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What Trump, Musk, RFKJr, and too many MAGA voters have in common: a short rant [1]

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Date: 2025-01-31

Everyone collectively is better off when we have a functioning justice system. But Trump is guilty of many crimes, so he personally will be better off without one. Therefore, he must pervert if not destroy our entire system of justice.

Everyone collectively benefits when the economy is thriving. But Musk is already the richest man in the world; how much more thriving can he do? If he wrecks the economy by helping Trump implement gobsmackingly stupid policies — high tariffs on our closest trading partners; borders closed to the workforce we need to keep our economy running; draconian “anti-DEI” plans that are a de facto return to segregation, which will kick thousands or millions of qualified workers out of crucial jobs — then in relative terms, he comes out ahead. Everyone else becomes impoverished; he not only keeps all his looted wealth, but by controlling the purse strings of government (stolen from Congress), he’ll be able to funnel even more government funds into his own portfolio.

Everyone collectively benefits when we are all healthy. But RFK Jr subscribes to the (racist? classist?) belief that he and, I guess, his family and friends are somehow especially healthy and can’t be affected by anything as minor as a virus. To the average person it would seem insane that he would purposefully create the conditions for one, two, many pandemics. But when his anti-vax, anti-medical campaign hits our healthcare system and creates those conditions, he must think that measles and bird flu will come for the rest of us but not him, clearing out the underbrush for himself and his kind to thrive in the brave new world.

Everyone collectively benefits when all of us can contribute to society — start businesses, get jobs, get an education, move up in the world — regardless of who we are, where we come from, what we look like. But the MAGA base rejects that world of equality and prefers what W.E.B. DuBois called “the wages of whiteness,” an unearned place at the top of society. (Even if that top spot turns out to be no more than a tantalizing offer, never to be achieved in reality.) So they vote against their own economic interests, in favor of their bigoted social interests.

This is the world that MAGA creates by prioritizing “me” over “all of us”: a world that’s more unjust, poorer, sicker, more unequal, with few “winners” and all of us, collectively, the losers.

/end of rant.

Coda: It ain’t over, folks. Even more than the first time around, we have to get together and push back on the madness which is already upon us. We’ve done it before, and though it’s tiring, we’ll do it again.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/31/2300435/-What-Trump-Musk-RFKJr-and-too-many-MAGA-voters-have-in-common-a-short-rant?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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