The People Are Wrong Again
An Owner’s Manual for Democracy, as Explained by the Man Who Lost It
“In MAGA logic, honoring the will of voters is violence. Trying to overthrow it is civic engagement.”
There is a special sound a republic makes when it is being explained away. It is the sound of a man who keeps losing elections insisting that the problem is not him, not his ideas, not his record, but the voters themselves. That sound now echoes through the White House, occasionally punctuated by dancing, miming, and the sort of verbal free association usually reserved for late-night cable access television.
President Donald J. Trump, bewildered that elections keep producing outcomes he does not personally approve of, has finally said the quiet part out loud. If Republicans have “the right policy” and Democrats have “horrible policy,” then why bother with elections at all? Why even run against people whose very existence is a policy error?
This is not confusion. This is clarity.
The ideology of MAGA is not small government or fiscal restraint or even nationalism in any coherent sense. It is an epistemological entitlement. Trump does not believe voters are wrong sometimes. He believes voters are wrong by definition when they disagree with him. Democracy is fine, so long as it produces the correct answer. When it does not, it must be corrected, edited, or quietly retired for its own good.
He knows the optics are bad, so he catches himself mid-sentence. He will not say “cancel the election,” because the fake news would call him a dictator. Instead, he merely wonders aloud why elections should exist when Democrats win them. This is statesmanship in the same way a toddler explaining gravity is physics.
The logic is elegant in its cruelty. If Democratic voters are violent, vicious, irrational, and wrong, then their votes are not votes but malfunctions. A broken machine does not get a say in how the factory is run. It gets fixed, silenced, or replaced.
This worldview did not appear out of nowhere. It is the concentrated residue of forty years of Republican rhetoric that taught its base that government is illegitimate when it helps the wrong people. Add racism. Add sexism. Add the grievance that the Voting Rights Act interrupted the natural order in which wealthy men governed without interference. Shake vigorously. What you get is a movement that believes freedom means never being told no by anyone who does not look like you.
This is where the tech libertarians come in, peering down from their glass towers, sighing heavily about the inconvenience of women voting. Peter Thiel did everyone a favor by writing the sentence that most of them only whisper. Freedom and democracy are incompatible, he argued, once too many people are allowed to participate. The problem was not capitalism. The problem was the voters. Especially female voters. Especially poor voters. Especially Black and Brown voters.
When democracy fails to serve concentrated wealth, the answer is not reform but escape. Cyberspace. Outer space. Seasteads. Anywhere but a ballot box.
Trump, lacking the patience for floating cities, has chosen a more direct route. Rewrite history. Silence opponents. Erase policy. Declare reality fraudulent and replace it with a press release. Nowhere is this clearer than in the White House’s revision of January 6, which now reads like fan fiction written by someone who watched the footage with the sound off and their fingers in their ears.
The mob that beat police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol, and chanted about hanging the vice president has been rebranded as peaceful patriots. The real insurrection, we are told, was Congress certifying an election Trump lost by more than seven million votes. In MAGA logic, honoring the will of voters is violence. Trying to overthrow it is civic engagement.
This would be darkly funny if it were not policy.
Because while Trump insists the country was a smoldering ruin when he returned to office, the data stubbornly refuses to cooperate. The economy he inherited was strong by nearly every measurable standard. No major wars. Falling crime. Falling overdoses. Rising wages. Low unemployment. Manufacturing growth. High energy production. Even Moody’s Analytics, which does not hand out compliments lightly, called it about as good as it gets.
So naturally, Trump dismantled it.
Policy was never the point. Control was.
That same logic now animates foreign policy, which increasingly resembles a real estate negotiation conducted with aircraft carriers. Venezuela was not liberated. Its actual opposition leaders were sidelined. Journalists were arrested. Armed gangs filled the streets. And Trump announced, without irony, that he would personally control tens of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil, for the benefit of the people, of course, as soon as it was shipped directly to American docks.
The man who believes Democrats stole an election now claims Venezuela stole oil that happens to be under Venezuelan land. Sovereignty, like voting, is valid only when it produces the desired outcome.
Greenland is next on the vision board. A NATO ally that has already granted the United States extensive defense access is now being threatened because Trump has decided that allies who say no are a national security risk. Denmark’s prime minister responded with the sort of calm clarity adults use when explaining consequences to someone who has never experienced them. Attack a NATO ally, and everything stops.
Trump’s response to that, one assumes, will be to accuse Denmark of being violent, vicious, and insufficiently grateful.
This is not chaos. It is coherence. From elections to oil fields, from January 6 to Greenland, the through line is simple. Trump believes power belongs to him because he believes he is right. Anyone who disagrees is illegitimate. Any system that contradicts him is corrupt. Any rule that restrains him must be destroyed.
Democracy, in this framework, is not a shared civic project. It is a customer satisfaction survey that keeps coming back with the wrong answers.
And so the people are wrong again. They keep voting. They keep insisting on having a say. They keep believing that government exists to serve more than one man’s ego. How tiresome. How vicious. How very uncooperative of them.
One can almost sympathize with the frustration. Running a democracy would be so much easier if the public would just stop participating.
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any suggestions as to how to stop/reverse what's going on, michael?