The GOP-caused fiscal disaster and government shutdown has been postponed until March, but in the meantime, House Republicans have laid out their vision for the future of America.

In a budget document they released last year, anticipating this very moment, the legislators proposed dramatic $9 trillion cuts to Social Security, food stamps, aid to women and children, Medicare and Medicaid, along a new round of tax cuts for America’s billionaires. Their argument is that we need to “balance the budget now!”

This is the classic Two Santas strategy that the GOP has been running ever since 1981. In addition to showing the hypocrisy and depravity of these politicians who are happy to live on the largesse of rightwing billionaires but see no benefit in feeding hungry children, it also shows that Jude Wanniski’s grand plan, adopted by Reagan in 1981, is alive and well.

It’s no accident or coincidence that the threat of a failure to pay the nation’s bills or fund an upcoming year constantly happens when Republicans control the House of Representatives.

You could even call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory — with a unique name — here. And it all started with a guy named Jude Wanniski, who literally transformed Republican Party politics with a plan that the American mainstream media, astonishingly, continues to ignore.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

To set up its foundation, Wanniski’s “Two Santas” strategy dictates, when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency and tripled down on it during the presidencies of Bush and Trump with massive tax cuts for billionaires and increases in spending across-the-board.

Those massive tax cuts and that uncontrolled spending during four Republican presidencies produced three results:

1. They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;
2. They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $36 trillion today, all of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal off-the-books wars);
3. And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “you must cut spending to solve the crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes, the “Two Santas” strategy goes. Tie up legislation, deny a quorum, filibuster, shut down the government, whatever.

Which is why, following Wanniski’s script, Republicans were squealing about the national debt and saying they will refuse to fund the government, possibly crashing the US economy on Biden’s watch.

And, once again, the media covered it as a “Debt Crisis!” rather than what it really is: a cynical political and media strategy devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the 1980s, and since then rolled out every time a Democrat is in the White House.

Politically, it’s a brilliant strategy that was hatched by a fellow most people have never heard of: Jude Wanniski.

Republican strategist Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in The Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP, particularly when Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because ever since the 1930s they’d publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic New Deal — as well as their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, schools, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” — and Democrats’ 91% top tax rates on the morbidly rich didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the morbidly rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too.

But because Republicans hated the idea of helping working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head. (Everybody then understood that demand — “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earn in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services.)

To lay the ground for Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and claimed the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things (“demand”) but, instead, because business made things (“supply”) available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he said, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 move by the Reagan Republicans to cut taxes while increasing spending seems irrational, cynical, and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, Arthur Laffer took that equation a step further with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time and our $36 trillion national debt have proven both to be colossal idiocies — but if Americans would buy into it all, they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy.

He told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (then a newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in The Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Ronald Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski’s supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing nothing to benefit average Americans.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party.

Democrats, Wanniski told the GOP, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors, oil companies, and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s theory went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions because that money would “trickle down” to workers from the billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new mansions.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people’s taxes!

For working people, the tax cuts would only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, part of which they knew would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Every time a Democrat was in the White House, they’d be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes; or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either one would lose them elections, and if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he was elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

Republicans embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in twelve years than every president in history up until that time — from George Washington to Jimmy Carter — combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton buckled under the threat of a government shutdown: he raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy with brutal threats to shut down the government, they finally took it over in the middle of Clinton’s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to Congress to the White House.

Newt had done his job in the House of Representatives. Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when they were in office; but they knew well how to scream hysterically about it and hook in the economically naïve media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work. Using the “fiscal responsibility” argument — essentially Two Santas in drag — Republicans have forced two Democratic presidents, and tried to try to force a third, to gut-shoot the Democratic Santa established by FDR.

Using this strategy, Republicans held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor’s representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 8 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Ronald Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.6 trillion in his 8 years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history until Trump.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218% increase in our debt; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five rightwingers on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he immediately reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding several trillion in borrowed money to pay for his two tax cuts for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $8 trillion.

