Idiocracy 2.0

“At times, it seems like every single thing about the United States government under Donald Trump has become so toilet-licking, bug-chewing, propaganda-chugging stupid, that it’s nearly impossible to target an attack or mobilize resistance. So, in the face of all this dimwittery, what the hell do we do? I think the first answer is that we all gather in our Satanic cabals to pray that the hamberders get him before he gets us, but that’s not much to hope for in the long, temporal desert between now and the 2026 midterms. Still, there are lessons to learn as we move ever deeper into our national cosplay of Mike Judge’s cautionary tale, ‘Idiocracy.’”—Michael Tallon

Fairly Unbalanced

By Michael Tallon

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”—Robert J. Hanlon, from Murphy’s Law book two: More reasons why things go wrong! (1980). 

“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”—H. L. Mencken

ANTIGUA Guatemala—(Hubris)—April 2025—In all my nearly 60 years on this pretty blue marble of a planet, I’ve never seen an era more defined by boastful stupidity than right now. Truly, when sitting down to write a column about the state of our democracy and the existential danger our nation currently faces from Donald Trump’s commitment to unreality, I’m at a loss. How do you even approach political analysis in 2025 without first acknowledging just how rock-headedly obtuse, how fact-and-reason resistant our nation has become? 

Take, for example, this recent headline about the wildfires in Los Angeles that, according to several appraisers, will cost over $250 billion (billion with a B) in property loss, economic disruption, and environmental damage. While the fires were in January, the Washington Post story ran in early March, after reporters had a chance to dig into the absurdity of Trumpism in crisis. Here’s how it read: “Army Corps Knew Trump Order Would Waste California Water, Memo Shows.”

From there on, the story unfolds predictably. Donald Trump took office in the waning days of those horrific, climate-change driven fires. It was an ongoing tragedy the nation’s newly elected leader needed to address. In his final weeks, President Biden had been doing just that, offering federal support to California in its time of need, while speaking seriously about the catastrophe of global warming. It was a response based on science and empirical facts, and that simply would not do for Donald, as he spends the coin of a different realm. 

Upon taking office, the Tangerine Tyrant did what he’s best at. In an act of stunning psychological projection, he attacked his predecessor as a corrupt and doddering old fool whose actions intentionally caused harm to the citizenry. He stated that Joe Biden and the California Democrats were intentionally withholding water from Los Angeles to make the fires worse. That was, of course, a filthy lie—but for Trump, lying is an autonomic response, akin to breathing or digestion.

Then, surely knowing that his actions would cause great harm to California’s agricultural sector during the coming dry season, he ordered the immediate release of over 2.5 billion (again, with a B) gallons of fresh water from two lakes in California’s Central Valley—Lake Kaweah and Lake Success. He did this, he claimed, to fight the fires, even though those lakes are over 200 miles north of Los Angeles and no way exists to transport that water to the site of the fires.

Then, the ruse having been set in motion, he fired off a Tweet stating he’d “turned the water back on,” though none of it would in fact reach Los Angeles. Instead, it either evaporated or ended up back in the water table, where it will be unavailable for irrigation during the next, inevitable drought.

This was waste, fraud, and abuse all rolled up into one neat package.

Ugh. As noted above, it’s all so colossally stupid that it’s hard to know what to say.

Then again, let’s give Donald his due. If you’re ever going to starve a drought-prone agricultural region of water for a bullshit photo-op, 2025 is probably the year to do it! There’s likely going to be an underwhelming harvest in the Central Valley this year as Trump’s much-ballyhooed crackdown on undocumented workers has driven tens of thousands of migrant farm laborers out of the market altogether for fear of arrest, detainment, and sudden deportation—another easily predictable, and predicted, crisis brought to you by the salmon-faced Bonehead-in-Chief.

But don’t worry, Donald has a plan for that, too!

He argues that we shouldn’t worry too much about the loss of all that migrant labor, because he has a plan to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States by slapping a blanket 25 percent tariff on all goods entering the country from Mexico and Canada, our two largest trading partners! That’ll show ‘em . . . or maybe not, as those two neighboring countries didn’t take Trump reneging on their legally binding trade agreement (that he himself negotiated during his first term) lying down.

Instead, they slapped their own tariffs on American goods, causing the price of cars and trucks to rocket up by between $3000 and $20,000 overnight, crashing the stock market, and leading the Atlanta Fed and other agencies both public and private to alter their economic projections for the United States from a trajectory of nearly 3 percent growth in 2025 to a 2.5 percent contraction.

Can you say “stagflation?” 

Can you say, “Trump Slump?” 

It’s all just so phenomenally stupid.

Pretty much wherever you look with this second Trump administration this climate of stupidity prevails. They are making policy based on delusional fantasies, not science, reason, or empirical reality.

Consider this: Right now, just when there are new and aggressive coronaviruses emerging in China, novel and poorly understood hemorrhagic fevers blossoming in Africa, and serious outbreaks of measles, bird flu, and whooping cough right here in the United States, Donald Trump has appointed the world’s best known anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I mean . . . how dumb are we??? How pinheaded a nation have we become?

