Hispanic Fanatic

As we celebrate (is that even remotely the right word?) our country’s birthday, let’s pause to consider that according to experts, “never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president.”

Yes, the guy who famously pledged to drain the swamp is so overtly corrupt that one has to assume his plan is indulge in massive amounts of grift so “people will not think anything about it is weird.”

Trust me — it’s weird. Also criminal.

In the quaint past, “presidents worked assiduously to show they were not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue.” But in this golden age of MAGA morality, the entire Trump family “has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits,” causing historians, political scientists, and anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News to marvel at “the openness, the flagrant nature” of their blatant corruption, which they undertake “almost with pride — cashing in on the office itself” almost daily.

Unless one is delusional or oblivious, it has become “increasingly obvious that the obscene wealth and power of a select few, at the expense of the many, is a feature, not a bug for the Trump years.”

Those who are in on the scam — and that doesn’t include you and me — are “swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of self-dealing and greed that is unprecedented in American history.”

All those pardons for donors, contracts for flunkies, and misuse of inside information are not “a disconnected series of scandals” but a well-coordinated system of depravity.

Yes, our avarice-prone chief executive is fantastically obsessed with money and power (also windmills, for some bizarre reason). But there is more to it. There is a dark psychological neediness. 

You see, the drooling, shuffling occupant of the Oval Office “wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf.” We’re talking about a guy who insists he is a genius (a very stable one) even as the US economy teeters and he loses a war against a much smaller nation led by religious zealots. He proclaims himself to be an unparallelled mastermind, the mighty leader who “knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it” despite the overwhelming evidence of his incompetence and his “relentlessly oafish output.”

As others have noted, “the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.”

That’s the real symbol of America today.

Happy goddamn birthday.

OK, so Hungary didn’t work out. What other small, corrupt nation can right-wingers emulate as their model for a future America?

Well, damn. They are fixating on my family’s homeland of El Salvador. How absolutely flattering. Yup.

It is constantly disconcerting how often conservatives boast about America being the greatest country in the world and then qualify it with “but we should really be more like [tiny authoritarian nation with a negligible GDP] because they have it right.”

Republicans have moved on from the flop in Budapest to focus on El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele has set himself up to be president for life. This neo-fascist hero has co-opted the separation of powers, heavily relied on the military for internal policing, and built the world’s largest prison, which happens to be a concentration camp where the US sends many of its former residents to die. In El Salvador, authorities can detain anyone without a warrant, deny them access to legal counsel, and suspend the right to assembly. Independent media is nonexistent, and the state promotes “a cinematic version of Bukele” to create a cult of personality.

All of this is peachy keen with American right-wingers, who see Bukele as “an aspirational figure” and “yearn to implement his authoritarian transformation of El Salvador” in the United States.

On behalf of my family, let me say that we do not want America to become El Salvador. We would like more pupusas, but that’s about it.

Of course, it’s not just hardcore right-wingers who are flirting with despotism. Around the world, in “both developing and developed countries, democracies are facing historic tests” as polls show “mounting public apathy from voters, particularly young people, and growing disenchantment with the ideals of liberal democracy itself.”

Compared to just a few years ago, Americans are less likely “to see a democratically elected government as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important to the United States’ identity as a nation,” and there is a “growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and increasing support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that concepts like democracy and human rights and due process have failed them.”

To be fair, maybe democracy has failed them. After all, in this bastion of democracy, we are under the thumb of old men who hold disproportionate power over us and are quite overt about their contempt for anyone who was foolish enough not to be born rich and male.

But do we really want to be El Salvador? Have we given up on the American Dream (whatever the hell that is) and replaced it with the Authoritarian Settle?

If so, that will be a compromise that we soon regret.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if we had installed a sock puppet as president in 2025, we would be in better shape today.

A sock puppet, or any inanimate object that made no decisions, would never have implemented idiotic tariffs that ravaged the economy, 

A sock puppet would never have launched a war with Iran for vague, confounding, contradictory, arbitrary, and imbecilic reasons, resulting in widespread death and destruction.

Would a sock puppet steal $1.8 billion dollars from the US Treasury and plan to hand it out to thugs and flunkies beholden only to him? Possibly, but not necessarily.

