They are seventh graders who’ve taken over the middle school.
They are hooligans who, after looting the Glocks & Ammo outlet store, believe they now run the town.
Team Musk, that is.
There they are in broken glass and black-fabric faces. Stay calm. Hear and obey: “We are in charge, dudes.”
The Musk administration is here to serve us, and itself. Stunned Americans ask, “What app delivered this to our door?”
If you voted for this, time to make peace with your mistake. I’m addressing those of you who thought you lived in a democracy: three branches of government; checks and balances; accountability; transparency; laws written by your representatives; spending dictated by the legislature.
Sorry, but you chose wrong: a dynamite-toting commando squad to blow up this agency and that department, to comb through the Treasury’s innards, to summarily liquidate civil servants.
Do you remember marking the ballot option for this?
Oh, yes. It was just before the “Rename Gulf of Mexico” box on your ballot.
Which was just before the “Invade Greenland” ballot issue and the ballot question we all recall being hashed out in the presidential debates: “Reclaim Panama Canal.”
Our re-installed monarch says this is what the people demand by way of his “landslide” win and clear-as-day mandate.
Like other lies, the MAGA “mandate” is a myth, attributable not just to campaign boasts but to premature Election Night reporting.
The 2024 election, like most in modern times, was won at the margins – barely negligible numbers in key states that delivered the Electoral College result.
First of all, the national margin in the presidential race was less than 1.5 percent. I will bet a canned ham that by the end of this month, the Musk administration will have alienated enough voters to have flipped the whole deal.
I say this amid the election post-mortems and assumptions about Democrats’ sentence to wilderness wander. I prefer to offer a pre-mortem — about the defeat of a party that winks at the looters and anti-democracy goons.
First, it’s worth noting that turnout among voting-age Americans was down 4 percent from 2020. Ninety million Americans stayed home. Don’t blame the Electoral College. Blame apathy and ignorance.
With only slightly higher turnout, thin margins in three decisive states won by Team Elon could have flipped to Kamala Harris. She lost by 1.4 percent in Michigan, 1.7 percent in Pennsylvania and .9 percent in Wisconsin.
Looking forward, America’s only remaining major pro-democracy party can be optimistic that it will take back the House and thereby blunt a dictator’s designs.
Democrats gained two House seats in 2024, reducing the majority held by the Hand-It-All-Over-to-Elon Party to five seats, the slimmest in modern history.
It will be harder taking back the Senate next time with most of the challengeable seats being in states carried by President Blob.
However, by then Democrats will have truckloads of evidence of the destructive and dictatorial actions of this administration. Too few voters grasped the stakes when “saving democracy” was just an abstraction. Now it’s real.
The fate of democracy aside, consider: The Wall Street Journal reports that public confidence in the president is already cratering because of his erratic start and economic uncertainty with his tariff threats and various chaotic moves.
If you want actual evidence of what is already happening regarding support for the new team in the White House, ask Muslims in Michigan who lodged protest and pro-Republican votes over President Biden’s policy toward Israel.
After our newly installed president made sickening small talk about ethnic cleansing – removing all Palestinians from Gaza, one of those Republican-voting Muslims told Politico, “We screwed up.”
Wayne County (Mich.) County Commissioner Sam Badoun, a protest voter who played into the hands of the Nov. 5 victor, did not attempt to mask his contempt for what the president he helped elect had just said about Gaza.
Badoun told Politico: “The Palestinian people would rather die and live in a demolition site than be ethnically cleansed and sent out of Gaza to Egypt or Jordan.”
Already — votes siphoned off from this president.
Americans are going to have to adopt a fight-or-die mentality lest under the Musk administration the land they love becomes its own demolition site.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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