And then there’s his foray into meme coins—a get-richer-quick scam based almost entirely upon the gullibility of silly-ass MAGA voters who elected a six-times-bankrupted conman found guilty of tax evasion to the tune of $350 million dollars, and fraud for another $25 million for falsely marketing a scam university to those self-same, entirely willing dumbass victims of his mendacity. That coin, listed as $TRUMP on the exchanges, earned over a quarter billion dollars in three weeks, but is also clearly part of a massive pump-and-dump scheme that will fleece his followers before the con runs its course. Honestly, only a nation with a good 50 points shaved off its national IQ in the past century could be this blind to the obvious. 

Yet, here we are.

And, of course, there’s more!

How stupid does a nation need to be to believe that there really are tens of millions of fake Social Security accounts collecting trillions of dollars of fraudulent payments by claiming to be 150 years old? How stupid do you need to be to trust that the world’s richest man has your interests at heart while he’s calling the nation’s foundational retirement system “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time?” How stupid is it to dismantle the Department of Education, or believe that Ukraine started the war with Russia? How dumb must a person be to believe a single goddamn bleat from that moronic devil’s puckered, porcine, and pumpkin-colored facial sphincter?

At times, it seems like every single thing about the United States government under Donald Trump has become so toilet-licking, bug-chewing, propaganda-chugging stupid, that it’s nearly impossible to target an attack or mobilize resistance.

So, in the face of all this dimwittery, what the hell do we do?

I think the first answer is that we all gather in our Satanic cabals to pray that the hamberders get him before he gets us, but that’s not much to hope for in the long, temporal desert between now and the 2026 midterms. Still, there are lessons to learn as we move ever deeper into our national cosplay of Mike Judge’s cautionary tale, “Idiocracy.”

1.    A Lesson on the Willful Ignorance of His Followers

First, we need to accept that it is too generous by half to assume that most of Trump’s supporters are simply being fooled. Many of them know he’s lying and embrace the bullshit anyway—either out of a sense of hopelessness, spite, or motivated self-interest. I’d hazard a guess that, if pushed, that most MAGA voters understand full well that cabals of evil Democratic overlords intentionally torching their own states on a lark are about as rare as full dentition in rural Alabama—and those people aren’t fools, they’re worse. They are spiteful assholes and should be publicly pilloried as such.

Many MAGA voters clearly remember how their own political party spent the past 50 years inveighing against the suicidal nature of unrestrained, poorly thought-out trade wars. They remember men like George W. Bush and his pappy “Poppy” touting the vital necessity of Social Security in guaranteeing an income to tens of millions of American retirees. They grew up understanding the crucial, life-saving importance of vaccinations in fighting easily preventable, often deadly childhood diseases. Yet, now, rather than acknowledge those realities and join a war on the side of reason, they have chosen, instead, to revel in the golden shower of Trump’s manufactured grievances and cheap revenge fantasies. They have become so inured to his lurid spectacle, so accustomed to his horseshit, that they embrace his self-defeating worldview to somehow “own the libs.”

Trump is a fool, but he has learned how to weaponize stupidity as a social bond—uniting into one political movement the truly incapacitated morons of America with the opportunistic, petty-minded shitbags who, I guess, figure that if the worst white people no longer have a free pass to hate trans kids and immigrants, or to fly the Confederate battle flag over their state capitol buildings, then they may as well join the inbred Visigoths of Trump’s dunderheaded base to burn the whole nation to the ground.

And that’s so fucking dumb.

2.    A Lesson on Institutional Weakness

The second lesson we’ve got to learn is that this version of the Trump presidency has exposed how fragile our system of governance truly is in the face of targeted buffoonery. We all learned in civics class that the Constitution had built-in fail-safes, checks on and balances of power that would prevent the ascension of a moronic monster to the highest office in the land. We were promised that certain “norms” would protect us from the whims of an absurdist autocrat. But it turns out that none of those guarantees mean a bucket of chilled spit in the face of concentrated, lobotomy-grade nonsense.

However imperfect it has been over the past few centuries, the Supreme Court, we believed, would always be there as a final bastion of justice. Yet, now, it is packed with ideologues who have twisted the High Bench into a pretzel of jurisprudential illogic in order to shield a criminal president from prosecution when it was obvious to everyone everywhere that he is guilty as sin—but that’s not all.

We trusted the media, our noble Fourth Estate, to bring a bright and disinfecting light to bear on all manner of governmental corruption and incompetence, but they are now either fully complicit in the con (see: Fox News, Newsmax, et al.) or far too enamored with the spectacle of Trumpism to risk losing access to the show by sounding the alarm. Yes. I’m looking at you, Jeff Bezos—though you’re not the only one, by long chalk.

Then there are the Department of Justice and the military, both of which stood strong during Trump’s first term, but are now being hollowed out, their heroes replaced by garden-variety lickspittles who will do the boss’s dumb-ass bidding without question or push-back.

I could go on, but you get the point. No cavalry is left to save us this time around. We’re alone with the fuckwits, the conmen, and the pricks, and they’re in charge. The guard rails have all collapsed. The Constitution and the institutions of civil society, which served to defend our system for nearly a quarter of a millennium, are failing under the weight of persistent, orchestrated stupidity, and we can all now clearly see where this will end if we don’t pull out of the dive in the next few years.