A president who did nothing would be an improvement on a president who willfully makes mystifying, moronic decisions that seem designed to hurt America.

Unfortunately, we do not have a sock puppet for a chief executive. We have a careening, decaying narcissist who “is not good at wars, economics, or geopolitics” but is “amazingly good at corruption.”

Americans are starting to catch on — about 18 months too late, but they are catching on, nevertheless.

The vilest person to ever be president has an approval rating that is sinking faster than a Tesla dropped into a black hole. The only people who still believe in his insanity are the hardcore base.

But that’s a new problem. You see “Trump’s strategy for power has a tighter and tighter hold on fewer and fewer people.” As MAGA withers and dies, it will become even more toxic, without the nominal need to appeal to anyone but zealots who are quite literally willing to die for this repulsive bigot.

As the right-wing “base of support shrinks, the concentration of primary-voting diehards and Cabinet-level dead-enders in the president’s party will only increase.” This means that the flailing despot’s “threats to upend democracy will only grow more intenseas Trump’s faction of MAGA diehards keeps shrinking.”

Basically, these fascistic fucks will try to take the whole damn country down with them.

I know of no solution to their whiplashing destruction. 

Hell, maybe we can talk them into voting for a sock puppet.

As you know, our most philanthropic of presidents has set up a $1.8 billion fund that will compensate supposed victims of government oppression. This unprecedented, nauseating, and likely unconstitutional decree isn’t just the most overtly corrupt act in presidential history. It is also a moronic and ill-formed idea that even its adherents can’t explain. 

Because it’s unclear who gets the money, I figured why not apply and see what happens? I deserve a few million just as much as a hillbilly insurrectionist does. So here is my application to the fund:

Dear Acting Attorney General Blanche (or Your Utmost Excellency, whichever you prefer):

Recently, you set up a $1.776 billion compensation fund for victims of lawfare and weaponization perpetrated by “political and career federal employees, contractors and agents” who targeted “individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons (“Lawfare” and “Weaponization”).

I say it’s about time! No longer will Americans be intimidated by an out-of-control government that clamps down on their freedom of speech. Unless you’re swarthy, of course, because then ICE has the legal right to taser you just for kicks. Or if you’re a comedian who makes jokes about our chief executive, because no one has to right to criticize (all genuflect) President Trump (all rise) ever ever ever. Seriously, don’t even joke about making jokes.

In any case, I seek an award of $8.647 million from the Weaponization Fund. As with your fund amount of $1.776 billion, the amount I am seeking is based purely on punitive damages, backpay, arbitrary symbolism, and vibes.

You may ask about the grounds for my claim. Well, it’s true I don’t have anything as ironclad as storming the capitol, or lying under oath, or committing multiple felonies for the purposes of overthrowing democracy. I mean, the people who did that have it made. Am I right? If only the rest of us had known that it would be so profitable to bludgeon a cop. Alas, it’s all 20/20 hindsight.

No, my claim is based on the many angry emails and vague threats I receive from MAGA types, a few of whom imply that they work for the administration. Again, it’s nothing solid, but let’s be honest, the flunkies you’re going to pick for the commission that approves the payouts are going to be Mr. and Ms. Rubberstamp, so the details don’t matter.

The point is that I have been oppressed for political and ideological reasons. Like, really badly. So send me a big old bagfull of taxpayer-funded money as soon as possible. Let freedom ring, God bless America, ease on down the road, so on and so on.

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

The Hispanic Fanatic

You know that a triangle has three sides, and birds can fly, and fire is hot.

With that kind of independent thinking, you’ll never be a member of the Trump administration.

You see, our favorite band of charlatans, incompetents, and evil nepo-babies are harmful enough because of their zeal for distorting reality and promoting easily disproven nonsense. But the few sane and logical people who support this band of delusional freaks are so intimidated or fearful of losing their jobs that they are going along with grade-A gobbledygook and hardcore claptrap.

For example, pretty much everyone told our easily befuddled president that it was a horrible idea to attack Iran. And they were right. But at the White House, “so many people are afraid of being on the outs that they are just drinking the Kool-Aid and going along with it.” 

Yes, what could be a more powerful encapsulation of brave leadership and moral courage than the phrase “going along with it”? Perhaps that can be their motto.