There was not a whisper about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney — who knew Wanniski personally — famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86% to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t be put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

So much so that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him. And then we got the “sequester” out of it: a freeze on Democratic spending and political power along with automatic cuts to social programs if certain terms weren’t adhered to. It was a successful hostage-taking exercise that is still largely in place.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by over $8 trillion, and the GOP funded the government without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended the debt ceiling altogether for 2020 (so, if Biden won, he’d have to justify raising the debt ceiling for 2 years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And last Friday, Republicans again tried using the renewal of government funding for fiscal year 2025 to drop their Two Santas bomb right onto President Joe Biden’s head. After all, it worked against Clinton and Obama and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

And if the GOP’s failure to fund the government crashes the economy, all the better. Republicans can just blame Biden: it’ll give Trump a great bragging point and make it easier for him and Congress to pass a new tax cut for billionaires!

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated, and by whom. Sadly, although I and others (it’s even detailed on Wikipedia!) have been calling out Wanniski’s scheme for decades, none of the national media have ever seriously examined this 40+ year GOP strategy.

Hopefully when they write obituaries for Trump’s effort last week to raise the debt ceiling, and revisit this scam in March, Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam and let Americans know how they’ve been conned for over 40 years.

NOW READ: How to deal with your Trumper Uncle Bob

Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:

“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”

Donald Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:

“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump as also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“

But why? What the hell is going on here?

Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. They point out that if unemployment numbers included the underemployed and those stuck in “poverty-wage jobs,” it would be around 24%, not the 4.2% recently reported, leading to an acknowledgement of a widespread misery that’s largely hidden by the way we currently calculate unemployment.

Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.

Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.

The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.

And nobody’s sure why.

The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.

At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.

You could call it treason, except that it’s become so normalized and institutionalized that most Americans wouldn’t even understand the reason for the label.

Republican policy weirdness that brought us to this moment began around the national debt in 1981.

The U.S. was significantly in debt following our Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Following the philosophy that a large national debt should only exist during a time of national emergency, in each case, after the end of each war, we began a serious effort to pay down that debt.

Andrew Jackson finished paying off the entire debt from the Revolutionary War in the 1830s. We’d largely paid off the debt from the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, and, as the Treasury Department notes on its debt history site, our “government ended the century with its finances in very good order.”

We paid the national debt for WWI down to a mere $17 billion by the time the Republican Great Depression hit, but between the cost of the New Deal and World War II, we entered the post-WWII era in 1946 with a debt equal to 106% of GDP, a ratio we hit again in 2015.

Republicans and Democrats quickly united around the idea of paying off our national debt in the post-war years, driving it down to a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) between 1945 and 1981 when Reagan came into office.

And then, following Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santas” plan, the GOP embarked on an experiment that had never been intentionally tried in the U.S. or any other developed country in world history: drive up the national debt as high as possible with massive tax breaks for the very richest among us.

Reagan did this for two reasons:

— First, deficit spending with trillions in borrowed money (he ran the debt up to $2.4 trillion in a mere 8 years) stimulates the economy, so people thought Reagan had produced good times. (Give me a $2 trillion credit card, and I’ll show you what it looks like to live large, too!)

— Second, the rising debt gave Republicans the perfect excuse to follow Wanniski’s advice to force the Democrats to “shoot their Santa [of programs like Social Security and Medicaid] in the face.” Whenever a Republican is in the White House, Wanniski argued, Republicans should run up the debt as hard and fast as possible, so when a Democrat is in the White House they can squeal about “the debt our children will inherit! Oh, the humanity!”

The GOP has stuck to this strategy for 44 years now, running up $36 trillion in debt (and our entire Gross Domestic Product was a mere $27.7 trillion last year) and now, finally, we’ve reached the point where this unsustainable debt is not only costing us a trillion dollars a year in debt service (interest payments) but has led to a downgrade of our nation’s credit score.

