A gas station assault shows the rage of Trump's crumbling cult
It was four long years ago this month, but I’ll never forget it …
For the first time since the murderous Covid had strangled the world into submission, my wife and I escaped the safety of our house, loaded up our old Honda Accord, and started chugging East from Wisconsin toward the beautiful beaches of North Carolina where we hoped to toss off our masks and breathe some ocean air.
Somewhere, dead in the middle of Indiana, our dependable, four-wheel darlin’ started asking for gas, so we pulled off the Interstate to take care of the thirsty girl. My wife headed toward the restroom, while I jammed the nozzle into the tank, and started cleaning the road-worn windshield.
Just then, a dusky, dented pickup truck roared into the slot behind me. Turns out the driver wasn’t as much interested in filling his beast with gas as he was fixated on me. I bet you know what came out of that truck without me describing him to you.
Pointing his chubby index finger at the blue Biden/Harris sticker on my bumper, the pickup’s dirty owner started screaming at me about the price of gas which was $4.75 for a gallon of regular, and how Biden was wrecking this country. That’s about all I can retain from the verbal assault, because I had entered the fight-or-flight stage of this insane encounter.
When America’s finest finally allowed himself a breath, I looked hard at him and said this: “I’m not sure why you think you can talk to me this way. Now BACK DOWN.”
I won’t lie, by this point my heart was beating into my ears. While I was packing nothing but suitcases in the back of my car, Indiana Groans sported a gun rack in his, because you never know when you’ll be forced to defend your freedom to accost Biden supporters at random gas stations across America.
He turned around and headed back to his truck and his guns, and I slammed the gas hose back in the pump, deposited my butt back in the driver’s seat, and wheeled out of there to collect my wife, who was walking towards us.
When she asked her flustered husband just what in the hell all that was about, I can remember saying something about it being just another day in ‘Murica, while I smashed the gas pedal, and pointed the Honda toward the open road.
I’ve been giving that close encounter of the weird kind some considerable thought lately as gas prices again reach for the sky, and guys like Indiana Moans are paying three figures to fill their gas hogs. I wonder what must be going through his deranged mind, as his orange idol singlehandedly plunges the country he hates into the toilet.
All of which leads me toward this future answer and question on Jeopardy:
ANSWER: You raise their gas prices.
WHAT IS: How do you kill a cult?
Because it turns out, you can do pretty much anything to a MAGA like Indiana Drones just as long as the people he hates are taking it on the chin as badly as he is.
You can poison their air and water, strip away their healthcare, take away their human rights, pocket their money to build ballrooms and demolish their White House, murder and cage innocent people, violently attack our Capitol, incinerate childcare subsidies, starve children, ban books, and bomb the bejesus out of hundreds of thousands of innocent souls, but if you dare raise their gas prices? Well, buddy, we might just have a problem here.
I hate living in a country like this, I really do, but if high gas prices are the thing that finally spur this hateful, deranged MAGA cult to begin the long, slow process of detox, and dissolve into places like the Indiana woods, well then, those prices can’t go high enough for me.
And look, we all know by now that there are still tens of millions of these losers who will follow the odious Donald Trump no matter how far down the sewer pipe he drags them. He’s a bigot who will always hate who they do, even if they are too far buried in that cult to understand that he couldn’t care less about them, either.
Man, I am sick and tired of these people, I really am.
The good news here is that the spell is breaking among enough of ‘em in the nick of time, so that when Nov. 3 rolls around, and the votes are being counted, you will see things you might have never thought possible in this gerrymandered, backward country.
Democrats are about to win elections in places like rural Indiana and Iowa, and in the suburbs of Miami, and Kansas City ... in the far reaches of Alaska, and the coast of Maine … In bright red Missouri, and baby blue California.
And before I climb atop my soapbox to preach about the wonderful things ahead, I am going to put this one out there one more time for the folks who might be new here: Yes, I understand America’s true patriots can’t get overconfident, and bask on iffy polls and predictions. With less than six weeks to go until the midterms, we have to run through the tape, finish strong, vote like our lives depend on it, and every other cliché this old sports writer can rattle off, but that won’t stop me from telling you what I firmly believe is going to happen on that glorious November day.
Democrats are going to flip the Senate and the House and win thousands of races up and down ballots all across America, as the balance of power tilts toward good, and decidedly against evil.
Since 2024, Democrats have been winning races at a remarkable clip, and they aren’t all of a sudden going to stop now. All those polls we love to hate are saying as much, but more than that, you can just feel it in the air.
Is OK to admit that, and breathe in hope for a change, my friends.
A good old-fashioned you-know-what kicking is coming, because enough people have had more than enough, including a small percentage of that cult, who know the cost of things like the eggs they couldn’t stop whining about under Biden are breaking their budget.
And while they might not pull the lever for a Democrat, they will be in no hurry to vote for a Republican, either, and that’s the kind of thing that produces wave elections.
Even though I count perusing polls as one of my nasty habits, I won’t spend much time with them here, with just two exceptions from a stunning CNN Poll that was released Wednesday:
- Since 2024, Trump’s net approval among Independents has dropped 71%. I had to wipe away the wide from my eyes after I came across that one.
- And those gas prices Indiana Clone was screaming about? Well, 64% of Trump voters believe those prices are presenting a severe-to-moderate hardship on their budgets.
I’m telling you, it is going to be a complete Democratic blowout in just 39 days.
Still don’t believe me?
OK, then I’ll let a guy named Steve Deace have the last word. Deace is a conservative talk show host based in Iowa. It’s the kind of show Indiana Groans listens to.
Deace blasted this one out to the heartland on social media this week:
“If the environment is this bad in my home state, where Trump has been the most popular political figure over the last decade, I can’t imagine where it is everywhere else.”
Well, I can.
Buckle up, Steve. This election is gonna be a gas …
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist who ran newsrooms, and worked in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.
