Old Socialist.
Apr 06, 2026
Headline: You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall
Sub-headline: A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.
Editor: Michael Tomasky is a paid political apologist for the Clintons. Yet what might the reader think of the Joe Biden candidacy as a check on Bernie Sanders?
These were and are Trump’s four pillars (there is considerable overlap between the first two groups, but they’re somewhat different). They have sustained him in and out of power for more than a decade, and they’ve proven stronger than the two things that in theory have the power to bring Trump down: the political opposition and plain reality.
But take a good, contemplative whiff of the zeitgeist right about now, and you’ll smell change in the air. The opposition is stronger. And I don’t mean chiefly the Democrats in Congress. We all know that some of them are effective, others not so much, but even those who do speak to the anger so many Americans feel don’t have much institutional power to do anything about it.
No—the opposition arose not in Washington, but in Chicago and Minneapolis, and in the thousands of No Kings Day marches that brought eight million Americans out into the streets. And as Trump is not a normal American politician, this is not a normal political opposition. These millions of Americans aren’t merely against his policies, although they surely are that. They’re against his hatred and lawlessness and corruption, and the moral rot he’s spreading over this country like blight over trees.
Editor: Reader note that ‘No Kings Day’ is about the political erasre of the utterly bankrupt New Democrats Bill and Hillery, and there coterie of a Political Technocrats like Tomasky!
…
I never understood, in 2024, how all these people convinced themselves that Trump could lower the price of a gallon of gas and a pound of ground chuck. He has raised the price of gas through his war on Iran. The price of beef is at an all-time high, and while that’s not really his fault—it’s mainly because cattle inventories are at a 75-year low due to drought and other factors—the increase makes the crucial point that there are many price inputs over which a president has no control.
I also never understood why anyone believed that he wouldn’t start dumb wars if the circumstances, in his mind, warranted doing so. The one fundamental fact about Donald Trump is, as my late friend and great Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett famously put it, he’ll say whatever he needs to say to wriggle through the next 10 minutes. He said what he said about wars to get elected. Period. Anyone who believed otherwise was, frankly, an idiot. And so now here we are, with Trump mocking Allah and likely this week to commit acts defined as war crimes under the Geneva Convention.
A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up. It’s finally happening. I’d say we should celebrate. But there now arises the question of how he’ll react as reality closes in on him. I fear we haven’t begun to see the worst.
Editor: The final paragraph of Tomaski’s rant is awash in Sturm und Drang! Trump was elected President and served from 2017–2021, and was suceed my Joe Biden as predident from 2021 to 2025. Perhaps my comment on Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers of September 7, 2011 might offer some insights?
Age of Fracture reviewed by Almost Marx
Posted on September 7, 2011 by stephenkmacksd
I finished Age of Fracture almost a week ago and decided that I would give some time to let my thoughts on this book coalese, but the further I got from that point in readerly time the more distant my thoughts became, the more faded, as if I had read a novel that rivited my attention only for the time of my engagement and was lost upon turning the last page. I reread the Epilogue to remind myself, to reacquaint with that dissatisfaction.I was very dissatisfied when I first completed my reading of it. I found that the Epilogue was a complete disappointment, a summing up that somehow didn’t really match the obvious research and time that went into this fascinating act of historical/intellectual reconstruction. It could have been entitled From Reagan to Obama: A Political History, but that, of course, would not carry the World Historical import that Age of Fracture carries with it, for good or ill. Professor Rodgers is an utterly conventional thinker, in some ways, not that you would be able to grasp that fact from the chapters that proceed the Epilogue, which are gems of historical prose and analysis. This book is a pleasure to read and worthy of your time and attention, the only real test, as far as I’m concerned. It is rather disappointingly obvious when the summing up of the Epilogue is finished, that the chapters that precede it are the worthy center of this history. Please read this book for the pleasure of its’ cast of familiar characters who come to vivid life illuminated by a more careful reading of history. I am a plodder, so it took me a week to read this book, but for that pesky Epilogue this is first rate.
Almost Marx
Age of Fracture: The Rediscovery of the Market
Posted on August 25, 2011 by stephenkmacksd
Here is Professor Rodgers stunning historical precis of the Mythology of the Market as idea, political,economic and legal practice, in our national life. The pernicious idea of the Market as metaphysical quantity,historical/political actor and household god is here treated to a breathtakingly rigorus thirty five page history. He manages to make this historical recreation completely, absorbingly readable, and to top it off,not withstanding it utter complexity, comprehensible.Bravo!
StephenKMackSD's Blog 