At first, the main effect of the Two Santas strategy was merely to make the morbidly rich among us fabulously richer, while extracting much of that wealth from the homes, retirement plans, and savings of the middle class. It was, quite simply, a planned and successful transfer of roughly $50 trillion into the money bins of the rich, almost all of it coming out of the hides and lives of the rest of us.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class with a single paycheck being able to buy a home, a car, raise a family, put the kids through school, and provide for a decent retirement.

Today, that same standard of living requires a bit more than two full-time jobs, and only about 47% of us are in the middle class (with two wage earners instead of just one in 1981).

“‘The middle class has been declining — we just haven't recognized it fully,’ LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig told CBS MoneyWatch. ‘It’s really dangerous because it’s the kind of thing that leads to social unrest, and it’s not fair. The American dream is not that it’s given to you — it’s that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead and achieve the things in life that you want to achieve. It’s not living in a tent, not having to steal.”

But now Trump, Musk, Vance, and congressional Republicans — having first crushed the American middle class — are doing everything they can to destroy America’s preeminent position in the world along with our social safety net.

— Instead of investing in education and science, they’re making it harder for students to get an education.
— Instead of promoting democracy around the world, they’re embracing murderous dictators while broadcasting rightwing neofascist propaganda on Voice of America.
— Instead of lifting up Americans by helping our veterans and providing food, healthcare, and shelter to the poor and disabled, they’re gutting the VA and the social safety net.

As a result, today nearly half of American children (45% or 34 million kids) rely on food and medical programs that are now targeted by “Christian” Mike Johnson’s House Republicans in their Big Brutal Bill providing trillions in tax breaks to billionaires. The proposed cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, for example, would be the largest in the history of the U.S.

Reagan’s Two Santas strategy has done serious harm to America, collapsing the economic futures of two entire generations.

And now they’re going after our government itself.

But, why? Nobody’s sure.

— Did Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or both tell Trump and/or Elon Musk to destroy America?
— Are our country’s billionaires so psychopathically greedy that they’re willing to sell us all out for another few billion dollars in tax breaks?
— Do Trump’s allies believe that if they can impoverish Americans we’ll be more willing to go along with their authoritarian agenda the way Germans did after being immiserated by the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s?
— Are they following the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophers of Silicon Valley who argue that democracy is outdated and “we need to get over our dictator phobia” and let the tech giants run the country?

Nobody knows for sure. Nobody can really explain it.

Republicans are aren’t even pretending anymore; they’re not even bothering to proclaim BS like “trickle down” or the “need to support the job creators.“

Most distressing, there’s virtually no discussion of any of this in the mainstream press.

— The Two Santas strategy is easily documented, but never mentioned.
— The explosion of our national debt is all over economists’ websites, but when the American media mentions it, it’s always in the context of Democrats needing to “reduce spending” rather than the fact that virtually 100% of our debt today was put there exclusively by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal wars.
— Nobody, it seems, is speculating about why Trump and Musk would want to kill off USAID or kneecap the FAA and the National Weather Service. Qui bono (who benefits?) other than Putin and Xi? The savings are a drop in the billionaire’s bucket; there must be a larger agenda than just funding tax cuts for billionaires.
— And, they’re now holding their votes in the middle of the night; I think we all know what they are hiding and the credulous press is letting pass.

I don’t know why Republicans have been so enthusiastic about first destroying the American middle class and now our government itself, but the consequences have driven the explosion of rightwing anger, racism, and misogyny that’s been sweeping the nation since Trump’s appearance on the scene in 2015.

And now they’re threatening our position in the world, as well as possibly leading us all into a third world war.

Why do you think this is happening?

NOW READ: 'Trump's tactics are in fact communist': Former Tea Party congressman busts MAGA for what it is

Donald Trump has built a cult around himself. This is dangerous to America and dangerous to democracy.

Cults of personality in governance are broadly incompatible with democracy. They usually erupt in dictatorships where the Great Leader’s face and sayings are splashed all over public places. Think Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, Kim’s North Korea.

On a smaller scale and in a different context, we see how destructive such personality cults can be with the deaths around Jim Jones’ Jonestown, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Charles Manson’s Family.

READ: Republicans don't even try to hide it anymore

This is what Donald Trump aspires to.

Back in 2000, Louise and I visited Egypt. Our guide was a retired professor of Egyptology from the largest university in the country, and as we were touring Luxor he pointed out some writing carved fifteen or so feet up a stone wall at the Temple of Karnack.

“This is from when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt,” he told us, as I recall. “It says that Alexander was the child of Amen, the god of all the gods, the one who was so great that even to this day we say his name at the end of prayers.”
“Why would Alexander make that claim?” I asked.
“Because” he said, “it’s a lot easier to seize and hold power when people think you have a connection to their idea of divinity.”

While modern Hebrew scholars may disagree about why “amen” ends our prayers, it was a lesson for me that I’ve kept in mind ever since. Beware of leaders asserting connections to divinity, particularly if they’re grasping for political or financial power.

Trump is now openly encouraging his followers to think of him as divine or, at least, divinely inspired. And this isn’t a new pitch, it’s just getting a new round of attention.

Back in 2019, when Trump actually was president, Dana Milbank noted for The Washington Post:

“On Wednesday morning, he tweeted out with approval a conspiracy theorist’s claim that Israelis view Trump ‘like he’s the King of Israel’ and ‘the second coming of God’ (a theology Jews reject). He shared the conspiracy theorist’s puzzlement that American Jews don’t view him likewise.
“Hours later, he explained why he has taken a tough trade policy against China: ‘I am the chosen one.’”

Followers of the Qanon cult and the Fox “News” cult appear to believe him. And, like those who followed the people mentioned above, it’s tearing apart families, devastating our politics, and causing deaths across the nation.

As a Cleveland newspaper noted last year:

“A man who authorities say killed his wife and dog and seriously wounded his daughter before being shot by police reportedly was depressed by Donald Trump’s loss in the presidential election and became fixated by online conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”

The man’s daughter who avoided being shot, Rebecca Lanis, told The Detroit News:

“It’s really so shocking but it really can happen to anybody. Right-wing extremism is not funny, and people need to watch their relatives and if they have guns, they need to hide them or report them or something because this is out of control.”

And she’s right: it is out of control.

Rational people know that messiahs don’t molest women and brag about it, don’t fleece people with a phony school who just want a college education, don’t encourage racial hatred, and don’t get crowds to try to overturn democracy and kill a policeman.

But Trump isn’t after the rational people. He’s a predator, and his prey are the psychologically and emotionally vulnerable, people crushed by 40 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism, now desperate for simple answers to complex problems.

We should have known when Trump said, in a Charles Manson moment, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him.

Charismatic con men can make some people believe anything.

For example, nearly a third of all registered Republicans believe that top-level Democrats are running international child trafficking rings to torture and abuse kids before draining their blood.

Where did this modern-day variation on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion come from?

When I was young my favorite writers were Ernest Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and my favorite Thompson novel was his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Which is why a caller last year who started on a rant about Democrats harvesting “adrenochrome” from children caused me to both cut him off the air and go back to my copy of the novel to see if my memory was right.

Sure enough, there it was. Thompson was bemoaning running out of hashish and being almost out of opium when his “fat Samoan” sidekick offered an alternative:

“As your attorney,” he said, “I advise you not worry.” He nodded toward the bathroom. “Take a hit out of that little brown bottle in my shaving kit.”
“What is it?”
“Adrenochrome,” he said. “You won’t need much. Just a little tiny taste.”
I got the bottle and dipped the head of a paper match into it.
“That’s about right,” he said. “That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.”
I licked the end of the match. “Where’d you get this?” I asked. “You can’t buy it.”
“Never mind,” he said. “It’s absolutely pure.”
I shook my head sadly. “Jesus! What kind of monster client have you picked up this time? There’s only one source for this stuff…”
He nodded.
“The adrenaline glands from a living human body,” I said. “It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”

When Thompson pushes his “attorney” about where the adrenochrome came from, the fictional character tells the fictional tale of having once been hired to represent a child molester/murderer who’d presumably extracted it from one of his victims:

“Christ, what could I say?” Thompson’s sidekick told him. “Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel. I didn’t dare turn the creep down. He might have picked up a letter opener and gone after my pineal gland.”

