The Coming Trumpian Era Of Leopards Eating People's Faces

Thoughts about the election outcome.

Photo by Geranimo on Unsplash

Leopards are going to eat so many faces these next four years.

This election is just as bad for MAGA fans as Democrats, they just don’t know it yet. There’s going to be a lot of schadenfreude watching various conservative demographic groups learn what everyone who puts any trust in Donald Trump learns: he will screw you. Hispanics who will have friends and family members deported, rural women who will get ectopic pregnancies, patriots who appreciate NATO as a source of American strength, poor people who will lose their health insurance subsidies, Muslims who will be banned and discriminated against, etc., all are about to go through some things.

Clearly there’s no Deep State.

No one should be surprised Trump made up a baseless smear against our government, but it’s disappointing. Isn’t there any Deep State at all? Surely the CIA or some of our close allies have collected evidence of Trump colluding with foreign governments, or having outrageous business conflicts of interest, and shared it with top US national security officials, right?

Foreign leaders regularly go to Mar-a-Lago, surely some intelligence group or officials have investigated what Trump is doing and saying in all those suspicious meetings, even if it’s picked up inadvertently by the surveillance we do of other countries’ governments and prominent leaders? Trump and Elon Musk have reportedly been regularly having phone calls with Vladimir Putin despite neither of them being the current president, aren’t there any Deep State eyes and ears checking out whether a former president is violating the Logan Act and committing treason? Several of Trump’s own handpicked national security officials, including Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, have publicly suspected Trump is being blackmailed by Putin, but there’s not a single thing the higher echelons of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA can do about it?

Honestly, I am pro Deep State, and disappointed there apparently isn’t any backstop on an idiot Manchurian candidate doing Putin’s bidding. I can’t say Trump is intentionally fucking America’s national interests for Russia’s benefit, but he’s so easily manipulatable because he’s dumb, greedy, and sociopathically narcissistic that he’s certainly doing it unintentionally at the least.

Do NOT quit Twitter

I think the biggest reason why Democrats suffered in this election is because they have a terrible habit of quitting the debate. Not many prominent Democrats beyond Pete Buttigieg regularly go on Fox News and argue against conservatives’ narrow, partisan, Republican bias.

Kamala Harris not going on Joe Rogan was not what cost her the election, but Democrats’ prissy, holier-than-thou approach to interviews and media appearances leads to millions of conservative and moderate voters who just never heard from any liberals explaining why Trump was a fascist threat, and why Project 2025 is a disgraceful insult to civil liberties, why deportations will lead to higher inflation, why tariffs will destroy the economy, and why women’s reproductive freedom is important for everyone.

These same voters regularly tell pollsters they agree with Democratic positions on many social and economic issues from abortion protections to higher taxes on billionaires, especially when they’re not told which party the ideas belong to, so they are persuadable, but Democrats write them off by refusing to argue with Ben Shapiro, Fox & Friends, Sean Hannity, etc. for the sake of reality, facts, and liberalism.

And now liberals are quitting Twitter en masse. None of the Twitter alternatives are as good or influential as Twitter, and now more than ever the moderates, conservatives, and Nazis on X need to be constantly argued with and pushed back against. Don’t quit the fight. It is death for democracy if liberals cede entire social media platforms or media networks to the right, and pretentiously proclaim they are too morally pure to engage with ideas that then proliferate with no liberal opposition and get fascist Republican presidential candidates elected.

Has identity politics jumped the shark too many times?

I am very sympathetic to the struggles of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities in America, and I want America to protect the rights of all. But that is only possible if Democrats win elections, and liberals get appointed to all the government’s departments, agencies, and offices.

But the small slivers of the American electorate only the Democratic Party in our bipolar, first-past-the-post election system is willing to represent — Muslims, trans, Green voters, etc — routinely hold hostage their support for Democrats, and then withhold their votes because Democrats are not willing to take unelectably-liberal positions on Republicans’ wedge issues. Then Republicans win, and these far left anti-authoritarians have effectively helped elect far right authoritarians. Because Donald Trump was able to win, he will soon fill the entire bureaucracy with ethno-nationalists, Evangelical fundamentalists and MAGA conspiracists, and replace our old, conservative Supreme Court justices with new ones in their 40s. Muslims, trans, and Green voters are going to get 0% of what they want.

