At long last, after years of campaigning, rallies and rhetoric, and after billions of dollars spent to sway the opinions of a tiny sliver of the electorate residing in seven of its fifty states, the US 2024 elections have concluded. The people have spoken, and what they said was Donald John Trump will be the forty-seventh president of the United States.
As I write this, it is clear they have also said that the MAGA Republicans will control the US Senate and, it looks like probably the House of Representatives as well, so their mandate is manifest. And according to what Trump has said and done, and therefore, presumably, what the majority of American people have voted for, it is a mandate to institute a White, Christian fascist dictatorship in this country, one based on retribution, plutocracy, repression, xenophobia, and bigotry. Either that is what the voters prefer, or the fact that they are going to get it didn’t matter to them.
Giving those voters the benefit of the doubt and assuming the latter, then, what did matter so much to them that they didn’t care about that fascist dictatorship thing? According to them, as quoted in numerous voting place exit polls, what mattered was that the price of groceries is ten percent higher than it has been in the past; that gasoline is not selling for $1.99 a gallon; that people like them without college degrees feel they aren’t getting enough attention or being paid enough for what they do; and, that inexpensive housing that looks like what such people see on TV is hard to find. So placing even the most charitable interpretation on those American voters’ actions, it follows that they sacrificed the freedom for which their ancestors fought and died at Yorktown, at Antietam, at Belleau Wood, at Guadalcanal, and at Omaha Beach to remedy those problems or deficiencies in their lives. And if so, in that case, not since Esau sold his birthright for a mess of potage has such self-centered, short-sighted, greedy, idiotic and childish behavior ever been seen.
That more than half the American electorate made such a decision surely signals a level of decadence and moral decay that would embarrass a third-century Roman. At least the Germans in 1932 had a decent excuse for the monumental mistake they made – massive homelessness, inflation topping ten thousand percent, and corpses dead from starvation littering the streets of Depression Berlin. The MAGA morons, by contrast, decided to vote for a democracy-destroying demagogue because the poor babies could no longer afford six trips to Arby’s and four Domino’s pizzas every week.
So, now that we have reached a point that marks the end of the United States of America as we know it, and which foreshadows the collapse of its economy and civil society, it is appropriate to recognize what a momentous occasion this is, and that, accordingly, some congratulations are in order:
CONGRATULATIONS FOUNDING FATHERS. The Electoral College messed up a lot of things, but compromises were necessary – slavery was a fact of life back then, so what could you do? And perhaps it would have been better to limit the term a federal justice could serve on the Supreme Court to something like twenty years. But back then, people only lived to be about sixty, anyway, and the concept of single-issue politics, much less the idea of a multi-decade program to appoint Supreme Court justices according to how they would vote on cases concerning that issue, was as unimaginable as traveling fifty miles per hour. And the idea that a Supreme Court staffed with such judges would issue a ruling granting the president powers exceeding those of a monarch and complete immunity for his actions? One might as well have suggested that someday people would walk on the moon. Furthermore, there was no way you could have foreseen things like the rise of modern national political parties, how the Electoral College makes more than two viable national parties pretty much impossible, the invention of gerrymandering, the organization of political machines, or the technologies that would transform every aspect of the America political process. Overall, the idea you had about a representative democratic republic governed by a written constitution worked out reasonably well for over two centuries. Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so difficult to amend, but who knows whether that might not have made things turn out even worse? Bottom line, nice job, but eventually, as you feared, an evil man with dictatorial designs came along, got the unwashed rabble mob behind him, and used the democratic process to destroy your inspired Enlightenment handiwork. As it happens, since the eighteenth century that has turned out to be the fate of democracies in general, so don’t blame yourselves too much – after all, there’s more than enough blame to go around here.
CONGRATULATIONS TRADITIONAL REPUBLICANS: You ignored the early signs when Goldwater began metastasizing the cancer within your party. Most of you even encouraged it, backing a psychopath named Nixon. Then, after having expelled the very last liberal, you got so cozy with big business that you perceived their idea of running an ex-movie actor puppet for president as genius. So Ronald Reagan gave America the Welfare Queen trope, the Laffer Curve and Trickle Down Economics, firmly establishing racism and lunacy as core Republican policy values. At that point, running a knucklehead like George W. Bush for president sounded like a good idea, leaving America caught with its pants down on September 11, 2001, followed by an invasion of Iraq based on idiotic lies and a domestic economy so bad that even a Black man with a Muslim middle name handily beat your 2008 nominee. Your solution? Donald Trump. Well, now he’s president with unchecked power and no accountability, and he’s talking about standing quite a few of you in front of military tribunals and firing squads. Congratulations for ignoring what was happening to your political party for seven solid decades, inventing such a monster as Trump, kissing up to him, licking his boots, bending over backward to excuse his disgusting character, being spineless toady apologists for his life-long crime spree of fraud, theft, confidence games, and sexual abuse, and for convincing yourselves that when he now talks about imprisoning and killing you, he’s just joking. Hilarious!
