Individual Choices, Collective Responsibility

Another day, another whirlwind of lawlessness by the administration of convicted felon Donald Trump.

I want to emphasize "administration" over "convicted felon Donald Trump" (although come on, CONVICTED FELON) because there is a depressingly large number of people more than willing to formulate and carry out Project 2025. They have fanned out through the corridors of power, some even walking upright (but not Hegseth after 11:30 AM at the latest), with the following simple directive:

BREAK IT.

That's all there is to it. There's no overarching philosophy or even discernible ideology, really, just to throw as much sand in as many gears they can't remove outright as possible.

To go back for a moment to Trump's connection to Project 2025, he can plausibly claim general ignorance of its details for two reasons:

1. He doesn't really care about anything outside of wetting his beak and throwing some scraps to his family. Although I do think he gets off on hurting people, so make that 1a.
2. He is genuinely stupid.

To expand on #2, I acknowledge that he has a feral cunning and charisma and often knows what to say at a particular moment, with the striking advantage of not caring what he may have said a moment ago. This combined with an education at the feet of Roy Cohn and an inheritance has gotten him a long way, to say the least. At the same time he is clearly, for lack of a better word, stupid. A limited vocabulary doesn't really stand out because that's not what's keeping him from expressing complex thoughts; his dull, smooth brain has that job covered. Compare Trump to G.W. Bush, the most recent president some people considered "dumb". Dubya was actually reasonably smart, but was intellectually uncurious and burdened with the legendary oratorical skills of the entire Bush male progeny to boot.

OK, we've established that Trump is a big fat smelly dumb narcissist. To wander back to the title of this post, how did he get where he is?

Here's how. Find yourself on this list, kinda sorta in descending order of active responsibility:

1. You voted for Trump. Pretty clear this category bears maximum responsibility although there are subcategories:
1. All in on Project 2025
2. Love you some Federalist Society judges
3. Member of the Leopards Eating Faces Party
4. Bought the BS
2. You did not vote for Harris. To the subcategories!
1. You voted third party
2. You wrote in a name
3. You preferred Harris to Trump, are eligible to vote and had no impediment to voting
3. You are Mark Burnett. Maybe he should be higher, I dunno.
4. You voted for Harris but didn't do... (waves arms like Kermit) ... SOMETHING. No idea what that would be but as a lapsed Catholic I put myself here out of reflexive residual guilt.

The second category bears some explication, a word I may not have used in print since fall 1983. (Shoutout to one of the good Hungarians.) In reverse order:

• Just Didn't Vote: This is a real and continuing problem and I'm not sure how to deal with it. This is a minimal-rewrite blog, not a think tank.
• Write-in: If you did this and voted GOP otherwise, nice try keeping your hands clean. Everyone else in this category, read on.
• Third Party: National-level and most state-level elections are two-party elections, full stop. Vote your conscience/specific policy preferences in the primaries, vote for the least worst of two candidates in the general. (Hint: It's the Democrat.) It doesn't help that the Green Party oscillates between a GOP ratfucking operation and a Russian influence operation; frankly it is getting increasingly harder to tell the difference. Bottom line: VOTING IS NOT SHOPPING. If I can hold my nose and vote, and I most certainly have although it ended up fine, so can you.

The bigger question of course is how we get out of this.