This story originally appeared on The Advocate.
Donald Trump has always been awful. And his followers have arguably always been worse.
In 2015, when Trump mocked a reporter living with disabilities, it should have been enough to disqualify him from ever getting enough votes to even be considered a candidate for president of the United States. When Donald Trump and his immigrant wife descended an escalator for a racist attack on Mexicans billed as a press conference, the U.S. media should have stopped giving him the coverage he so desperately needs to survive.
When a video emerged of Donald Trump openly explaining the vulgar way he likes to sexually assault women, he should have been forced to live out his days in social exile at some dictator-chic golf club where we would never have to hear from him ever again.
When the tiki-torch khaki Nazis stormed Charlottesville, America should have said cut ties with MAGA for good. When Donald Trump lied about his whereabouts on 9/11 and claimed he'd witnessed Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the towers fell, he should have been laughed into oblivion.
When Trump rallies turned into glorified KKK rallies, the media should have stopped airing them. When MAGA idiots started modifying their diesel trucks to spew black smoke because climate change is a hoax, we should have remembered that public shaming serves a purpose. When MAGA turned trans people into political targets, whipping up a nationwide moral panic with deadly consequences, we should have rejected the entire movement once and for all.
But we didn’t. None of those course corrections happened. Because Donald Trump appealed to the worst of us. And the rest of us were forced into some distorted, pretzel-like posturing of faux civility with people we should have never normalized. People whose behaviors we should never have excused. People who would rather dismantle their own grandmother’s health care in a sick, sad attempt to “own the libs.”
Donald Trump appealed to the racists, and the misogynists, and the Islamophobes, and the homophobes, and the sickest among us who don’t mind seeing ICE gun down people in our streets. Apparently, living in a culture of cruelty is tolerable if the groceries are affordable.
But we’re through the looking glass now. We’re poor. We can’t afford housing or groceries. We can’t afford gas. We’re living like it’s the Great Depression while the rich are earning like it's the Gilded Age on steroids. And because, in America, being poor is worse than losing civil rights, even MAGA seems to be done with Trump. It’s the stupid economy. It’s the economy, stupid. It’s stupid, but here we are. We are with stupid.
Donald Trump has become a hostile man on a tarmac, covered in a shade of foundation that can only be described as a melted Butterfinger, accosting a Reuters reporter for asking a simple question. Bonus points for calling the reporter fat. Donald Trump spent the night before the midterm elections talking about his various construction-project hallucinations while his administration secretly bombed Iran, all while telling the American public the war in Iran is over, and we won.
People are finally sick of it. More importantly, people are sick of MAGA. MAGA has always been awful, deplorable, if you will. But instead of a basket of deplorables, a whole sick cult has seemingly taken over America. And for the first time in a long time, it feels like we might finally be able to splinter MAGA off from itself, spreading it into disparate, powerless little pieces until it effectively dies. Rest in pieces.
Now, like a bad dog, let’s rub their noses in their own crap.
After 10 years of this rabid, disgusting campaign of hate, America has its first Black female governor. The Senate has its first openly gay male senator. South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina, and Kansas have elected Democratic senators. Ohio flipped. Iowa flipped.
Quite the legacy you've built for yourselves. We’ve got the big tent back. You’ve got a gang full of losers, rapists, domestic violence abusers, sex traffickers, grifters, liars, election deniers, and neo-fascists.
I dislike MAGA voters more than I dislike Donald Trump. Trump has never made much of an effort to hide who he is. His supporters saw exactly what he was offering and voted for it anyway. Again and again and again in this horrific carnival hall of mirrors we call home.
And I have no interest in playing respectability politics. I don’t owe these people civility, forgiveness, or another useless conversation about finding common ground. This mess is theirs. They made it, they defended it, and the rest of us have spent a decade living with the consequences. And now they’re suffering too. Welcome to the party, losers.
I’m not meeting them in the middle. I’m moving forward. And if they eventually find their way back to sanity, they're welcome to catch up. But rehabilitating MAGA voters is not my responsibility, not my job, and certainly not my concern.
Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.