CONGRATULATIONS PC DWEEBS. Thanks to you, ordinary people with ordinary minds and ideas were forced to confront things like transsexual men playing girls’ sports, office workers being forced to select their pronouns for their email signature lines, college professors who taught their students semiotics instead of math, Cancel Culture instead of classics, Woke and Defund the Police instead of history. Having carried on with this nonsense since the late 1960s, you produced a generation of elitist snobs who succeeded in alienating most of Middle America from the Democratic Party. Bravo!
CONGRATULATIONS FEMINISTS. An organized fascist political movement that has nothing to do with women’s rights, you spent fifty years demonizing men better than the Turks demonized the Armenians. You denigrated, belittled and insulted men at every opportunity, then screamed foul like banshees whenever a man said something fitting about feminists in return. Playing both sides of the fence in relationships, marriage, divorce and custody issues, you took hypocritical advantage of every traditional concept of womanhood when it suited you, then demanded every aspect of full equality when that paradigm offered you the most leverage instead. Thus, you ensured that a majority of American men would develop a deep subconscious hostile rejection complex so severe, that by 2024 sixty percent of males born after 2000 are involuntary celibates and wouldn’t vote for a woman to be a dog-catcher. What an accomplishment!
CONGRATULATIONS DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP. By losing touch with the white working class and going ga-ga for globalism while catering to special interest minorities to the point of letting them walk across our borders by the millions for the last forty years, you set the stage for the arrival of an unprincipled scoundrel with a program of division and grievance to catch the working class voter’s attention with a promise that only he can fix all the things that they think are wrong. Then you cowered like terrified puppies at the awesome presence of Hillary Clinton, fearing her own well-known reputation for seeking revenge, and allowed the only Democratic contender for the presidency in 2016 so loathsome they could actually lose an election to someone like Donald Trump to become your nominee. Then, for an encore, you did nothing to hold Joe Biden to his one-term promise, looked the other way as his mental state deteriorated, and all jumped on the bandwagon when he decided that Kamala Harris would be his replacement. Impressive!
CONGRATULATIONS JOE BIDEN. By promising to serve only one term, and then letting your ego get the better of you and changing your mind, you made it impossible for the Democrats to make a sensible choice of a young, handsome, affable white guy who could have successfully distanced himself from the lies and misinformation about your administration’s achievements that the Republicans threw at you and, after you totally screwed the pooch in that debate with Trump, your anointed replacement for the nomination. And about that debate, Joe – you had one job, okay? It was to beat Trump and make him look like the ignorant, stupid monstrosity he is. And what was your excuse – that you had a cold? As they say in Killarney, Joey Boy, that’s a load of malarkey. You weren’t up to the job, but you couldn’t let go of the power. Now the jack’s overflowed, America’s up to its neck in cac, and you deserve your due credit for putting it there. History will remember you as a mighty, mighty Gobshite, make no mistake about that!
CONGRATULATIONS EVANGELICALS. Your mental contortionist’s ability to pervert and prostitute Scripture in support of your bigoted philosophy, sixteenth-century moral codes and warped heretical notions such as the End Times and the Rapture has paid off handsomely. Convincing yourselves that a sociopathic, malignant narcissist was sent by God Almighty to play the part of King Cyrus or King Hiram in the demented religious pageant that comprised your part of the Trump campaign was a truly remarkable feat of intellectual and theological corruption. Now you can make the government force everybody else to act like you do, whether they like it or not. Next steps? How about getting rid of that pesky separation of church and state in the First Amendment, instituting an Evangelical Christian theocracy and starting Armageddon over there in the Middle East so Jesus will stop dallying around and come back? You’ve got to be tired of waiting, right? Hallelujah!
