Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce is one of my favorite blogger-pundits.
He reminds me of Thomas Paine, who authored The Crisis five months after the Continental Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. He hoped the pamphlet would boost flagging Patriot ardor during some of the bleakest times of the War of Independence.
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine famously wrote. His words echo through the ages to our own soul-trying times.
Next July 4th will be our nation’s 250th birthday. How we will observe our semi-quin-centennial is uncertain.
President Donald Trump is at best a would-be authoritarian, at worst a nascent neo-fascist. He doesn’t want for aiders and abettors: truckling toadies in the White House, sycophants in governor’s mansions and statehouses, sectarian and secular bigots of all stripes, and billionaires reminiscent of the old greed-is-good, Social Darwinian Robber Barons.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure Paine would have loved Pierce’s Dec. 30 ring-in-the-New Year post, which is headlined “When Trump’s Term Is Finally Up, We Must Burn His Legacy to the Ground.”
Here are some of Pierce’s suggestions for torching Trumpism:
“So whether it’s a Democratic Congress elected next November or a Democratic president elected in 2028, one of the main jobs is going to be diverting the river to clean out the stables. Subpoenas and investigations until hell won’t have them. Reform, and expand, the Supreme Court. Use every ounce of power. Hold nothing back. Where the current administration flooded the zone with arrant bullshit, flood it with activity aimed at cleansing the institutions of government of the paralytics injected in them over the past ten years. Do all of this, and then brag about it relentlessly.
“Do not listen to the council of people who tell you that ‘the country’ needs to ‘heal.’ Shut your ears to anyone who tells you to concentrate on ‘kitchen-table issues,’ unless it’s to remind people that John Maynard Keynes is back in town. Put not your trust in pundits, prophets, John Fetterman, or the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Declare your independence from convention. To use Lincoln’s magnificent verb, disenthrall yourselves. Then you can save your country.”
Meanwhile, what to do? The author of a meme making the social media rounds proposes voting the straight Democratic ticket “because every Republican on my ballot and YOUR ballot is a Trump enabler.” Count me in.
In 2025, 89 percent of Congressional Republicans toed the Trump line on legislation 100 percent of the time, according to The Center for American Progress Action Fund.
“While it is not unusual for the president’s party to vote in alignment with White House priorities, [last year’s]...Congress is particularly obedient,” wrote CAP Action’s Will Ragland and Ryan Koronowski. “Senate Republicans, on average, have voted with Trump 99.56 percent of the time. In contrast, during Trump’s first term, Senate Republicans’ average “Trump score,” as calculated by FiveThirtyEight, was 87.25 percent. Meanwhile, House Republicans ... have, on average, voted with Trump’s position 99.5 percent of the time, compared with 90.43 percent during his first term. This crystallization of alignment with Trump’s policies has come as his policies have grown more extreme and radical.”
They added, “The 119th Congress has never failed to pass a bill on which the White House has taken a position, and the Senate has never voted down a Trump administration nominee, even as many have espoused radical views out of step with the American people or have been dangerously unqualified.”
Lawmakers who occasionally buck Trump still serve the all-MAGA-all-the-timers because every Republican counts toward GOP majorities in Congress and in Republican run statehouses, including the one in Kentucky, where I have lived all my 76 years.
In Frankfort, our state capital, a handful of Republican lawmakers sometimes side with the minority Democrats on certain legislation, such as bills that help labor or public schools. But these occasional defectors vote the hard-right party line on almost all else, including opposition to abortion, “wokeism,” DEI, LGBTQ rights, and the rest of what Trump calls “the radical socialist Democrat agenda.”
I’m with the memelord or memelady who pointed out “Trump can’t exist without these guys. They make Trump who he is. They have got to go. All of them. Clean sweep.” That means in Washington and Frankfort to me.
“Many a truth is spoken in jest” is an old saying popularized by William Shakespeare. There is veracity aplenty in the joke that if Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis came back today, the former would be a Democrat and the latter a Republican.
--30--
Comments
