

And in every instance, someone in the West Wing is whispering the same thing: “The president
wants to get along with Putin.” That’s not foreign policy. That’s fealty to evil.

That’s the leader of the free world deciding that a KGB-raised thug’s feelings matter more than a
democratic nation’s survival. You are allowed…hell, you are obliged to hate that.

And if you don’t hate that, if you don’t hate Putin’s rancid war crimes and overt evil, you’re
doing human wrong.

​

We can’t skip the cabinet, that rogues’ gallery of mediocrities and malevolence.
They’ve richly earned your hate. If you set out to staff an administration with people whose chief
qualification was a willingness to do unlawful things on camera, you could not have done better.

Education run by someone who hates the idea of public schools. The Interior Department is run
by someone who thinks National Parks are a placeholder until we can get a good strip-mining
operation going. Defense in the hands of a drunken civilian courtier who is to former SECDEF
Dick Cheney as a cockroach is to a man. Marco Rubio’s State Department is run by someone
whose worldview is “my family fled Castro…how can America be more like him?”

Every department is told to break laws and rules, to ignore long-standing legal opinions, to treat
courts as speed bumps, and to do so with a smile. There is a special contempt due for people
who know better and proceed anyway.

The cumulative effect of these ten months is not chaos.

Chaos would almost be reassuring, implying a lack of direction.

This has direction: a relentless, contemptuous shredding of the restraints that make a republic
possible. We have a secret police state at home, reckless adventurism on the one hand, and
craven capitulation to evil on the other abroad, an economic policy built on spite and 18th
century trade theories, a legislative branch that traded oversight for access, a tech sector that
kissed the ring, and a White House that treats national heritage like a casino slated for
demolition.

This is a government of evil men, one that chose corruption over transparency, cruelty over law,
oppression over freedom, tariffs over prosperity, propaganda over truth, vandalism over
stewardship.

Hatred, properly directed, is a recognition of moral reality. It is an insistence that some things
are unforgivable while they are being done.

They want us numb, exhausted, and above all, polite. Polite people don’t stop ICE from
becoming a secret police. Polite people don’t call a tariff disaster what it is. Polite people look
away while kids go hungry.

We don’t have to be polite.

As citizens, even of this failing Republic, we are obliged to be honest.

And the honest thing to say, in this gray November of America’s diminished decade, is that they
have earned our hate.