CONGRATULATIONS WALL STREET. Big props to the imbecilic greed of the financial community, where banks kept selling mortgage-backed securities for years after the supply of individuals who could pay off a mortgage became exhausted, precipitating a near collapse of the world economy and a complete collapse of housing construction capacity that caused the high housing prices which were such a decisive factor in electing Trump the second time. And many thanks for more of that same sort of shenanigans, this time in the food and agriculture processing, distribution and retail sectors, where unjustified price gouging increased the cost of putting dinner on the table for millions of already disaffected working-class voters. Nice job, there! Just hope that Trump doesn’t decide he’d like to own your businesses now. Once he’s Dictator, what are you going to do to stop him? File a complaint with a federal regulator? Call the DOJ and complain about extortion? Nice work, masters of the universe!
CONGRATULATIONS SILICON VALLEY. Way to go, crypto bros! Pumping billions into MAGA Republican campaigns so you can supercharge ripping off the rubes with cryptocurrency get-rich-quick schemes proved to be a very successful strategy. Have fun mixing up the technology with stuff like Fanduel, BetMGM and DraftKings. The Trump administration should be a gold mine for you guys, provided he doesn’t lean on you too heavily for his piece of the action. Sixty-forty, right? Sixty for Trump, that is! ROFLMAO!
CONGRATULATIONS ELON MUSK. A good Afrikaner boy like you no doubt longs for the likes of John Vorster, but since you couldn’t have that back home, you came here – as an illegal immigrant, working while resident on a student visa. And work you did. You worked the suckers from every angle you could think of – PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, the suckers being Internet users, liberals who wanted to buy electric cars, and the US government, respectively. Then, envisioning yourself as some real-life amalgam of John Galt and Howard Roark, you bought Twitter, an incredibly stupid software idea implemented with an even more asinine business model that never made any money, just so you would have your own private political propaganda machine for your idea of the ultimate American president – Donald Trump. And you didn’t stop there, handing out a million dollars a day in a transparent vote-buying scam in the seven 2024 battleground states two weeks before the election. Having successfully played kingmaker, you no doubt think you can get Trump dancing to your tune and that is going to make you some kind of latter-day Hjalmar Schanct, Friedrich Thyssen or Gustav Krupp. More likely, however, you will end up like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev and the other oligarchs whom Putin locked up, subsequently confiscating their wealth for himself. Trump, after all, wants Donald Trump to be the richest person in the world, not you. And when he makes that offer to pay for controlling interests in your businesses with his own personal cryptocurrency, how do you plan to refuse? Smooth move, ExLax!
CONGRATULATIONS ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. If ever proof was needed that the Kennedys are over-rated, you have provided it in spades – the heroin, the gig with the ambulance-chasing law firm that overlooked the heroin, the brain worm, the vaccine conspiracy theories, the dead bear dumped in Central Park staged to look like a bicycle accident, the dead whale’s head strapped to the top of your car, the freezer stocked with roadkill, spreading multiple cockamamie Covid-19 conspiracy theories, claiming there’s no relationship between HIV and AIDS, supporting the Houthis and the Israelis at the same time, inviting Russia to join NATO and supporting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine while denouncing Putin as a thug and gangster, claiming the Republicans stole the 2004 election and then endorsing Donald Trump in 2024. Bobby Junior, you are one crazy, mixed-up kid, and the perfect choice to be the new head of America’s health regulatory agencies. Congrats on proving, once again, that if being an insane, unqualified bozo is keeping you from getting a good job, an appointed position in the federal government is always an option. Mazel tov, bubbeleh!
CONGRATULATIONS CONSERVATIVE FRONT ORGANIZATIONS. Well done, you folks at the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Policy Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Every man jack of you did a bang-up job of getting Trump elected the first time, spreading his lies about a rigged election when he lost in 2020, and reinforcing his xenophobic hate speech, rationalizing his demented gibberish and supporting his harebrained, half-baked utterances that sounded vaguely like policy statements in 2024. Of course you think you can make him do your bidding now, but you will soon find out how wrong you are about that. Oops!
CONGRATULATIONS FANI WILLIS. My God, girl, look at the size of that massive conspiracy case you mounted against Trump and his accomplices in Georgia, and it was pretty much airtight, too. But then you had to go and hire your lover boy as the point man for the prosecution, didn’t you? Girl! What were you thinking? Not, apparently, about how that would play in court, once it came out and Trump’s defense turned the tables, putting you on trial in front of the whole country. Congrats on winning first prize in the contest to make Trump look like a martyr for the 2024 election. Here’s your trophy – it’s shaped like a huge dildo. Enjoy!
