Relax - America Will Probably Just Collapse Now

Odds of a competent fascist regime aren't in Trump's favour

Well, not “relax,” but you’ll see what I mean.

So America just overwhelmingly voted for a guy who admires Hitler. That’s not great! When Hitler, the actual one, was voted into Germany’s government he neither had a history of praising Hitler (maybe technically) nor got anywhere near the popular vote. Also Germany was not, at the time, the most powerful country in the world, nor did it have nuclear weapons.

All things considered none of this sounds ideal. And this might sound like a hard sell to anyone who is in a minority group in Trump’s firing line (all of them), but the vast majority of your co-citizens don’t hate you or wish you harm, per se. This isn’t personal, exactly. It turns out that there’s just this universal rule in politics that, if inflation happens during your time as head of state, they’re going to elect the other guy.

It doesn’t really matter what the other guy’s politics are, either. He can say anything, it’s like a magic hall pass. It’s remarkably universal—he doesn’t even need to promise to solve inflation! He doesn’t even need to want to win! If you’re an incumbent and you’ve got a plan for world peace and the other guy’s day one plan is to simply kill every grandma in the country—no through strategy, no policy statement, just kill every grandma—then the electorate has only one question for you: Did the price of eggs during  your presidency go up or down?

Up you say? Piss off outta here. 60 to 70 percent of the citizenry rock up to the White House lawn day one with their grandmas in wheelbarrows.

Not everyone acts this way, mind you. Demographic categories play a small part…

So yeah, there’s a certain type of person who is unaffected by fascism to the point where it won’t impact their lives as much as a three dollar price hike on a chicken wrap. Or at least they don’t think it will.

The Middle Age White Male Substack Social Commentary Personality Cinematic Universe of which I suppose I am a part (though I have a small enough readership that I have the benefit of being able to slag off the rest of them relatively undetected) has a lot of opinions about why this whole thing is the Democrat Party’s fault for not putting all their focus on appealing well enough to the single demographic who has a magic shield that protects them from the negative consequences of white supremacy.

Sorry, Adobe stock image guy, nothing personal

I read Freddie deBoer, always keen to remind us he is the Only Real Leftist™, talk about how this is all because the Democrats pivoted way too far to the right. I read Jonathan Chait, who supported Trump the first time around but now thinks uh-oh-Spaghetti-ohs, talk about how this is all because the Democrats pivoted way too far to the left. I read Sam Kriss talk about how this is all because Kamala Harris’ laugh is annoying to white guys and pop stars are annoying to white guys and she didn’t do things that white guys can relate to like a 52-hour long Joe Rogan podcast that he pauses every 20 minutes so he and Tim Pool can compare their ballsacks. I didn’t read what Matt Taibbi thinks because I didn’t want to suffer brain damage.

I’m not going to try to lay any of the blame for this on the people who are going to suffer most from it. I’m actually going to take an unusual tactic, for a member of the White Guy Newsletter Writer With Opinions Club, and blame the Republicans and the oligarchs and the media barons in their pocket who have spent the past 8-12 years waterboarding us with misinformation and stochastic terrorism with the aim of melting our brains enough to vote for them.

Okay, so: For those of us who really don’t like that all this happened, some good(??) news. One way that Trump and his incoming administration broadly differ from the Nazi regime of old is in their staggering, mindblowing incompetence.

Voters who went for Trump, then pivoted to Biden, then pivoted back to Trump—statistically, more than a few people—probably aren’t mostly Covid-blasted enough to have actually forgotten how much of a useless circus of depressed clowns the years 2017-2020 were, but they think the reason Trump failed so spectacularly at everything he attempted is because his administration was full of secret deep state communist saboteurs, so this time he’s going to fix all that by firing everyone in the government and replacing them with people whose competence and experience peaks at Kid Rock.

Who left the pumpkin out on the porch? We're halfway through November

Elon Musk, of course, has been offered the job of being the guy who fires everybody. You would think it would strike him as insulting that they keep calling him the smartest man in the history of the world but instead of giving him an Ozymandias costume and an evil base inside one of the Mount Rushmore heads they just make him that John C. McGinley character everyone hates in Office Space.

This harebrained idea, of course, is all because Musk was so good at firing everybody at Twitter without destroying it, a credential that doesn’t make any sense for a number of reasons. First of all, the mass layoffs at Twitter weren’t done with any tactical strategy, he just walked around the office ejecting anybody who was too brown or female. Second, the boast that he shaved Twitter down to a tenth of its staff without rendering it non-functional is an incredibly dubious claim. The company is now valued at like a 10^th or a 20^th of what it was before, it now runs at an astonishing loss, costs money to use, has fewer features than when it was free, and the features that still run break constantly.

Hiring him to now do this to the government is basically like making him coach of the Lakers on the basis that he shot LeBron in both of his legs and bragged that he didn’t die.

