Donald Trump Just Became More Dangerous than Ever

Americans have entered a new era.

One of my cousins thinks he’s going to buy a beach house with ten thousand dollars he inherited. He lives with his mom, unemployed. “I know what it’s like to be a struggling parent,” he tells me.

He doesn’t have kids.

He has a dog.

Someone has always taken care of my cousin. Nobody has the heart to tell him he’ll never, ever get that beach house he keeps talking about.

He’ll figure it out one of these days.

When that happens, he’ll get angry. Maybe he’ll storm a building to punish a government he blames for selling him a lie. Or maybe he’ll just stay home and cheer the next group that does. Apparently, it’s pretty easy if you’re a white dude who’s had his unrealistic dreams crushed.

Even as Donald Trump finally agrees to a “peaceful transition” in the wake of violence that left four people dead, the outgoing president still didn’t back down. He promised that it’s “only the beginning of our fight to make America great again,” which is code for more violence.

We just don’t know when…

Donald Trump feeds off crushed dreams.

My cousin is like a lot of Americans. They grew up in a bubble, entitled to a comfortable lifestyle that’s eroding.

The future scares them.

This is what makes Americans like my cousin so dangerous once they wake up. They know they’ve been screwed over, but they have no idea who’s responsible or what to do about it.

They’ve been fed a bunch of lies about how great America is. They have no ideology, just a vague sense of loss that gets more and more violent as the life they imagined for themselves crumbles before them. When I look at what’s happening in America, that’s what I see.

My cousin is everywhere.

Trumpers have no plan, other than chaos.

Four people are dead after armed insurgents broke into the capitol and held our democracy hostage. They came with guns and chemical irritants. They tore through barriers. They fought police. They planted bombs. Our politicians cowered under their desks as terrorists marched through the halls of our government, ransacking offices.

They took selfies.

Labeling them fascists doesn’t make them go away. Even if they fit the technical definition of that word, they don’t identify with any political movement. They carry everything from Confederate flags to swastikas. They have no ideology, and they have no plan. They don’t know what they want, other than chaos and destruction.

You can’t call what happened in D.C. a protest or anything else. It was a test of Trump’s insurgency broadcasting network.

It worked.

It’s too late to hold Donald Trump accountable.

People keep saying we have to get rid of Trump. They demand we arrest him and try him for treason. They say we should invoke the 25th amendment and kick him out of office.

Well, maybe…

It could make an example out of Trump. It might squash the energy behind his movement. Or it could blow up in our faces.

It could make everything worse.

Trump has an army. If you think his troops were frenzied before, just wait until someone tries to slap cuffs on their hero.

Trump could become even more dangerous behind bars. Militia groups want nothing more than a reason to go commando on the federal government. Throwing Trump in jail would give them the excuse they’ve been waiting for. Remember, they’re all on standby.

Donald Trump wants Rambo violence.

We think democracy collapses all at once. That’s not how it happens. It happens the way it’s been happening. Our politicians promote stochastic terrorism, random acts of violence that are easy to deny and dismiss. They aren’t meant to look like a pattern.

Donald Trump and his allies know this. Guys like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz talk about law and order, then they go out for burgers with militia boys. They incite open rebellion, then they tell everyone to go home. “We love you,” the say. They leave us with the illusion everything is getting back to normal. Everything does, for a little while.

Then they strike again.

Each time, it gets just a little bit worse.

Militias will never “take over the government” the way we keep expecting them to. They have to destabilize the political system first. They’re just a handful of unhinged guys out in the woods…

Until they’re not.

Donald Trump has transformed himself.

The Donald Trump who told his rabid followers to storm the capitol, then thanked them, is not the same schmuck who could barely hold onto a reality TV show a few years ago.

Every dictator has their defining moment of transformation. All of them were pathetic losers at one point, until they found a way to tap into the dark impulses and unfocused rage of a mob.

It was a long time coming, with plenty of signs. If anything should be clear after January 6, it’s that we’re no longer dealing with an aging, narcissistic playboy. We’re dealing with a man who knows how to sway millions of poor, angry Americans across the country.

Those deplorables love their leader. They’ve been telling us for months they would die for him, they’d take a bullet for him.

Now they’re doing it.

We’ve wound up in an impossible situation.

We’ve reached a point of no return. We might’ve had a chance to punish Trump in the past, but we blew it. He’s put us in an impossible situation now. Our leaders currently have two choices:

The first choice is to go after Trump, and risk starting a war. We can do that by removing him from office, or prosecuting him after he leaves. It’s going to invite more violence either way.

The first choice turns Trump into a martyr.

The second choice is that our leaders swear in the next president and begin governing. Effective leadership will deflate all the rage that’s fueling Trump’s movement. Once Trump has been out of office for a while, then states like New York can begin prosecution. We can’t go after Trump, not like we were planning. Everyone’s too hot with anger.

He’ll pay for what’s he’s done.

Just not now.

We keep making the same mistakes.

It doesn’t matter what happens to Donald Trump anymore. We can invoke the 25th amendment. We can arrest him. We can ban him from Twitter. All of those moves would limit his influence.

None of it unplugs him.

The only way to undo Trump’s damage is to show Americans they put their faith in the wrong guy. It’s going to take years.

Trump draws his power from the deep sense of betrayal and outrage that millions of Americans feel about their future. That won’t go away anytime soon, regardless of what punishments we dream up for him. Once he’s gone, someone else will pick up the torch.

Maybe it won’t be this year, or the next.

But soon.