You are never gonna put a stake in the heart of Trumpism in this country. That bullshit is here to stay until its followers die of some illness they could have gotten vaccinated for, or from shooting themselves with one of their dozens of guns, or of old age, alone with a red hat faded by the sun and a threadbare “Let’s Go Brandon” flag they bought at a rally years ago, like an old Nazi treasuring that handkerchief the Fuhrer gave him after wiping the sweat off his brow. Truly, a Pandora’s box was opened once Donald Trump began running for president on an explicitly racist platform in 2015, except in this version, all the curses that were unleashed had beaten Hope to death in there long ago.
Trump’s rhetoric in the last few months has taken the racism and general hatred of anyone who doesn’t unabashedly love him and his awful family and amped it into explicit calls to round up and deport or imprison or flat-out murder large swaths of the population. It’s not just that he now regularly says some variation of his “vermin” line: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” That shit is frightening enough.
