The Lame Duck in His Labyrinth

Trump Is About to Get More Dangerous, Not Less.

Somewhere in a tasteful Georgetown living room, a Very Serious Person is swirling an excellent glass of Raen Royal St. Robert Pinot Noir and reassuring his friends that Donald Trump is a lame duck now, therefore he’s weaker, therefore the country can exhale. Things are going back to normal.

He’s been in lobbying and government in rotating roles for decades. He never believed in Trump, but he certainly seduced him, accommodated him, and enriched him, playing the role of an eager supplicant to deliver results for his clients.

And deliver he did.

His clients on Wall Street and Silicon Valley got everything they wanted, and more.

Now, men like him, the people who have no ideology but money and power, are calculating the post-Trump future, believing the danger has passed and that the next iteration of MAGA is theirs to command.

They’ve got a system now to control an eager working-class base, pumping endless, algorithmically predigested culture war agitporn slop into their waiting maws while they shout “America, fuck yeah!”.

At the same time, private equity firms rape their local economies, turn them from owners to renters, and ensure their kids are provided just enough education to be future consumers. AI and robotics companies eliminate their jobs. MAGA media outlets and the plague of MAGA influencers laugh behind their hands at the gullibility of their audience.

That is a comforting bedtime story for people who do not understand Donald Trump, the movement he built, or the way power works when an authoritarian personality starts hearing the clock tick.