CONGRATULATIONS MERRICK GARLAND. Your complete lack of, shall we say… intestinal fortitude in addressing Trump’s acts of treason on January 6, 2021 and his multiple, flagrant violations of US national security laws will surely go down in history. You dithered not for months, but for years before allowing DOJ to bring the charges, thus giving Trump the opportunity to delay rendering of any verdicts prior to the 2024 election. Your reward will probably be prison unless Trump decides to execute you, and it’s hard to say you will not have deserved it, considering your completely spineless performance as US Attorney General in these matters. Gratulationes, inertia stultus non compos mentis!
CONGRATULATIONS, MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA. Thanks to your juvenile fascination with every half-witted stunt, vulgar utterance and insane idea Donald Trump has come up with since at least 2015, combined with your slavish pursuit and endless discussion of all the details thereof, you successfully managed to distract and confuse the voters to such an extent that any rational messages about public policy made by anyone else were completely ignored. Your cynical devotion to getting eyeballs and clicks with Trump’s nonsensical crap made you huge bucks, so what do you care if Trump uses his Supreme Court-sanctioned immunity and orders Seal Team Six to kill a few of your reporters? There’s plenty more where they came from – Screamer!
CONGRATULATIONS FOX NEWS. As master propagandists in the service of wickedness, tyranny and oppression, you outdid Potemkin, you outdid Geobbles, you outdid Shepilov, you outdid Chen Boda, and you even outdid Mao Zedong! With your constant stream of red herrings, exaggerations, misdirection, blithering non-sequitur, willful omissions of fact and raging torrents of outright lies, Fox News has dragged every single journalistic standard, canon of ethics, rule of propriety and custom of decency through the gutter while encouraging dogs to urinate on them. High fives for your relentless effort to be the greatest toady apologist for Donald Trump ever! As Homer Simpson would say, Whoo – Hoo! Better keep up the good work, though – or else.
CONGRATULATIONS RUSSIA. Despite sinking for the last six decades from a formidable Soviet Socialist imperial world power to a third-rate weed patch with malfunctioning nuclear weapons and a kleptocratic government run by a seriously disturbed dictator, you have nevertheless proved you can interfere with other countries’ elections at a level that would be the envy of the 1950’s CIA. Relying on a formidable combination of the American public’s ignorance, gullibility and good, old-fashioned stupidity, all of which they possess in truly staggering quantities, you managed to get voters in the United States to believe all manner of ridiculous and absurd stories about Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and any number of other Democrats running for office. Furthermore, you almost single-handedly convinced them that the best performing economy in the world was in a recession, and did such a good job at it that Trump himself began parroting your falsehoods whenever he got the chance. As a matter of fact, by some counts over half the lies Trump trotted out in his rallies were manufactured in the Kremlin. Now that Trump will be president, in January he will cut off aid to Ukraine and you can send those North Korean troops in with your own amateur soldier conscripts and they have a great time raping and murdering everyone they find. What fun! Then you can roll your tanks up to the Lithuanian, Latvian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Slovakian, Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish borders and rattle your saber while Trump stops by Moscow with NATO’s latest top secret military plans. Sweet!
CONGRATULATIONS KAMALA HARRIS. When they came and suggested you run for president in place of Joe Biden, did you look in the mirror and say to yourself, “If I was a White, working-class man in Wisconsin, would I vote for this?” No, you did not. Instead, you freaked at the possibility! Me! President! Of! The! United! States! Unfortunately, doing that blinded you to a sober assessment of the probability, which wasn’t much. So here’s your participation trophy – a solid gold replica of the Seal of the Vice President of the United States. It will look absolutely stunning decorating the wall of your prison cell. Kudos!
CONGRATULATIONS DONALD TRUMP. Employing your tried-and-true tactics of delay, playing the judicial system for all the loopholes, while staunchly adhering, tens of thousands of times, to Mussolini’s adage that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, you managed to escape accountability for your life of crime and moments of high treason. Now you will become Dictator and exact your revenge on all those who sought to bring you to justice. And while you are doing that, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammad bin Salman, Mihály Orbán and a host of other guys who are actually good at this Beloved Leader / President for Life / Strongman / Autocrat stuff will run circles around you, making you look like the vain, ignorant, clueless chump you really are as they dismantle and plunder America while you bankrupt it with ridiculous trade policies, huge tax cuts for the rich and hundred-billion-dollar-a-year projects to imprison and deport millions of people who provide services vital to the nation’s economy. And oh yeah… watch your back and keep an eye on your Number Two, who the grapevine says has his own plans. But meanwhile, hip-hip-hooray! Break out the high chair! Donnie is president again! Whoopie!