But it’s not just obsequious toadies at the White House who deny reality. It’s also most conservatives in general.

For example, “rigorous research [has] demonstrated in place after place, decade after decade, that immigration to the U.S. does not cause crime to go up; it may even push it down.

And yet, 85% of Republicans “believe that migrants bring crime to the U.S.,” an erroneous belief that has held steady among conservatives for the last 20 years of polling. Conservatives insist that immigrants are synonymous with crime waves even though “the data shows otherwise.”

Perhaps conservatives would also like to know that in research that stretches back to the 1990s, the US immigrant population has “generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.” Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be nearly twice as high, and the economic contributions of immigrants may have “already prevented a fiscal crisis.”

That hasn’t stopped “major Trump donors” from complaining about immigrant invasions, right before hiring and exploiting Mexican workers illegally.

There are many reasons why Republicans see the world they want to see rather than acknowledge inconvenient reality.

One particularly disturbing theory is that MAGA is nothing more than right-wing fan fiction, and that the participants in this unhinged movement see themselves as players in “a cinematic epic of universal Good versus Evil.” According to this theory, the Trump administration is “far more steeped in storytelling than governing,” and policy is “presented via pop myths.” 

You could argue that the original Trumpian artifact, QAnon, was nothing more than a “popular mixed-reality fan fiction unfolding in real time” that morphed into a “kludgy, byzantine conspiracy saga.” It quickly became “a collaboration between the one in five Americans who believed its core conspiracies, a cottage industry of QAnon content creators, and even a few government officials.”

Hey, maybe the January 6 riots were merely “a fan fiction IRL meetup, a live action role-playing or alternate reality game that some took more seriously than others.”

Somehow that theory doesn’t make me feel any better.

But this disillusionment is the price we pay for living in the real world.

If you are a Christian conservative, you’ve been quite willing to overlook Trump’s many deviations from devout behavior. There’s the nonstop lying, cheating, adultery, “unrepentant mendacity,” arrogance, gleeful boasting that he hates his opponents, and threats of death on all who oppose him. Despite his “suspect professions of faith and his glaring unfamiliarity with scripture, conservative Christian leaders have praised him and described him as heaven sent.”

But now, our most holy of presidents has indulged in full-force, straight-up blasphemy, and he believes you are too stupid to see it. Yes, he has presented a defense, which is based on the man being so moronic that he doesn’t understand basic imagery that a nine-year-old would comprehend. And that is the best-case scenario for his behavior.

It’s bad enough that the president is a narcissistic liar who doesn’t even care if he insults his followers and who revels in ultimate cringe. The bigger problem is that he is a nutjob.

Yes, I’ve addressed the man’s frayed sanity before, and as far back as his first term, many political commentators and healthcare professionals were shouting, “This guy is cuckoo for Coco Puffs.”

It will forever be mystifying to me how millions of Americans saw this demented act in 2024, excused the word salad and meandering as “passionate” or “joking,” and thought this dementia-addled bigot was fit to make economic policy and negotiate with heads of state. This philandering oligarch was one step from babbling on the subway. Clearly, “they’re eating the cats and dogs” was a cry for help, but huge swaths of Americans thought it was a campaign slogan.

In any case, more people are openly debating the 25^th Amendment, which I advocated for in 2017.

This development is because “Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” 

Instead of leadership, we get “a series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements,” interspersed with threats to destroy entire civilizations. It leaves even the most partisan of observers with “the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.”

And Americans are catching on. Polling shows that 61% of Americans “think Mr. Trump has become more erratic with age” and half think he is too old to be president. Only one-third of Americans thought the near-octogenarian was too old just a year ago, so we have to wonder why such a large percentage of people suddenly realized how time works.

Regardless of this abrupt epiphany, we now have a government run by psychos, and a president who went from “making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later,” even if the situation did not change in the interim. It is no exaggeration to say the chief executive is “an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”

Right now, this is how we live: “The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war.”

This is madness.

As we know, supporters of Trump come in all styles.

There are angry young men, cackling oligarchs, virulent racists, smug misogynists, cowed conservatives, frightened boomers, furious Gen Xers, religious zealots, conspiratorial lunatics, pedophile defenders, oblivious minorities, and casual voters who wanted cheaper eggs, among other demographics.

