New Yorkers should take particular pleasure in watching MAGAs discover how badly they’ve been suckered.

New Yorkers told less dynamic Americans who and what Donald Trump is and was. Instead of listening and learning from people who knew him because for better or worse, okay, worse, the scab is one of us.

He’s a Queens mook. Has been all his wastrel life. His vaulting from an outer borough enclave into a pinnacle of Money Makin’ Manhattan should’ve been a success story. Well, back in civilization the pattern ought to have garlanded him as a success. Nonetheless his meager legitimate achievements aside, he’s been incapable of rising above being a phony, penny ante blowhard.

Despite branding anything with his name while indiscriminately slathering so much goldplate it’s become his creepy calling card, the grifter in chief cannot be considered a success. He is not to be idolized. And never-ever emulated.

No ambitious New Yorker will ever come along proclaiming he or she wishes to model him- or herself after the grifter in chief. But he does serve as a cautionary.

Watching the scab as he publicly panics and crumbles, I am reminded that early American writers such as Washington Irving established the basis of our nation’s literature through figures such as Trump. On the surface, these tall tales contained puffed up men, so full of themselves they cannot recognize those failings in themselves which are apparent to others.

As always, their punishments are entertaining, amusing, and justified. Even compassionate readers find satisfaction in seeing their falls.
While established literature pushed moral denouements, early American writing delivered comeuppances as endings. These suited a country that in its nascence had a strong strain of egalitarianism. Well, at least such was widely professed.

Seeing the disaster that is Donald Trump, watching him brought low and riding a figurative rail out of town would put smiles upon stoics’ faces.

Beneath this desire for just due, the new nation’s earliest writers also wanted to admonish as well as of frauds stalking the innocents of our then young nation. These were good lessons. Particularly for a nation as experimental as ours was. And remains.

Too many of those “good people” happily, willingly led astray by shrewd charlatans bartered their integrity and dignity for false promises; any riches eventually diverted into con artists’ pockets. In the Elections of 2016, 2020, 2024, MAGAs forfeited their own integrity and dignity by wasting ballots on Trump.

He’s been reaping fortunes off them ever since.

During those election years, particularly the third, Republicans fulsomely campaigned on family, faith, and work. Nothing wrong with that. Except the party and its candidates didn’t believe in any of them. But the three did demand individuals to obey. All three require individuals subsume themselves, their feelings, their urges.

If the father carries himself as a patriarch, then his word, his whim, is law. If the priest is doctrinaire, then his preachments provide no salve for human frailties. If the boss is a martinet, he or she will mulct the greatest amount of productivity at the expense of the employees’ humanity.

Somehow all that appealed to MAGAs, deplorables who need greater amounts of benevolence they prefer to deny than acknowledge.
Now what’s resulted from the Election 2024 outcome is abundantly clear, are those voters who so deliberately cast ballots against their own interests experiencing more than just twinges of “buyer’s remorse”? Are farmers and ranchers, long-haul truckers, factory workers having deservedly heavy moments of self-reproach?

If so, only grudgingly.

Donald Trump was their candidate. He could be none others. The scab filled his Bund rallies stump harangues with broadsides against “those people.” So aligned with him, his supporters knew of whom he spoke of without his having to name them. Orator and audience were simpatico in defilement.

Rather than lay out any vision for America, ones that might advance the nation, Russia’s Boy No. 1 inflamed resentments. He’s not good at much, but he’s great at finding then drawing upon the worst in Americans’ character.

The scab has never promoted others’ aspirations. He’s only cast aspersions on them. Only the puniest Americans find this favorable.

Those throngs attracted to him already resentful, how easy was it to further stoke and stroke their bitterness? Through sour messaging he told the lazy, the unambitious, the disincentivized, the groups who they’d once been able to look down upon with impunity had been given advantages allowing them to vault beyond his listeners.

In reality, the once excluded finally got onto level playing fields upon which they excelled. Further expanding the gap, the previously unchallenged had taken their upper hand for granted so long they fairly stopped striving. Instead, the comfortably numb settled into inertia. This passivity lulled them even as the formerly denied raced past.

But wouldn’t the truth have skewed the narrative and robbed MAGA of its invented victimhood?

From such voluntary losers bubbles much of the scab’s support. Particularly Anglo males from less dynamic America. No great shakes convincing these narrowbacks their one-time inferiors benefited from nefarious schemes designed to ditch salts of the earth like them. Farfetched as it is, for those desperate enough for any explanation that deflects as wide as possible from their own culpability it sounds just about right.

Listening to enough of “it’s not your fault” – even though it is your fault – from a fraud who speaks the exact words you wish to hear is the perfect siren for low-esteem Anglo males. Particularly those clustered throughout afterthought America.

Until his 52-card pick-up policies directly started breaking MAGAs, the scab swayed his faithful through appeals which drained what little integrity and dignity they possessed. Let’s face it, there’s not much noble in running down others in order to build up one’s self. Which is exactly what the grifter in chief campaigned on.

He offered zero calls towards improving the country. All he did was feed red pork to his red cap audiences. They were eager for scapegoats onto pin their own shortcomings. And there was Trump offering up “those people.”