That little seed, entirely fictional, planted in the national subconscious back in the early ‘70s, has now blossomed into a full-blown flower of a belief held by literally millions of Americans.

As Rightwing Watch documents, uber-Trump cultist and “journalist” Liz Crokin explains in one of her many videos:

“Adrenochrome is a drug that the elites love. It comes from children. The drug is extracted from the pituitary gland of tortured children. It’s sold on the black market. It’s the drug of the elites. It is their favorite drug. It is beyond evil. It is demonic. It is so sick.”

People who have been ensnared by the QAnon cult and are gullible enough to believe this kind of thing are the explicit targets now in Trump’s crosshairs.

Similarly, when then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney used the word “pizza” in a televised cabinet meeting, Crokin laid out how she and all the other Trump cultists were being flagged as to the “reality” of a pizza restaurant in a DC suburb being the place where the children were being held prior to being tortured and having their adrenochrome “harvested”:

“President Trump and his staffers are constantly trolling the deep state,” she said of Mulvaney’s reference as Trump nodded in agreement. “That’s President Trump’s way of letting you know that Pizzagate is real and it’s not fake. He’s constantly using their words against them and throwing it in their face and God bless him, it’s amazing.”

And now the cult that Trump has both adopted and built around himself is claiming its victims, as personality cults usually do.

Matthew Taylor Coleman, a 40-year-old Christian surfing school owner, drove his two children, a 3-year-old boy and a nine-month-old girl, to Mexico where he slaughtered them with a spear-fishing gun.

His children “were going to grow into monsters so he had to kill them,” said federal officials handling the investigation. Coleman told police that killing his kids was “the only course of action that would save the world” because they had “lizard DNA” and would grow up to threaten us all.

Federal officials believe he learned this from Qanon/Trump followers, as did Anthony Quinn Warner who died when he blew up his truck outside an AT&T building in Nashville on Christmas Day 2020 causing a widespread internet outage in an apparent attempt to cripple the “lizard people” network opposing Trump, which included Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obamas.

The University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism notes that 68 percent of the open Qanon followers arrested at the US Capitol on January 6th who had also committed crimes before or after that coup attempt “have documented mental health concerns, according to court records and other public sources.”

Their psychological issues included “post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”

The “Qanon Shaman” of so many iconic 1/6 pictures has now pleaded mental illness as his reason for showing up at the Capitol, as have two others who “were found to be mentally unfit to stand trial and were transferred to mental health care facilities.”

Of the six women arrested on 1/6 who’d also committed crimes before or after the coup attempt, the researchers note, “all six…have documented mental health concerns.”

This should be no surprise: Donald Trump also has well-documented mental illness, as do most messianic cult leaders. But his mental illness is what makes him dangerous to society, just like Jones, Koresh, and Manson.

Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee MD edited a compilation of articles by accredited mental health professionals discussing Trump’s issues and their possible impact on America, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Psychiatrist Justin Frank MD wrote Trump on the Couch, a similarly chilling account of Trump’s issues and their consequences.

Even Trump’s niece, clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump PhD, has repeatedly and convincingly documented Trump’s mental illness and its causes deep in his twisted and unhappy childhood with a psychopathic father.

And, it turns out, certain types of mental illness are functionally contagious.

People with Trump’s malignant narcissism can, essentially, activate or bring out narcissistic tendencies in others, which may explain in part the explosion of air rage among Trump followers who were, until recently, infuriated by being told to wear a mask in-flight.

Followers yearning for a parent figure turn to a damaged leader, hungry for adulation and to create a symbiotic relationship that binds them together, notes Dr. Lee in an interview with Psychology Today.

