The resistance seems to be divided into two camps: Those who think MAGA has nefarious plans for everything and those who think that they’re fuck ups who are winging it. I’m a member of the second camp.
Repeat after me: It’s the incompetence, stupid.
After the Iran War and Epstein Files fiascoes I’m gobsmacked that anyone still thinks MAGA madness is the result of careful planning or consultation with the so-called authoritarian playbook. They’re fuck ups who are winging it.
The fuck ups take their cues from the fuck-up-in-chief Donald Trump. The pattern is clear. The Kaiser of Chaos says or posts something inflammatory on a given subject and his flying monkeys pile on. That’s not planning, it’s improvisation. They’re a confederacy of dunces, not conspirators in some grand plan. There is no plan. Does anyone really think the Insult Comedian even knows what was in Project 2025?
MAGA is a fundamentally anarchic movement. They’re destroyers, not builders. It’s the incompetence, stupid.
Trump’s comments on the California vote count are classic. Any election that his candidate loses is automatically rigged. He keeps going to this shallow well with diminishing results. Yet the legacy media and others insist that this boilerplate bullshit is evidence of some sort of strategy. MAGA doesn’t do strategy. Hell, they barely do tactics. The movement is a reactive one, seizing on the outrage of the day before moving on to the next target. Fear mongering is the point.
The aim of this distinctive MAGA pattern is to scare its opponents witless and, well, shitless. In fact, they’re as scary as one of the worst monsters in film history: The ruglike creature in The Creeping Terror.
Does that scare you? It shouldn’t for, like MAGA, it’s bluster and bullshit writ large. They’re trying to scare the country into submission. It worked on some people but the creeping terror is fading as the incompetence and incoherence of MAGA becomes clearer.
Repeat after me: It’s the incompetence, stupid.
The Justice Department is an excellent example of MAGA incompetence. Cases are being dismissed left and right as they send lawyers to court armed not with evidence but with lies. DOJ lawyers are now viewed with a jaundiced eye by the federal judiciary. They’re the legal equivalent of the boy who cried wolf; with each statement their credibility shrinks faster than Grant Williams in The Incredible Shrinking Man. It’s gotten to the point where the judges are like the cat in this GIF.
MAGA reminds me of the worst Fifties horror movies: it’s short, brutish, and incompetent. We have to sit through it until 2029, then its current incarnation goes away for as the Insult Comedian has said:
MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”
I guess they love the appointment of incompetents like Bill Pulte and Todd Blanche who seem to specialize in failing upward like their dear leader.
One thing about references to the authoritarian playbook irks me: The idea that appointing incompetent functionaries is a feature of ALL authoritarian regimes. It’s a central feature of MAGA but the Nazis were about Teutonic efficiency so competent nationalists like the economist Hjalmar Schact and the diplomat Konstantin von Neurath remained in Hitler’s cabinet until he was ready to dispose of them. A grimmer example is Henrich Himmler of Final Solution infamy. There is NO one size fits all authoritarian playbook. MAGA can barely read the funny pages let alone a playbook.
Thoughts of the 1950’s permeate this post. The featured image is of an obscure board game from that epoch. It’s not, however, how MAGA maggots see themselves. This is more like it:
If MAGA was capable of having a central tenet, misogyny would be it. Instead, its central tenet is incompetence. MAGA is a fucked up movement led by dipshits and dunces.
Repeat after me: It’s the incompetence, stupid.
The last word goes to The Kinks:
