What to Expect When You Don't Know What to Expect
Some thoughts and observations as 2024 comes to a close
What a strange, schizophrenic year 2024 has been! In addition to being the best of times and the worst of times, the age of wisdom and the age of dumbfuckery, the epoch of belief and the epoch of WTF, and all the other allusive neo-Dickensian extremes we can trot out, Anno Domini 2024 was, paradoxically, a year to remember, but also a year we’d like to forget, while at the same time being a year we are reluctant if not downright terrified to let pass.
Today is the last day in what could be the last year of the American republic. The ball dropping at midnight may well be—to continue our A Tale of Two Cities motif—a guillotine falling on the neck of democracy. Pending some deus ex machina development—Congress enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment? Filet O’Fish-induced coronary? Alien intervention?—Donald Trump will lay his petite hand on a Bible and be sworn in as nonconsecutive POTUS just 20 days from now.
After that? All bets are off.
I can’t tell you what will happen. And neither can anyone else—although there seems to be no shortage of Sybils prophesying with great certainty at the Cumae and Delphi that are BlueSky and X.
In 2025, literally no outcome would surprise me. I could see Trump going full Hitler, with the mass deportations leading to mass genocide; I could see him never leaving the golf course. I could see a spike in political violence and oppressive media crackdowns; I could see MAGA continue to fracture and go to war with itself, while the rest of us post popcorn emojis. I could see martial law being declared; and I could see things continuing much as things always have, with one decrepit old man replacing another decrepit old man in the White House, and not much changing at all—although, for sure, that last possibility is probably wishful thinking.
So while I am scared shitless about what schemes may come after high noon, January 20th, I make no predictions for 2025. I had to hock my crystal ball on eBay to pay for a burner phone and a golden passport. But, in the spirit of New Year’s Eve, I do have some observations: things to keep an eye on, as the calendar turns to 2025, and the country turns to shit.
DOGE Ball
Much of the news coverage for the last few weeks has involved Elon Musk, somehow the world’s wealthiest man despite being a hapless Nazi imbecile no one likes. On the day he took over Twitter, I remarked: “His is just the pasty, punchable face of the fascist insurgency.” That assessment needs no further clarification.
After Musk helped Trump win the election—helped so much that Monsieur Dittman somehow knew the result four hours before anyone else—Donald gave him and another insufferable fascistic dork, Vivek Ramaswamy, control of a new agency that a chortling Apartheid Clyde named the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Much ink, real and virtual, has been spilled writing about DOGE. But here’s the thing: DOGE is not a thing that actually exists. Right now, it’s completely made-up. Trump could just as easily have named Musk ambassador to Mars, or head of the Bureau of Unicorn Affairs. Butt-Head Elon and Beavis Vivek seem to be operating under the assumption that they soon will enjoy dictatorial powers. That may well happen down the line—nothing is impossible given Trump’s despotic ambitions—but for now, DOGE has literally no clout at all.
Not only that, but the Constitution is pretty clear about the functions of the three branches of government. Let us review. The Congress, the Founders wrote, shall have Power:
To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
In short: the Congress enjoys the power of the purse. The Executive Branch does not.
I’m by no means a Constitutional scholar, so I may be reading this wrong, but it seems to me that Trump has put Musk in charge of the nation’s pocketbook…only, whoops, the President does not have charge of the nation’s pocketbook. The skipping South African dipshit is behind a toy steering wheel and thinks he’s piloting the Ship of State.
DOGE, and all the grand and malevolent plans Elon and Vivek have elucidated, is a tale told by two idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—at least for now.
Where, O Where, Has That Couchfucker Gone?
Notably absent in the news, in the public arena, and in furniture stores across the nation is one JD Vance, VP-Elect of these United States. Where is he? What’s he up to? Does he have enough eyeliner to make it through the next four years?
All joking aside: I have warned of Vance’s connections to the neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment movement for many months now. He’s a fascist. The guy occupies the space on the Venn diagram where the NRx, the Peter Thiel tech bros, the finance industry, and the Leonard Leo weirdos overlap. He is very dangerous. And he will soon be a heartbeat—or a 25th Amendment vote—away from the Oval Office. It’s concerning that he’s nowhere to be seen.
The media should be hounding him relentlessly. But, you know: DOGE is so shiny.
Fourth of July Traitors, Assemble!
In December of 2019, when PREVAIL was a month old, I wrote about the eight Republican lawmakers who celebrated Independence Day, 2018, in Moscow. Did they comprise a Kremlin sleeper cell, I wondered? Few of my pieces have held up as well as that one.
