The MAGA agenda for 2024

Whenever Donald Trump begins a sentence to the effect that “people have been saying,” you can bet safe money he will follow with some obviously false bombastic declamation of shameless self-promotion. You’ve probably seen it by now the idiocy that Trump recently posted to his failing social media platform “Truth” Social: “For so many years people have been saying that Elvis and I look alike. Now this pic has been going all over the place. What do you think?” Below was a photo composed half of the face of Elvis and half of Trump, proving precisely the opposite.

Needless to say, a viral internet furore of hilarious mockery and ridicule quickly followed, including repostings of the far more familiar picture, half Trump and half Adolf Hitler. One can imagine the 90 megaton nine day meltdown with which Fox News would have received such a boneheaded proclamation from, say, Joe Biden or Barack Obama. As it is, I can’t help but wonder if even the most ardent Trump idolaters secretly cringed and thought to themselves that such a thing was better left unsaid.

Expect many more such gifts as the November election draws near. Trump’s bottomless ego demands a constant diet of praise, much the way a hippopotamus demands 80 pounds of fruits and grasses every day. His narcissism is perpetually on public display, so much so that he can’t go five minutes without boasting.

But that, as they say, is just the icing on the cake. With 91 criminal charges across four indictments in four jurisdictions, with civil judgments of the better part of a hundred million dollars and many hundreds of millions to follow, with failing health and shocking cognitive decline, Donald Trump’s campaign is an unqualified disaster. What’s more, if Trump is tried and found guilty on any of those charges between now and November, fully 47% of Republican voters planning to vote for him will either vote for someone else or stay home.

That’s why MAGA Republicans plan to cheat. Expect the usual obvious suspects, including flagrant lies about Biden, the economy and tales of “hordes of illegal immigrants” marching on the southern border. Expect MAGA Republicans to continue to suppress the vote and abuse the judicial system and obfuscate and lie and blame.

Above all expect violence. Expect monster trucks festooned with half a dozen oversized MAGA flags, full of idiots high on rage. Expect open-carried guns and body armour. Expect internet doxxing and stochastic terror. Expect death threats. Expect intimidation at the polls and suppressions of civil rights not seen since the days of Jim Crow.

And, of course, expect a crescendo of claims that the 2024 election is rigged, growing ever more shrill and violent as November approaches. It’s good to be on the side of strength, but let’s not fool ourselves. The coming election is full of peril, and we would be foolish not to be prepared for it. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.