The MAGA red line

Progressive YouTuber and podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen asked Senator Adam Schiff, โIs there a red line, even for [the MAGA Congress], realistically speaking, where you think that they would actually have the spine to stand up to somebody like Trump?โ Schiff replied, โI think so. I hope so. Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far for the Republicans in the Senate. I hope we see other indications that thereโs a willingness to say, โOkay, youโve got to be kidding. Thereโs no way weโre going to go there.โ But we will find out.โ
I hope the Senator is right in his guarded optimism. But I donโt think he is. I donโt think Matt Gaetz was quite the โbridge too farโ that the Senator thinks. For one thing, Gaetz was almost universally hated in both the House and the Senate. In his congressional tenure Gaetz managed to piss off just about everybody with his backstabbing and personal excesses. He was also losing popularity with MAGA voters outside his constituency, and that, finally, is the point.
It is well known that many congressional Republicans privately despise Trump and despise his MAGA base. But they also know that if they oppose him, Trump will renounce them as RINOs and have them primaried. So opposition to Trump is rare, and it will get rarer still as time goes on.
If there is a bottom to MAGA treachery it will have to be provided from below, from the MAGA voters themselves. Unfortunately for that to happen, things will have to get so bad and so obviously Trumpโs fault that even an idiot would see it, and most MAGA voters are clearly idiots.
In 1945, the same streets in Berlin once crowded with wildly enthusiastic crowds cheering Hitler ten years earlier, were filled with refugees picking their way through the cityโs smouldering rubble. Hitlerโs partisans still existed, to be sure, but by 1945 they were too few on the ground to sustain his dictatorship.
Must America lay in similar ruins before MAGA turns on Trump? Possibly, if converting the seemingly indestructible MAGA base to sanity is the only way to get rid of him. But there is another way.
The good news is that because MAGA is still in the minority, ordinary non-MAGA Republicans and independents can join with Democrats to overwhelm them at the polls. The bad news is, because Republicans are so spineless and Trumpโs thugs are so corrupt, it could prove very difficult to elect any Democrats to any office in four yearโs time, or even two yearโs time.
Iโm not here to tell you that the situation is hopeless. But I think we would be naive to believe that Trump will self-destruct on his own. Weโve already been down that road before. We ought to know by now that hoping for a Trump self-immolation is a foolโs game. If we canโt learn from history then maybe nobody can.
WE are the way forward. We must each individually join the fight. We must, each and every one of us, become activists. That job includes talking to others, telling truth to power on social media, promoting, supporting and watching alternative progressive media on the internet and turning our backs on the legacy media and its advertisers.
If every one of us joins the fight, and our voices become loud enough, we can send a message to Trump and his MAGA base that the people are intractably against him. We can do for the cause of truth what MAGA has done for the agenda of tyranny. We can out-MAGA MAGA. We must. Because in the final analysis, there is no MAGA red line. WE must become that red line.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.