In any case, Trump already has hurdles to jump, here, and jumping hurdles is difficult for a man who hasn’t even done a pushup in 40 years. The first challenge is keeping the Musk/Trump relationship from imploding before Trump is even inaugurated. The problem these guys have is that they hate each other, and as I’ve pointed out before, it’s because they are so similar they’re like two positive charged magnets trying to squish together. It briefly suited Musk to go along with things for the purposes of squeezing under the same umbrella of total legal immunity that Trump enjoys, but now he’s going to have to take orders, something he’s never once done in his entire life.

But say Musk manages to earn Trump’s trust enough to actually win temporary control over his own fiefdom. All you’re left with is the challenge of getting him to actually do anything.

Ostensibly, Elon Musk runs six major companies. We can even be generous and drop that to three because I’m not sure if the others do anything or if they’re money laundering fronts. Busy guy, right? Now, keep that in mind and reconcile it with the fact that he tweets between 60 and 200 times a day

Source

It’s mostly a lot of Hitlery shit. But, okay, he spends a lot of time scrolling on his phone, maybe he’s a multitasker. Sure, but he’s also one of the top Diablo 4 players in the entire world, which sounds like a fucking obvious lie considering who’s saying it, but it’s actually verifiably true and one of the very few things he’s really good at.

How does that relate to anything, you ask, sweet baby child? Achieving this kind of rank in that game takes a mindboggling number of hours of playing time. He’s competing against people who are either unemployed or otherwise playing Diablo professionally is their job, and he’s still blowing them out of the water. For comprison I work one regular job and write this kind of stuff in my off hours and if I’m lucky I get to veg out in Stardew Valley for a couple of hours on the weekend.

Mathematically, if we assume Elon Musk doesn’t sleep, then he has roughly enough work hours to hold down a part time shift, and that’s not even counting the amount of time he spends looking at black crime statistics. There’s no indication he’s going to give up any of his companies to take on a government role, either, which means he can’t really be anything other than the least hard working person in the entire government in a role—at the absolute height of irony—dedicated to purging the government of useless employees.

But it’s all in the playbook, baby, the notorious Project 2025, the papyrus-inscribed Hell document that outlines Trump’s foundational policies upon taking power and involves re-designating most government employees as appointed positions so they can be fired and re-filled exclusively by hardcore MAGA people.

The only problem is that the Venn diagram of red-cap-wearing rally attendees and competent and experienced government officials is two big circles with very little overlap, and they’ll soon have as hard a time scraping up seat-fillers as Russia has fiilling new military positions. By the end of the first year the DMV is going to be staffed entirely by North Korean conscripts.

But then, who said anything about competent and experienced, right? MAGA is good enough by itself. Trump and Musk have already started playing Fantasy Football with the new administration and the dream team is a blistering cavalcade of rank incompetence selected from a broad pool of far right influencers and celebrities, like Megyn Kelly.

Trump already has a history of handing out jobs to people he’s socially familiar with, like the wife of Wrestling manager and turbo-rapist Vince McMahon.

And sure, it probably doesn’t exactly terrify you that the Trump administration will share half its cabinet with the Fox newsroom, but how about Herschel Walker in charge of missile defense? That’s another idea Trump has floated. If you know Walker from nothing else it would be the 2022 Gerogia midterms when he somehow got within a whisker of being elected to the senate despite being the only professional football player whose concussions actually added IQ points.

Most notoriously and potentially hilarious if it didn’t involve the potential for mass death, Trump has promised to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr in charge of basically the entire health system of the United States. All of it. Plus the Department of Agriculture maybe.

Kennedy is undoubtedly the weirdest idiot in politics and I stand by that even now that JD Vance is in the administration. Kennedy once found a dead bear on the side of the road and caused a minor local panic by dumping its body in New York’s Central Park. Kennedy once decapitated a beached whale and strapped its dripping head to the hood of his car like a hunting trophy. Kennedy once complained of headaches and they found a living worm inside his brain. These aren’t the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, they’re Kennedy’s actual exploits, and that’s, like, a tenth of the weirdest ones.

But he’s also a germ theory skeptic, and a vaccine-autism moron, and despite (or because of) his total lack of any formal education on science or healthcare, his plan for American health involves abolishing the FDA and replacing medicine with mercury chelation and unpasteurised milk.

Kennedy’s first stated missions as health czar are to remove fluoride from drinking water and stop chemtrails. Basically, he’ll put a stop to unnatural therapies like measles vaccines and replace them with natural alternatives, like measles.

You’ll remember I implied earlier that this is good news. Well, you can say my reasoning here is dubious but none of this feels like it bodes too well for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out many of its more ambitious tyrannies. There’s the threat of war with Iran, but if he wants expertise in entrenching the US in a Middle Easterm quagmire then he probably shouln’t have antagonized the Cheneys. He’s a businessman whose primary gig is construction but he spent four years trying to figure out how to build one wall.

Shit, one of the stated goes of Project 2025 is to completely ban pornography, which might be a revenge thing against Stormy Daniels but in reality is Prohibition cranked up to eleven, and we all know how well that worked out. With any luck they try that one early, stretch No Nut November out as far as the Twitch streamer contingent of Trump’s army can handle it, and we can just wrap this whole thing up by June.