To Save America, Elect Donald Trump
To end the madness, let him fail
Let me be clear, Trump is incompetent at best, and a dangerous moron at worst. And the MAGA movement is bizarre and laughable, and if implemented will be destructive of the nation’s economy, the Constitution, and the fabric of our society. But it is a disease, and the disease won’t go away until, like a fever, it burns itself out.
Trump is an old man and will shuffle off this mortal coil soon enough. But the MAGA movement, and all it entails, may live on beyond him. It will only disappear if it is thoroughly discredited, and it will not be discredited until it is put to the test and fails spectacularly. It is doomed to fail because it is largely based on nonsense. The main “policy” of the MAGA movement is that liberals have destroyed America, and the only way to save the nation is to roll back virtually everything that liberals have done over the last fifty years. Even assuming that liberals have done some bad things, they are hardly responsible for every evil, so removing every vestige of liberalism won’t solve every problem. And in fact, simply eliminating various liberal policies is hardly a “policy” for addressing complex issues. It is bizarrely simplistic, and therefore highly unlikely to solve any real problems.
If Kamala Harris wins the election there is no doubt that Trump and his minions will sow chaos up to, and possibly beyond, the inauguration. But he and the MAGA movement will not have their ideas put to the test, and will be able to criticize what Harris does and highlight every error and misstep regardless of how trivial. Then even without Trump the movement will endure.
But if Trump is elected, and if he institutes a quarter of the weird and dangerous things he has proposed, like mass deportations, onerous tariffs, mass firing of government employees, and persecution of his political opponents, it will be disastrous. Deportation of a large proportion of the nation’s farm and construction workers will be a shock to the nation’s economy. And tariffs will drive up prices. Who will Trump and MAGA blame then?
Let’s game this out with an imagined scenario of the beginning of Trump’s Administration. Let’s say that in his first week in office he pushes for loyalty tests and oaths across the civil service, and promises to fire anyone who is not loyal. There will be lots of lawsuits and angry op/eds, and liberal politicians will scream on television and Twitter. But there won’t be much complaining from ordinary citizens. The media, as they have for the last ten years, will be fixated and distracted. Trump will take the opportunity to order the mass deportations he promised. The media will be outraged, and lawsuits will be filed, but this time there will be protests almost immediately. Trump will order U.S. law enforcement agencies to begin rounding people up. A few localities will offer to help, and will begin arrests of suspected undocumented people. Some of this will be predictably ham-handed, and there will be ugly news stories and video of police dragging women to cars while children wail. This will spur additional protests. As more and more news stories and more and more videos show police forcibly separating parents from shrieking children, protests will grow. And, of course, they will grow in liberal cities — ‘case where do you gather to protest in small rural areas? A few protests will grow violent. Conservative media will show unending loops of the violence, and conservatives will believe (as they did with the BLM protests in 2020) that liberals are destroying the cities.
Trump will order the military to assist, as he attempted to do in 2020, but then military and senior civilian officials said that this violates both the Posse Comitatus Act and two hundred years of norms, and were able to stop him. But this time Trump will have more loyalists in both the military and senior civilian ranks. He will claim that anyone opposing this is disloyal, unpatriotic, and complicit in the destruction of the nation. Conservative counter protesters may emerge. Trump may fire one or more senior military leaders, calling them disloyal. Protests grow and more turn ugly. Trump calls on the military to suppress the protests. Many soldiers will state, correctly, that this is not their job. A significant number of senior officers, including at least one senior leader of one of the Services, may refuse. A few members of the Joint Chiefs may resign in protest. Trump questions their patriotism and fires a few more.
There may be news stories across the country about the impact of this fear on immigrants, causing liberals to weep and conservatives to cheer. Then there will be stories about the impact on the construction industry. Major construction projects are halted, and reporters, politicians, and economists, talk about the impact this will have on the economy. This occurs in early spring, during planting season, and farmers across the south complain that they don’t have enough workers to plant their crops. A few southern governors complain. The impact on construction grows. At this point even a few Republican Governors, even Gregg Abbott of Texas, suggest that this might not be an effective policy. This push-back from his supposed supporters only makes Trump angrier. (This is pure speculation, but let’s suggest that a few of his speeches turn into angry and ugly rants. Is that even possible?)
As this chaos unfolds, one of Trump’s senior advisers (could it be Steven Miller or Micheal Flynn?) suggest that this would be a good time to impose the promised tariffs. The media and the nation are distracted, so there will be little immediate push back, and the little that there is will simply get drowned out by the outrage over the deportations. And so Trump, by executive action, imposes a 25% across the board tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.
There are many — many — Republicans and conservatives who hate the tariff idea, and a few will finally come off the sidelines and object. They will explain the negative impact of tariffs, they will explain that these are not paid by the country of origin, as Trump suggests, but by the companies that sell the products in the United States, and that these companies will have no choice but to raise prices, which will be paid by the American consumers. The impact will, as always and as predicted, be inflationary. Prices for many products will rise. This will also spark a trade war, and many foreign nations will impose retaliatory tariffs on American exports. One of this nation’s main exports is grain — particularly corn and soy bean — and these tariffs will be felt most acutely in the agricultural Midwest, causing suffering amongst Trump’s strongest base of supporters.
Many economists are currently warning that these proposals — mass deportations and tariffs — will harm the economy. There is a better than even chance that these economists will be right, and so prices will rising, causing inflation, and the economy will fall into a recession.
In a year or so the public will be shocked and outraged by what Trump has done. And at this point there will be no way for most Conservatives to deny their support and complicity in Trump’s actions.
Remember, if Trump wins, it won’t be because a majority of the public is MAGA. MAGA represents, probably, a bare majority of the Republican Party, if that. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it represents 60% of the Republican Party. Statistically, about 40% of the public self-identifies as conservative or Republican and a similar 40% as liberal or Democrat. So, if 60% of the 40% are MAGA, that’s 24% of the public. (That honestly seems high, which is partly why I say that it is not even half of the Republican Party.)
If Trump wins it will be because of these Republican votes, but it will also be because plenty of people believe that there is something in Republican plans that are good for the economy. If the economy stumbles because of Trump’s deportation or tariff plans, that will strip away those people.
MAGA is a disease, producing a fever in the body politic. If Trump doesn’t win, the disease will continue to metastasize below the skin. It will cause plenty of problems but will remain largely hidden. If Trump does wins, it will be exposed. It will operate in the open, its impact on view for all to see. Chaos is inevitable, it’s part of Trump’s brand and integral to the MAGA movement. And the consequences, predicted by economists across the political spectrum, will also be inevitable. It also seems likely to produce dissent amongst Republicans and a spiral of internecine political conflict. This will only grow worse and the economy flounders. And Trump and the MAGA movement will bear the blame. As the 2026 midterms approach, and it appears that it will be a blow-out blue wave, it will be obvious to most Republicans that they only have Trump and the MAGA movement to blame. And they will finally save America and purge the MAGA movement from their ranks, like William Buckley did with the John Birch Society back in the early Sixties.
The only way to make this happen, the only way to end the MAGA madness, the only way to save America, is to elect Donald Trump.