CONGRATULATIONS JD VANCE. The initial phase of your master plan to seize ultimate power worked perfectly. Leveraging a shameless lack of conscience and a talent for changing values and beliefs that would astound a chameleon with a willingness to say or do anything to achieve your objectives and the ability to lie better and more often than Donald Trump, you are now perfectly positioned to employ Section Four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, lock him up in Mar a Lago under round the clock supervision, and assume the presidency yourself. Rumors inside the Beltway hint that you have already concocted a plan of action, complete with accomplices who will occupy the principal offices of the executive departments in the Trump administration, and the only question is when. Well played, Macbeth!
Yes, congratulations to all those who made the final demise of the United States of America and its replacement with a fascist dictatorship possible. And with that, it is time for me to go. I have been posting to this Web Log since 2006, and the Friends of Tom Collins tell me that since then, I have written more words than War and Peace, Moby Dick and the King James Bible combined. And while I gratefully thank and will sincerely miss my worldwide audience of readers from every country on the planet except North Korea, this will be my final post. I have already initiated a deal to sell my home in Great Falls to a wealthy British diplomat. Cerise speaks very fluent French, and I can get by with it pretty well myself, so we will be moving to a Francophone region of Switzerland called Romandy. It is a place, I dare say, a damn sight more beautiful, not to mention more civilized, than Northern Virginia. Living there, we will not miss Donald Trump’s United States of America any more than Picasso, Casals, Bunuel or Alberti missed Franco’s Spain.
Frequent readers will be pleased to know that I rewarded Gretchen for her years of dedicated service as my private secretary with a high six-figure severance package. She told me she’s looking forward to returning to her Pennsylvania Dutch home county and buying a farm to grow organic produce and create a signature line of fainting goat’s milk cheeses. I suggested she try that business model in Scotland instead. She’s agreed to think about it.
My dear brother Rob Roy, his wife Katje and their son Jason have resigned from Whizzonator-YoYoDyne Federal Information Systems and are moving to Vancouver, British Columbia, where they will work on developing enhanced artificial intelligence social media user addiction algorithms to rot the brains of American youth with dopamine. They will be making more than twice the money they were getting as federal IT contractors, plus very generous perks. Their software won’t be allowed in Canada, of course, but the Communist Chinese who own the company which will employ them are certain that incorporation of the code as components of TikTok USA will be acceptable to the new Trump Administration.
My sister Rose, as might be expected from the account of our recent lunch date in my previous post, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, worried sick about how she, her brother-in-law Arthur and their huge brood of Roman Catholic children are going to survive in that already overcrowded house Fairfax County. Fortunately for Rose, I have arranged seventeen Swiss visas for Rose, Hank and their minor children; the adult offspring are all currently outside the US at the moment – Hank Jr., the artist, whom regular readers know, is actually in Switzerland already. I’ve also arranged for interim psychotherapy sessions to cope with election-induced PTSD, as well as real estate agent representation to sell that house.
Her husband Hank contacted Rose the morning after the election and indicated that his sister-in-law, Shannon, has decided she and Hank will stay with their numerous MAGA compatriots in their West Virginia survival compound until Trump’s operatives contact them for assignment to appropriate missions, such as rounding up illegal immigrants, trans-sexuals, gays and dissidents, guarding the internment camps, doing sniper duty shooting rioting urban Negroes or executing Trump’s political opponents with firing squads of AR-15s set on full automatic. According to Rose, during that telephone call Shannon had never sounded happier in the entire time that Rose has known her.
Word among the Project 2025 types here in Washington is that Hispanics and Blacks who voted for Trump should expect visits from Shannon, Hank and their buddies before the 2026 elections; Trump will cancel the mid-terms by Executive Order as unnecessary and a danger to public order, following that with “a cleansing bloodbath.” At least those pathetic dupes will be experiencing something like poetic justice – the random Democratic, Independent, Green or Libertarian voters who end up imprisoned with them or lying in the street with a bullet in their head, on the other hand, will just be, as Stalin so trenchantly put it, “another unfortunate consequence of history.” All of them should remember, of course, that when one person dies, that’s a tragedy, and when a million people die, that’s a statistic.
As I have noted many times before, by definition, in a democracy, the people get exactly the government they deserve. So while what’s coming will be a horrifying dystopia, it’s what the majority wanted and what the majority deserves, because the United States of America had an open, free and fair election for the majority to choose it. And that will be the last such election this nation will ever have. There is a grave lesson there. Remember it.
Farewell.