It’s more difficult to find highly educated professionals who see a blithering, self-aggrandizing bigot go on and on about himself who think “This is the guy.” But you will find them. There are economists who support his tariffs, political scientists who insist Trump is a strategic genius, and doctors who like polio. 

However, one professional class refuses to get on board the Trump train. That would be the historians.

I have yet to see a prominent historian say, “This is a golden age, and Americans will celebrate Trump in the future.” Indeed, historians are among Trump’s strongest critics. They really dislike the guy.

Many will say, “Who cares what a bunch of elitist eggheads think?” And then these people will steal the historian’s lunch money and yell, “Nerd” while giving them wedgies.

But in some ways, Trump’s horrible reputation with historians may be even more alarming than his notoriety among scientists, journalists, heads of state, and anyone who believes that citizens should not be murdered in the street.

You see, historians have devoted their lives to studying the past, analyzing the present, and presenting conclusions. And pretty much all of them are saying, “This shit is fucked up and will lead to chaos for years, even generations.” And they have been saying this since his first term.

Historians are shouting about the signs of fascism, the parallels to other countries that dabbled with authoritarianism, and the fact that the GOP has a Nazi problem. They are pointing out that all of this has happened, in some form, in many other countries over many decades, and it has always led to catastrophe.

They are the Cassandras that Americans are not listening to, either because it’s too disturbing, too unbelievable, or too easy to dismiss as the caterwauling emanating from ivory towers.

But keep in mind that historians judge presidents differently than voters and journalists do. Historians don’t evaluate leaders on how the economy is doing today (although the answer is “not well”). Nor do they obsess over partisan ideology, culture wars, or political wins and losses. 

Rather, historians prioritize long-term institutional effects, like constitutional norms, minority rights, commitment to rule of law, respect for democratic processes, and the peaceful transfer of power.

And guess what? Trump sucks at all of those.

If historians don’t like a president, it’s usually not because he was mean to trans people or constantly insulted allies (but let’s be honest, that doesn’t help). No, historians interpret warning signs in democracies and say, “This is ominous as fuck for all these reasons that we have seen in other countries, and America will not be an exception.”

Other experts are beginning to agree, like the research firm that states “the United States [is] the principal source of global risk in 2026.”

Unless we alter our terrifying trajectory, the historians of 2126 will shake their heads at our ignorance, sigh, and add America to the long list of countries that didn’t pay attention to the lessons of history.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Second Amendment.

This poorly written clause has provoked more death and mayhem in this country than any other scrap of the English language. And its homicidal power has only increased in recent decades, as belligerent  dudes insist the right to own an AR-15 is so fundamental, so crucial to liberty, that slaughtered children are just an annoying byproduct of its greatness.

But even though I would like to see the Second Amendment revoked (or at least heavily edited, modified, and clarified), I accept it as the law of the land. You want a gun? Yup, you can get one, no matter how much I personally don’t like it.

So it’s more than a little perplexing to see Second Amendment “absolutists,” the same people who are the first to proclaim how much they love the Constitution, now backtracking, hedging, and wavering in their support for this supposedly sacred right.

These guys believe the Constitution is ala cart, and their belief in any of its principles depends upon how politically inconvenient they are.

Now that their leader — aka Tangerine Palpatine — has mumbled, “You can’t have guns,” many of them are saying, “OK with me, chief! What other theoretically essential values do you want me to abandon?”

Of course, some gun owners have pushed back… meekly and with the respectful tone that they would never adopt if someone were, say, asking them to wear a mask to prevent disease. But it’s a pushback nonetheless.

Our old friends at the NRA felt pressured to say something after a Republican president threatened gun ownership in a way that no Democratic president has ever come close to vocalizing. Remember all that nonsense about Obama taking your guns? The guy never even implied that you can’t have them.

So if you ever needed proof that many Second Amendment advocates are weak-willed hypocrites, here is your proof.

But to be fair, Trump and the most fervent of his hardcore supporters are not hypocrites. That would require them to have principles in the first place.

No, the MAGA faithful think about the Second Amendment the same way they think about all American rights: as something reserved exclusively for them.

In their eyes, the Second Amendment is not for Latinos or liberals or punk rockers who live in cities.

