Living On A Thin Line
By 
Dave Davies, 1971
I was reviewing the current draft of The Triumph of Stupidity, which has grown to nearly 85,000 words, making it 30% longer than the first draft, written in the spring of 2025. It has now more or less organically morphed into among other things a chronicle of the first half of Trump’s second presidency, and in that regard I’m struck by the extent to which, at this moment a little more than ninety days before the midterms, America seems balanced on a knife’s edge.
My impression is that Trump II has done enormous damage to the government and many other key institutions, that the fabled “guardrails” have largely though not completely buckled, that the Republican party has almost but not quite completely collapsed into a Trumpian cult of personality, and that the Democrats are slowly but perhaps (?) surely beginning to become radicalized toward the beginnings of something like the sort of all-out resistance that the historical moment calls for.
On the plus side, the legal system has not collapsed, as evidenced by things such as the DOJ’s amazing admissions in court documents yesterday that the arrests around the purported vandalizing of the Reflecting Pool were carried out directly in the face of all the evidence, which proves that this vandalizing was nothing more than a figment of Donald Trump’s deranged and increasingly demented imagination. Other encouraging signs include resistance from some, although far too few, elite educational institutions — Harvard, most notably — and the willingness of quite a few mainstream media outlets to continue to report on things like Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in a straightforward manner, by for example simply calling those lies false, although they remain far too fastidious about using the word “lie.” (I learned many years ago in my freelancing adventures that there’s something of a fetish among editors about this, since using the word “lie” ascribes a particular mental state to the liar, as opposed to “false,” which merely makes a statement about external facts rather than subjective mental states. This distinction does seem to be slowly breaking down in the face of Trump’s continual lying and bullshitting though.). And the courageous actions of lots of ordinary people in places like Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles are also evidence that something like real resistance is building up against the attempted fascist destruction of liberal democracy, which all but the most deluded reactionary centrists and fake leftist fascist fellow travelers now recognize as something that’s actually happening.
On the down side, that does continue to actually happen. There simply is no way at the moment to know exactly what Trump and his minions will do when they lose the House and quite possibly lose the Senate three months from now, despite all their to this point not very successful voter suppression efforts (Trump’s inability to pass the SAVE Act speaks to both his sheer incompetence in terms of actually governing, and the fact that some shards of resistance to some aspects of his authoritarianism still exist among a crucial handful of Republican senators, including a couple of lame ducks who Trump, with his characteristically mind-bending stupidity, has been surprised to discover are now at least a little hostile toward him after he wrecked their re-election chances.)
Nor is there any way to know how Trump is going to handle the fact that he’s not legally allowed to remain in office after January of 2029. There remains every possibility that he’ll simply run for re-election, and dare the system to stop him (the Republican party certainly won’t).
Similarly, there’s no way to know how much more chaos and escalation we’re going to see in Iran, where Trump continues to oscillate between his desperation to reach a deal, and his increasingly violent frustration about his inability to do so. The Iranian adventure is another classic example of the classically stupid failure to have a Plan B, when Plan A (bomb; Iranian regime collapses) all too predictably fails.
At this point I’m tempted to grow a mustache and declare the next six months to be crucial, but the real point here is that America is a land of contrasts, and the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle.