We All Know What This Is

The time for convenient denial is well past. It's time we looked this in the face and reckoned with what is actually happening.

This is a free article reacting to the results in Iowa. To gain access to the vast majority of Dispatches From A Collapsing State’s content (including exclusive coverage from Iowa and analysis of the ongoing election), and to support this ongoing project, become a subscriber today. And while you’re at it, recommend Dispatches From A Collapsing State to friends and family members who would benefit from this information

---

I felt nauseous Sunday after leaving the Donald Trump rally in Indianola, Iowa. It had been one thing to deal with a couple of aggressive Trump supporters, but it was another to come to the stark cold realization that Trump wasn’t going to just win Iowa, he was going to dominate it beyond any question. Talking with supporters, listening to them openly voice their desire for violence and for their God-sent messiah to serve as dictator, made it even worse. For eight years, since I reported from the 2016 Trump Campaign, I had been fearing it would come to this and trying my best to warn people. And now, here we were.

Nick Hauselman and me hosted a live-reaction show for The Muckrake Podcast last night as the picture in Iowa became very clear. It took a full half hour for the major networks and outlets to declare the race dead and finished. The only questions remaining were whether Trump would wind up north of 50% (he did) and whether Ron DeSantis could eek out a disappointing second place (sure). By the time the sun rose in frozen Iowa on Tuesday, the landscape was easier to read than the morning’s papers. Trump is in total control of the Republican base and DeSantis and Nikki Haley are largely wasting everyone’s time and the money of their billionaire donors. It’s a question now of when those oligarchs will realize where their checks are going and when the gravy train will derail.

For years now I’ve tried to explain what has happened with the Republican Party. The GOP is a bottom-heavy structure depending on rural and white voters to bolster their voting ranks while a small group of elite politicians guide them on behalf of their corporate donors. It is a volatile, contradictory body that has relied on carefully-crafted manipulation and fearmongering, a strategy that requires white supremacist paranoia, evangelical apocalypticism, and appeals to every ugly tendency buried in the white American heart. Because of this, the ground was laid for someone like Donald Trump to come along and seize the machinery from those hands and use it for his own benefit.

In 2016 they tried to use Trump’s popularity while struggling to take the party back under their control. They failed. Now, in 2024, they tried again. They turned to Ron DeSantis. They turned to Nikki Haley. And they have failed again.

So. Here we are. Drowning in an ocean of white rage and radicalism. So far ashore that we have little idea what direction to turn. MAGA is evolving into the full-blown death cult many of us have warned you about. 2020 and the Big Lie of the stolen election, mixed with the fetid layers of Right Wing conspiracism, has left the true-believers convinced liberal democracy has not only failed but that it is irredeemable. The only thing left is to install their God King and let him sort through the ashes.

This isn’t pretty stuff.

I’ll be the first to admit this.

I’ve had conversations in the past few days with friends and supporters about that very fact. People are understandably worried as the avenues people have tried to convince them would solve the problem have all dried up. Some are dealing with the problem by preparing and growing their communities. Others have chosen to tune everything out and continue pretending the problem doesn’t exist. To each their own.

Living in denial is your right. I don’t agree with it and I think turning your back on the millions of vulnerable people who will be destroyed by what could come is unethical and indefensible. For them, for the people you care about, for your neighbors, your children, for complete strangers you’ll never meet, I think the only option is to recognize the problem and fight it head on. But I can’t make you do choose that.

I’ll be publishing more installments of my special series The Stakes (Part I and Part II are already available), but I wanted to make a couple of appeals this morning while the Iowa result is still ringing through the country.

For Democratic Politicians and Strategists

For the past few years, as long as I have had your attention, I’ve made the same argument over and over again. Maybe, this morning, as Trump’s victory is becoming more and more clear, as he continues to worsen his rhetoric, as his supporters openly embrace fascism and authoritarianism without so much as a hesitation or second thought, and as the polls get worse, you’ll take more seriously.

Please.

For the love of god.

Come up with a plan for the future.

Stop telling us what Joe Biden did in the past three years. There’s time for that, sure, but this movement and this rising radicalism can only be disarmed if you give people a direction to head that can begin to solve the underlying conditions that got us here. You need to craft a message about what America could be and what America should be. Go big or go the hell home, because your timidity is dooming us. I cannot make it more clear than that.

If you find yourself fearful that Americans will reject you, I promise they are desperate for this. Give up on your pollsters and every moderate terrified that something “radical” will increase the risk. Because the risk couldn’t be higher and your hesitancy is a plague.

The time to do this is years ago. But today is a good time to start.

For Journalists and Pundits

For the love of christ, get your shit together.

I know most of you enjoy a privilege that leaves you feeling removed from the drudgery of life in the wasteland and, as a result, pretty indifferent to suffering and resentful that you even have to talk to the unwashed masses, but good god.

There is way more than life to feeling part of the in-crowd in New York City or Washington, D.C., than building your brand on dead and dying platforms like Twitter/X and continuing to nurture your professional relationship by “keeping rational” in the face of so much doomsaying. Way, way more.

For years I’ve been telling people the media has a Donald Trump problem. They’re addicted to him and the chaos he brings. It keeps them afloat in hits, impressions, advertisements, and ratings. It’s time to break the habit and recognize the time for screwing around is over.

Again. Get your shit together.

For Citizens

Once more, the answer to rising authoritarianism is grassroots democratic energy and the revolution is births. You have a massive role to play in that and it begins in your own life. Healing from the weaponized trauma capitalism, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism, its byproduct, is necessary should you play that role.

But healing requires energy and resiliency. If you feel tired, if you feel beleaguered, and how could you not, it’s probably time to take a breather. Go find the things you love in your life. The people. The places. Re-energize yourself and choose when to get into the fight and get into it in a real and meaningful way. Lashing about, reacting to Trump and Right Wing fearmongering, can only keep you drowning. If you are going to make it through this it’s going to take determination in the face of overwhelming odds.

I understand the fear and the trepidation. And I understand the desire to tune out. But we don’t have that option. Not if we want to wrestle this beast to the ground and have anything resembling a future. This is our fight and it’s going to define everything moving forward.

Take a breath. See what matters to you. And get back up. We’ve got work to do.