It’s for them — rural and suburban white, straight Christian men who are the God-given owners of this country. They alone receive the benefits of the Constitution, the protection of the government, and the right to say and do whatever the hell they want.

And if you don’t like that, watch out, because they are heavily armed. 

When Trump said gun ownership could be restricted, he clearly wasn’t talking about these guys.

He meant the rest of us.

And that goes for all our rights. They can just be whisked away like they never existed.

I recently created my first AI agent.

Don’t be impressed. It took ten minutes and no technical skill at all. The AI basically synthesizes my news feed.

But maybe I should look into developing an AI chatbot that can convert hardcore right-wingers into progressive activists, because that would be one hell of a cultural improvement from a tool that, so far, has been most effective at writing poorly phrased emails for lazy people and creating bizarro images.

You see, a recent study has found that AI chatbots “can sway voters better than political advertisements.” The researchers found that “a conversation with a chatbot can shift people’s political views” more effectively than talking to a human can. But since we’re talking about AI here, and there is always a dark side, you will be unsurprised to know that “the most persuasive models also spread the most misinformation.”

Basically, your Tia Ana will remain steadfast in her political views no matter how many facts you throw at her or regardless of how much you plead. But her principles may waver if an AI bot lies to her enough. 

No, that’s not reassuring.

The researchers say that “the chatbots’ persuasive power could have profound consequences for the future of democracy.” For example, politicians who “use AI chatbots could shape public opinion in ways that compromise voters’ ability to make independent political judgments.”

As we know, many Americans believe Jewish space lasers control the weather and vaccines cause babies to explode. And those beliefs have a head start even before AI does it thing. 

Research shows that the affinity to believe total nonsense is more of a trait for conservatives. This tendency apparently extends to AI, as the study revealed that “chatbots advocating for right-leaning candidates made a larger number of inaccurate claims than those advocating for left-leaning candidates.” 

You see, if AI is parroting right-wing nonsense, it quickly runs out of objective truths. So the chatbots create “misleading or false information” to become more persuasive, and AI “essentially reaches to the bottom of the barrel of stuff they know, so the facts get worse quality.”

The researchers conclude that this study implies “a troubling world for democracy.” But they have a solution. All we need are “strong guardrails to keep the systems in check.”

If AI chatbots could laugh, they would bust out cackling at that statement. Because in the interest of making tech bros even more money, and to facilitate Silicon Valley’s continued right-wing drift, the Trump administration has made it difficult to create any guardrails — never mind strong ones.

Most likely, conservatives will swarm Americans with AI chatbots, deep fakes, and technological tricks designed to fool people into thinking progressives are diabolical and the GOP is competent, neither of which is true.

So in the future, perhaps robots won’t need to rise up, attack humans, and subjugate them. Maybe we will just meekly do whatever AI tells is to do.

We have not lost our democracy. That’s the good news.

We are rapidly losing our democracy. That’s the bad news.

Recently, the New York Times assessed how America is doing on 12 key aspects of democracy. They concluded that we have declined in all dozen areas, which is “a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.”

Ok, so we’re 0-12 when it comes to maintaining the guiding principle of our republic. That’s about as bad as it gets, right?

No, it’s even worse. You see, the Times analysis did not get into some of the grayer areas of America’s decline, such as the fact that in the last year, we have witnessed “a parade of rapid-fire knee-bending that has heralded in a new era of American exceptionalism—one in which we prove that no country capitulates to authoritarian tendencies faster than us.”

However, it’s not all bad news. This week’s election results imply that people are getting sick of Trump and his boorish brand of authoritarianism. 

The Democrats “won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country.” They won governorships, mayoral races, school board seats, “long-held [Republican] dog-catchers,” and “flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club… just everything.”

It is, of course, far too early to launch into a touchdown dance. But the off-year election’s results shows, at the very least, that GOP dominance is not a given.

In fact, it gives credibility to my assertion that the Democratic Party does not need to move to the right to win elections. Maybe Trump’s victory was not a sea change in American politics and harbinger of conservative ascendancy. More likely, the guy won because of “high inflation, Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to try to run for reelection, an underwhelming Kamala Harris campaign, and an anti-incumbent mood.”

If so, the “anti-MAGA majority has reemerged,” and democracy is not dead yet. 

That’s our hope anyway.