It’s political suicide and maybe Democrats should reevaluate and change some of their unpopular stances on political wedge issues they take to protect coalition partners who keep fucking them over.

In praise of liberal Millennial men.

One of the more interesting reveals from the election data is that millennials, particularly Millennial males, are the age demographic most disproportionately loyal to Democrats’ liberalism. I am one of those liberal Millennial males who votes straight-ticket Democrat. You’re welcome, America.

Millennials got sucker punched with such a gauntlet of crises in our formative years — 9/11, Iraq, the Great Recession — and we were politically awakened with Obama’s historic liberal victories and themes of hope and change, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that we are enduringly liberal.

It’s interesting that Gen X before us has veered hard right, and Gen Z males coming up behind us are having a slight reactionary shift to populist conservatism flirting with fascist aesthetics. This is proof that Democrats are not effectively messaging to and for young men, and it’s sad Gen Z might never know or experience Millennials' optimism and idealism circa 2008.

My pet peeve about conservatives

I’m very annoyed at how often pundits moderate and conservative alike criticize liberals for flaunting their Hollywood and musician endorsements because conservatives absolutely do the exact same thing every time they snag a celebrity endorsement, they just don’t get many. Republicans love bringing out their celebrities, such as Kid Rock, Jon Voight, Clint Eastwood, Dana White, Hulk Hogan, etc. every chance they get. They’re just jealous and envious that most professional artists are very liberal because they’re necessarily extremely empathetic.

It’s the same thing with sports, where Republicans tell every athlete concerned about injustice to “shut up and dribble,” but then gush like Beatlemania when a player prays on the field, wears a MAGA hat, or tells women to stay in the kitchen. Conservatives are actually quite desperate for attention from cultural elites, and no one gets more upset about actresses and musicians criticizing them than Donald Trump. Conservatism and fascism tend to just be an anathema to extremely creative people.

Leftism and liberalism are not why Harris lost.

The commentary about how liberalism and even leftism are election losers is not convincing. Harris was absolutely not a leftist candidate. She ran an incredibly centrist campaign, regularly did events with Liz Cheney, and actively sought out Republican votes promising to be a consensus-focused president.

But Bari Weiss recently said on Fox News, “It turns out, running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police don’t actually matter — or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch — to ordinary Americans.”

…But Kamala Harris didn’t run on any of those. She never brought up any of that stuff, and she was a prosecutor so she definitely was not for defunding the police. Kamala Harris is such a center left person that her primary campaign in 2020 went nowhere, and she had to drop out before the Iowa caucus. When Biden was kicked off the ticket, the nomination was thrust into Harris’ hands quickly in part because everyone knew a primary would likely divide the party specifically because Harris, the VP and obvious inheritor, was not likely to win, and it would look bad to essentially sideline the Black VP.

It’s bad faith to constantly associate the stupid things the far left says online when the Democratic Party consistently nominates center-left candidates up and down the ballot who are so moderate leftist factions are inspired to boycott them, particularly when it’s such a stark contrast with the GOP that routinely rewards its most far right candidates in its primaries.

Take notes now for the future.

I like watching these rumors of who Trump will pick for various jobs in his next administration because these are the future authors of memoirs full of details of how often he kept mentioning Hitler, and how he was an amalgam of all the very worst personality traits, and how they suspected Putin must be blackmailing him. We’re watching people eagerly beg to be let into a political legacy woodchipper. 🥃

---

☕ Enjoy my comedy and political commentary? Buy me a coffee!

But first subscribe to my Substack The Halfway Café to get my work right to your inbox.

Check out my Linktree for all my digital branches, but definitely follow The Halfway Post on Twitter or Threads to interrupt your daily political doomscrolling with my Dada News.

If you think Donald Trump is a joke, I published the book for you: “Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post,” available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I also have two poetry books full of Millennial existentialism, Cabaret No Stare and Moon Goon available in print and on Kindle.

Browse my comedy portfolio, my Dada News portfolio, and my poetry portfolio.