I mention this because two of the eight Fourth of July Traitors have been in the news of late. Kay Granger, the only member of the House to make the trek to the Kremlin, made headlines when the Dallas Express discovered that she was suffering from dementia and, despite being a sitting member of Congress, had been living in a retirement home for months—something neither she nor her staff bothered to relay to her constituents:
We then received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering, lost, and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.
The Dallas Express team visited the facility to confirm whether Granger was residing there and to inquire about how she planned to vote on the spending bill. Upon arrival, two employees confirmed that Granger was indeed living at the facility.
Today is the last day of her last term, no harm no foul, but my eyebrows did raise when I saw her name in the news story.
The other Fourth of July Traitor in the headlines is John Thune. Unlike John Kennedy of Louisiana or Wisconsin’s bigmouthed traitor Ron Johnson, the Senator from South Dakota has given zero indication that the Moscow visit affected his political decision-making process in any way. Most likely, he made the trip to Russia with his colleagues, held some pointless meetings that went nowhere, and managed to avoid being compromised. I hope that that is so, and remains the case.
Thune is, of course, the incoming Senate Majority Leader. Funnily, Mitch McConnell was given the alliterative moniker “Moscow Mitch,” but his GOP successor has a much more tangible connection to Russia. It would be very much like the Kremlin to play the long game with one of their “sleeper” assets.
Stay tuned—or Thuned, as it were.
Marco, Oh-No!
A Senator who has sat on, and even chaired, the Select Committee on Intelligence for many years, Marco Rubio knows more than almost any other American about national security matters. The stuff in his brain couldn’t be more top secret if it was document-dumped in boxes and stored in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. He even signed off on Volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 Election.
So when Rubio made a Twitter video minimizing Trump’s Kremlin treachery immediately after Volume 5 dropped, and when he plucked Aileen Cannon from flamenco-dancing obscurity to install as a MAGA District Judge in Florida, and when he not only didn’t vociferously oppose Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy but agreed to serve as Secretary of State, well, my Spidey Sense started tingling. The guy ain’t dumb. The only logical explanation for the remarkably read-in Rubio’s capitulation to Trump is that he is compromised. Why else was he chosen, and why else would he agree to serve?
We have focused most of our outrage on other Trump appointees: Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., etc. And rightly so. But I wonder if, when all is said and done, Lil’ Marco will wind up being the most dangerous Cabinet pick. Why would Donald put him there, if not to publicly humiliate him, and use him to negotiate sweetheart deals (sweetheart for the bad guys, that is) with hostile foreign governments?
Let’s maybe think twice about making a traitor Secretary of State.
Again: these are not predictions, just things I’m keeping an eye on, as we close the book on 2025. But if it’s future-telling you’re after, let’s go to Dickens one last time and end with this prophesy from the last page of A Tale of Two Cities:
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
Amen to that. Happy New Year! May 2025 be less bad that we anticipate!
Photo credit: Anthony Quintano. New Year’s Eve Aftermath, 2015, New York City
I will not make any major predictions either but I do expect that while things will be bad for all of us, they will be much worse for the uneducated, underemployed, white racists in red states who thought that Orange Caligula was going to fight for them. His non-mandate will be used by red state Republicans to put ever more oppressive restrictions on daily life from women's reproductive health to access to Medicaid, Food Stamps and heating assistance. They will also drive employers away when the promise of low taxes pales in the face of an inability to attract skilled workers. And the corrupt SCOTUS will be there, lurking in the background, on the prowl to inflict unpopular Republican wet dreams on the rest of us, further eroding their status with the public. My two part question - will Democrats unite as a true opposition party and will we, the people, demand that they do their damn jobs in opposition? No more Democratic bailouts when MAGA Republicans cannot govern!
As happens to many subscribers, I am working my way through back copies of The New Yorker and hit on Elizabeth Kolbert's piece on the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and, more to the point, the strong possibility that we have passed the tipping point for self-reinforcing climate disasters. It isn't actually a secret or particularly new information. I bring it up because I suspect that the likely inevitability of climate disaster is a central driver of Elon Musk's behavior. Trump is a nihilist who doubtless hates the fact that others will live after he dies and is quite happy to diminish their numbers in any way that he can. Musk, a devotee of science fiction, I believe thinks that humanity - for which he has little regard anyway - is doomed, has given up on it, and thinks he is creating the alternative future for the human race. He has said as much. He's a fantasist of the worst sort (the incredibly rich kind), and since both he and Trump and the MAGA movement, in general, are very much at peace with the suffering of others, has made common cause with them as long as it permits him to advance his agenda. Seen through this lens, his childishness, buffoonery and erratic behavior have a certain internal logic no matter how inherently cynical and harmful the goal.