Tragically, America in 2025, rather than being a nation of engaged citizens who view liberty for all as the light that will guide us to a new day, has become more like a tourist gawking at a three-card monte table in Times Square. We’re mystified by the noise and commotion, and the smooth banter of a dealer prepared to snap shut the trap, sweep all the winnings into his own pocket, and then disappear into the crowd leaving us lost, alone, broke, and bewildered that we could have been taken by such an obvious ruse.

3.    A Lesson on National Decay

The third lesson we need to fully integrate into our worldview is that Trump is no cosmic accident. He’s not a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. Rather, he’s the natural byproduct of a nation that has spent decades allowing the civic institutions outlined above to fail, often because propping them up might cost the lords an extra few percentage points on their taxes.

Trump is the logical result of a nation eating away at its own core competences for a quick profit, while letting cruelty, stupidity, and conspiracy metastasize into a sort of Gollum-like national identity. We’ve become a land whose citizenry struggles to see the difference between an expert in public health, and a Joe Rogan guest. We’re a nation where climate scientists are doubted in favor of YouTube influencers. We’re a collective of cretins, half of whom actually believe that foreign governments pay tariffs.

We’ve been on a slow glide toward epistemic collapse since at least 1980, when we elected the all-hat/no-cattle cowboy, Ronald Reagan. But Trumpism has turned that downward drift into a fucking nosedive. Our schools produce graduates who can’t tell—or don’t care—the truth from a TikTok meme. Our military, which held strong against autocracy during Trump’s first term in office, is now facing a purge to remove any potential impediments to Trump’s reign. The Republican Party which, ten years ago, had leaders—like John McCain and Mitt Romney—willing to stand up to Trump’s narcissism has now seen its last few heroes ejected (See: Kinzinger, Adam or Cheney, Elizabeth), or gelded (like the tragically de-balled Marco Rubio, the sycophantic runt in eyeliner, JD Vance, or the one-time Never-Trump Senator Lindsey Graham who—not to kink-shame—has proven time and again that he simply becomes only the last person who pissed in his mouth).

Meanwhile, in the face of this collapse, half the nation’s voters have retreated into the comforting myth that America is somehow naturally exceptional, somehow genetically determined to be resistant to the debilitations that cause empires to fall. 

Only we’re not immune at all—we’re just in a mind-bendingly stupid form of denial.

4.    A Lesson on Survival

So, what do we do?

I think, on the one hand, we must accept that we, quite likely, are the last generation of free Americans and we must wake up to the reality that this all (the American Experiment, the Republic for which we could not stand) could very well go away in the next few years. Then, after confronting that truth, we each need to make the choice: Will we flee, or will we fight?

So far, I’ve been on the fence about what path to take. I’m 58 years old, with no kids, and very little holding me to an American identity if we’ve stripped away any meaningful fidelity to rationality and truth.

Yet, if we do fight back, it will involve abandoning the fantasy that our tolerance must extend to either the brazenly idiotic or the willfully delusional. We must recognize that the MAGA movement and its adherence to falsehoods is deadly to our nation. 

If we are to survive, it must be crushed.

In just over a decade, they have pushed us bodily into a post-truth world where democracies simply cannot survive, and if we ever wish to return to the necessarily clarifying light of reality, then we’ve got to become used to calling out the bullshit wherever and whenever we hear it. We’ve got to get used to picking fights with our Red Hatted uncles at holiday meals. We’ve got to become comfortable calling out venality and stupidity at our neighborhood barbershops and bars, because there is no way back from this advanced a collapse if we don’t toughen up and start calling shit shit.

We’ve got to accept, at a cellular level, that our whole civilization will collapse if we keep believing in things that just aren’t true.

Trump did not “turn on the water” and save Los Angeles. Tariffs are not paid by China. Vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Russia did invade Ukraine. Putin is a dictator, not Zelenskyy. No, they weren’t eating the cats and the dogs. School nurses aren’t performing sex change operations on elementary school girls. TransGENIC mice are not the same thing as transGENDER mice. Believing otherwise is NOT a cost-free dalliance. Believing things that simply are not true is deadly to our nation, and people dumb enough to believe this shit—or evil enough to know it’s not true, but to placate Trump anyway—are a mortal danger to us all. 

It is my firm belief that all of us must become personally invested in this battle. We’ve got to understand that our native sense of decorum and our traditional willingness to hear out a good faith opposing view must have limits in the face of those who kill our way of life to satisfy their mendacious king.

Our battlefield for the truth must become our daily lives. We must get used to challenging the morons in our midst who either swallowed the orange-hued huckster’s lies, or who knowingly go along with his charade for shits, giggles, or profits. We must never become tired of screaming at the top of our lungs how none of this is normal, nor sustainable. None of this keeps America alive for her tricentennial. A nation that repeatedly runs off the cliffs of reality to chase Trumpian fictions is destined to fall and if we don’t wrest back control from the fuckwits soon, it’s game over for the USA.

Truth be told, I’m not hopeful. Still, so long as others join in, I am willing to fight. Are you?