MAGAs voted for him because he openly disdained others. Loudly. Profanely. He gave outlets to his listeners’ swampy anger, frustration, and hardly concealed prejudices. He campaigned on hurting “those people.”

Had any the least foresight, a few might’ve refused endorsing the cruelty for cruelty’s sake measures approved by the scan and employed by ICE Gestapo goons. Surely had most known victims of the agency’s dragnets and roundups were economic contributors such as gardeners, laborers, farmworkers, home health aides, pushcart merchants, and military personnel spouses instead of “the worst of the worst,” criminals nobody wanted in America in any capacity, MAGAs might’ve prevented that horse from bolting.

There’s nothing positive about policies solely intended to injure others rather than improve a nation’s general standing. MAGAs heard what the candidate promised. MAGAs liked what the candidate promised. It made them giddy throughout less dynamic America. He gave hectoring voice to their misdirected rage. This somehow validated their shortcomings and weaknesses. None thought of the consequences inherent in his negative posturing.

Today, wide segments of the scab’s once most ardent supporters find themselves nosediving in the same sump as “those people” the scab campaigned against. While none face the draconian measures meted out by ICE Gestapo goons – thus far – he has imperiled their financial futures. MAGAs affected now are waking up to the realization they’ve been betrayed. As if they were one of his wives. Or one-time close associates. Or New York laborers or contractors who worked on Trump construction projects during his fraudulent real estate mirage-like mogul heyday.

By any metric excluding the wealthy, the United States is broken and sinking. Red caps are among the forefront of those broken and sinking with it.

More and more MAGAs are taking to the airwaves and social media to lament. Such as factory workers whose holiday bonuses were withheld in order for management to front load inventories before tariffs hobbled their firms. These workers’ plights worsened when layoffs and closures then robbed them of steady incomes.

Like industrial workers, people in the agricultural sector also wail. Despite his policies having screwed them during his first term, ranchers and farmers somehow again let themselves be led down the scab’s cracked and buckled primrose path. How could they have failed learning from their first dance with him?

Then, his flat feet even mashed their toes.

Of all people shouldn’t sodbusters and hayseeds have had enough mother wit to never step on a rake’s comb in order to avoid being smacked in the face by the implement’s handle?

A couple of generations down the line when family farms and ranches have become rarities, those toiling on acreages which through sales have been collectivized into corporate holdings, the people working these properties may likely be descendants of former landowners. Instead of having inherited to further the line, they will be employees. “Hands.” Rather than continuing prideful ownership, they’ll be disposables laboring for wages.

Unlike the lionized pioneer generations long before them who furrowed virgin loam or the initial cattlemen whose grit increased a bull or two and several cows into herds, latter-day tales will focus on dispossession. Specifically, how could so much endeavor, their lineage, have become dust and dreams borne away on prairie winds?

Perhaps during future workdays when a moment of respite arrives, those dashed of their inheritances will contemplate how this land lost the individuality of distinct ownership and became part of an indistinguishable entity. How did uncultivated soil or rangeland settled by their forebearers of multiple generations ago become just another piece in a portfolio far removed from that earth and these people?
The displaced may wonder how they became 21st century peasants – though peasants paid sustainable wages.

Can’t mythologize losing homesteads for foreclosures in the same manner as venturing across frontier and wresting livelihoods through crude implements, muscle, and determination. Loss is the antithesis of the American West’s legends. That would be a Willa Cather tale as written by a malicious O. Henry.

Or an ordinary Bret Harte short story.

Will denied inheritors accept that land worked for anonymous masters was forsaken because some forebearers let the most disreputable man America has ever produced draw on the worst of their beings? Common belief harnesses farmers and saddles ranchers with integrity and dignity. How to explain most of these straightshooters chucking both in order to back Donald Trump?

Who could’ve believed that during his four years of noisy “exile,” the scab had changed? Had learned? A constant harping presence during the Biden respite, he offered no positive alternatives benefiting America. Rather, all he shoveled was incessant grievances.

Complaining without delivering solutions redresses nothing.

If it hadn’t been for life preservers in the form of federally funded welfare during the grifter in chief’s first term, how many homesteads would’ve already vanished today? Now their straits are even more dire than six years ago.

Throughout Election 2024, the scab campaigned on ridding our nation of the very same hands and backs the above enterprises depend upon. What rancher or farmer could not have known what percentage of his or her own hires occupied dubious immigration statuses? How could any rancher or farmer have been so blue-eyed to believe his or her acreage would be exempt? Particularly since the roundups the Queens mook guaranteed would be so indiscriminately all-encompassing.

And once more as thoughtful, mindful Americans can’t miss, heartless, too.

Whether they work on assembly lines or beneath open skies, salts of the earth seeking sympathy from Americans who knew better in 2024 are undeserving of our pity. MAGAs welcomed the known menace.

Whatever sterling qualities seen in themselves they’ve forfeited over and over again to burnish Trump’s crookedness. It’s not that MAGAs can’t be rescued. It’s that they’ve repeatedly chosen risk which endangers them. So why bother?

They should bear its unadulterated brunt.

It’s what they asked for.

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