When it reaches a lot of people, we see a repeat of the Salem Witch Trial-type of mass insanity that ripples through society. This is called shared psychosis.

“When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position,” Dr. Lee notes, “the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence – even in previously healthy individuals.”

We have multiple Republican governors now using the power of law, enforced by armed police, courts, and prisons to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, an emulation of Trump’s misogyny.

In an attempt to out-Donald his role model, Ron DeSantis is using Florida taxpayers' money to fly Texas-based asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere: it got him a standing ovation in Kansas this past weekend.

Half of the Republicans in Congress refuse to say if they’re vaccinated (although all probably are; outside of Gohmert, Greene, and Boebert these people are grifters, not idiots), thus modeling behavior that is destroying families and even today killing around 400 people a day in America.

Liz Cheney put down how Republicans in Congress refer to him as “Orange Jesus.”

Meanwhile, a clearly delusional pillow salesman promotes a democracy-destroying conspiracy theory that the Senate of the State of Arizona has endorsed and thrown a pile of cash at, while Republican state officials in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania tried to emulate Arizona’s “audit.”

If it all seems insane, that’s because it is.

There’s a very sad and very human aspect to all this.

We’re all primed to be a bit gullible when it comes to fantastical ideas. Childhood myths like Santa Claus and most organized religions teach us that things beyond our understanding were both real in the past and will cause events in the future.

We all grew up tiny and helpless, depending on giant magical-seeming adults to take care of our needs, and that little, frightened child who just wants to be protected and loved is still alive and buried deep in the psyche of each of us.

The 918 people who died at Jim Jones’ jungle camp in Guyana didn’t join the People’s Temple because they were suicidal: Jones’ own psychosis either infected them or wore them down to a passive compliance.

We’re all vulnerable to mass psychosis as a condition of our humanity.

That’s why true leaders like Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders openly refuse to allow cults of personality to form around them.

Back when Bush was president, Bernie ridiculed the idea of voting for him “because you’d like to have a beer with him” on my program. Vote for a politician’s policies, not his personality, Bernie said emphatically.

Even John McCain had the decency to correct a woman saying that Obama was a “secret Muslim.” While he appreciated political support, he was wary of cults around him or cults that were demonizing other politicians. He’d been in politics long enough to know it’s a two-edged sword.

So what do we do as a society when we’re confronted with a psychotic former leader who’s continuing to inflict and spread contagious forms of mental illness among our nation? How do we handle it, and repair the damage?

Dr. Bandy X. Lee says, “The treatment is removal of exposure.”

Point out as often and as clearly as possible what a criminal, hustler, con artist and genuinely damaged person Trump is, and put him safely in prison.

Break the bond with his followers by crushing his aura of invincibility: indict and convict him of very ordinary crimes like public corruption, tax fraud, bank fraud, treason, theft, and rape.

Make clear how corrupt and destructive his policies were when he was in office, his criminality and treason around classified documents he stole and perhaps shared with or sold to hostile nations, and the long con he’s run the past 20 months fleecing donors out of a half-billion dollars just since he was forced out of the White House.

If we fail to deal with Trump in this way and keep him in jail and out of the headlines for a good long time, it’ll be extremely difficult to rescue his followers who’ve fallen deeply into the Qanon/Trump rabbit hole. And in their induced psychotic state, the damage they could wreak in a country awash in 400 million guns is breathtaking.

Like so many infamous leaders in history, if Trump isn’t both stopped and imprisoned for at least another presidential election cycle (until 2028) he’ll simply attempt a comeback and further tear apart the psychological and political fabric of our nation. Hitler came out of prison stronger than when he went in: Trump would, too.

As Liz Cheney pointed out last year:

“Excuse by excuse, we’re putting Donald Trump above the law. We are rendering indefensible conduct normal, legal, and appropriate — as though he were a king.”

If we are to save America, we must convict and meaningfully imprison Trump for his lifetime of very real crimes. And we must do it now.

NOW READ: Biden connects the dots: Trump’s 'Big Lie' is the new 'Lost Cause'