It's Over

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By Don Varyu

February 4, 2025

There’s a classic confrontation that features a bully. It happens in movies, and it happens in real life. The bully is angrily advised that he can’t do something again. There’s a sense that punches might be coming. Instead, the bully just smugly sneers and says, “who’s gonna’ stop me?”

This is where America is now. The bully is fully in charge and knows he’s untouchable. He stands astride everything. “Norms” and “rules” and “laws”  are now meaningless…because there is no one left to enforce them.
Who’s gonna stop him?

The pathetic wretches Trump has selected for his cabinet will do nothing he doesn’t instruct them or allow them to do. Both houses of Congress are under his control, with members of his party pre-programmed to consent to any crime. Even-handed and fair-minded federal judges are irrelevant; the Supreme Court has already urinated on the Constitution by granting him full immunity from any outrage he may choose to commit.

And anyway, what charge would he ever face in the first place? And who would charge him? The FBI? The Justice Department. A beat cop? He can do what he wants.
 

Who’s gonna’ stop him?
___
 

So, the obvious next question is this: does that mean there’s  nothing we can do?”
Well, let’s consider the traditional counterforces:

  • The media. They now come in two flavors. First, the traditional, mainline kind, and second, the free-flowing sewer of online and social media. Each has already been slapped down.

    •  To settle a lawsuit with Trump, ABC agreed to pay him $15 million for committing what amounts to semantics. On his program, the third-rate commentator George Stephanopoulos claimed that Trump had been found “liable for rape” for his assault on a woman years ago. In fact, the jury declared he was guilty of sexual abuse, and liable for both battery and (ironically) defamation.  To settle a suit many legal experts said ABC could easily win, the network caved and paid Trump the money. At this writing, Trump has yet to fork over a penny he owes Carroll. And his legal attack does not stop there. Trump has also sued CBS for the way they conducted an interview with Kamala Harris…and one against the Des Moines Register newspaper because he disagreed with the results of a poll they conducted.

    • In the social media world, Jeff Zuckerberg, the odious founder of Facebook, paid Trump $25 million because Trump objected to being kicked off the site for comments he made after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Trump called that “illegal censorship”, even though he—like all users—agreed to terms of service that granted Facebook the right to boot him. Not only did Trump get the money, but Zuckerberg voluntarily chipped in  a million for the inauguration, and soon after announced that the platforms would no longer practice “content moderation”.

  • The opposition party. It has become sport among many media personalities…and some members of the Democratic party itself…to complain that the Democrats “aren’t doing anything to stop him!” Let the circular firing squad load up once again. Apparently, these self-flagellators did not watch the confirmation hearings for the insipid mopes Trump nominated for cabinet positions. Democratic Senators Michael Bennet, Amy Klobuchar, Maggie Hassan, Dick Durbin, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy, among others, did exactly what the dilettantes were demanding they do.  It can be such a bother to pay attention.

  • Big money. If you’re a billionaire, one would think you can afford to say and do pretty much anything you want. Not in the era of Trump 2.0. On the contrary, we found the richest of the rich dutifully seated on stage at the inauguration. In the front row were Zuckerberg of Meta, Bezos of Amazon, Musk of Tesla, Pichai of Google and Cook of Apple. Each was more than happy to strap on the gold-plated knee pads to bow down and kiss Trump’s ring (or any other part of his person you choose to imagine.) President Teddy Roosevelt used to like to mount the heads of big game he had killed on the walls of his office. Trump is satisfied to have his victims fawn in the front row behind him.

  • “Better angels”. During Trump 1.0, he didn’t have the slightest idea where to find a warm body to nominate for his cabinet. So, the ‘party elders helped him recruit a bench of recognized D.C. elders--some of whom were actually effective. This time, Trump didn’t want old hands--he wanted his hands. Once he was defeated in 2020, one GOP Senator said in a future term, he should, “…fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state…replace them with our people… and when the courts stop you…tell the Chief Justice he’s made his ruling--‘now  enforce it”.

Apparently, Trump liked that advice, because he made that Senator—J.D. Vance-- his vice president. So much for better angels.

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I’ll close with a different metaphor.

You wake up one morning with a disabling toothache. You struggle to the dentist…he takes an X-ray…then comes in and says, “well, bad news. You’ve got a huge abscess. We need to get rid of that, which means you need a root canal.”

You tell him you’ve heard about these things…how excruciating they are…and maybe  you could just get some pain killers and hope it goes away.

The dentist then informs you that not only will it not go away, but the infection could eventually spread to your skin, your jawbone, and even your entire immune system. No choice--you’re going to have to face the drilling.
And this, as a country, is where we are now. Trump is the abscess that’s already inhabited the entire body politic.

The pain will be staggering. It will disfigure us.

And we can only hope we’ll live through it.

There are no fairy tale or superhero solutions.

America—the place we grew up knowing and believing in—is over.

The bully won.
___
 

I realize this is a bleak and depressing assessment. There’s nothing obvious to stop him now. But maybe an idea will pop up.
After all, we’ve got four years to figure it out.
 
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