It’s a Movie!!!
Yes, it’s That One!
Does it seem to you every day that we’re all stuck in a really, really bad movie?
We are.
So, let’s look at the tRump regime as a 60’s noir spy film.
The scene- an evil foreign dictator has corrupted the highest levels of US government, now led by his equally evil but very stupid patsy and protected by complicit congressmen and judges. Our hero, a dashing Senator played by George Sanders, has to expose them and bring them all to justice.
In a typical American spy drama, they’d all be caught and charged with treason after a penultimate gun battle / car chase.
But, that’s for the American traitors. They must be taken alive to face punishment.
The foreign enemies, not so much.
Usually, the enemy agents who corrupted our traitors didn’t make it to the end. This happened in countless WWII movies, where the tradition was that any traitors who killed Americans are killed themselves by the enemy, who is then killed.
For a war movie, this was a happy ending.
World War II gave us a formula for being a ‘good guy’. And our cop and spy movies follow it like the Bible;
- The good guy cannot kill the bad guy outright. They have to be forced to do it to save others.
- The good guys can’t kill their betrayers, unless they’re forced to do it to stop them from doing something horrific.
- The good guy can’t attack the bad guy when innocent people are at risk.
- The good guy must save everyone possible, catch the bad guy and stop the evil enemy.
- (Option) They must think the evil leader has been killed but can’t find the body.
But, in real life?
Those rules still apply to the good guys, but, of course, not the bad guys.
In real life, the despots do act like the despots in the movies. Putin acts like every kind of arch-criminal-evil-dictator there was all at once. tRump acts like the most thieving, lying, vindictive moron on the planet. (Ok, it’s not an act.)
The atrocities Russia is committing against Ukraine are open and obvious. And, tRump is joining in with his cold-blooded bombings of small boats in international waters, killing over 100 people already, under the unproven suspicion of drug smuggling.
tRump’s destruction of US integrity and support on the world stage is blatant and sweeping.
By these metrics, tRump is definitely not the good guy.
If this was a classic American 1960s spy movie, and it is, who would be going to jail at the end?
Well, tRump, obviously.
And, Vance. And Rubio. And Bondi and Hegseth, and Gabbard and Noem and the ringleaders would be revealed as Thiel, Homan and Vought. And don’t forget un-elected-un-appointed Nazi death czar Stephen ‘Nosferatu’ Miller. Lutnick, would, of course, have to go back to selling Barcaloungers during the late movie and RFK Jr would be hauled away in a straight jacket in a rubber truck.
“And, we’d have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.”
No movie ever had the actual whole fucking White House in collusion with a foreign enemy. Someone in it maybe, but not the fucking president.
‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ doesn’t come near it. When there’s no Jimmy Stewart movie about it, you’re treading dangerous new ground.
Now, here’s the thing.
It’s not a movie.
I know. You know.
It’s us.
The whole fucking world knows that we have been taken over by an evil, vicious, lying, thieving, greedy- this could take a while- disordered, malignant narcissistic, cruel, demented and incredibly stupid despot.
Who do we have to fight back? Who are the real good guys?
No Jimmy Stewart. No Al Pacino. Well, we do have Al as an advisor.
But, no, it’s the Democrats. (But, we still have George Sanders as the Senator, right?….. What? Oh no! When?)
That’s who we have. Our Republicans are complicit with tRump and our independents are cynical. Most Democrats, though, are at least trying, as much as they can, under the circumstances.
They have about a half-dozen seat minority in both the House and the Senate. They can’t get things to the floor in the House and the Senate Republicans are blocking them out of hand by sheer partisanship, and trying to use reconciliation for everything, which would preclude filibusters.
Even worse, though, is that the DoJ and the Supreme Court majority are completely complicit in all of tRump’s plans and the neutered Congress we see now is exactly what the auto-coup-plotters want.
All of the government offices that made and practiced our good guy stuff that gave us our world hero reputation are now controlled personally by tRump, and being shut down if he doesn’t like them. And, guess what? He doesn’t seem to like any of them.
So, Democrats are already up against the wall with a minority amidst the worst- and most meticulously planned- political auto-coup in the nation’s history.
Why don’t they just cheat like Republicans do?
They can’t.
They’re not allowed.
They are still beholden by the public, media and the Republicans to adhere to the movie-level ‘good guy’ rules. For politicians, that means abiding by the law, the Constitution, the norms of office and rules of procedure and civil discourse. We still demand Democrats follow them all even as tRump and Republicans shred them in plain sight.
GOP lies can float by untouched, but Democrats’ pointing them out is a ‘fake partisan talking point’.
tRump’s crimes are blatant. The violations of the Constitution are in plain view. The corruption is brazen. The dementia, the narcissism, bribery, cruelty and astonishing stupidity- all in plain sight.
Frankly, our ‘movie’, so far, would not get a green light- too over the top.
And, Democrats try to point out this outrageous and damaging behavior over and over again and find their patriotism questioned for doing it. Like, oh, saying the military must refuse illegal orders. Or decrying the ICE seizures, or protesting tRump razing part of the White House. Or denouncing killing 100 people in international waters with no evidence of crime.
For that, they’re called Marxist, corrupt, baby-eating, Atheist, Satanic (yes, both) insurrectionists. And that’s just the cynical left. Wait til you hear what Republicans call them.
And, mainstream media has bought the party line, and amplifies right wing narratives and limits Democrats’ appearances.
To the right, it is all a movie- a ‘Rambo-West-Wing-Lethal Weapon’ mash-up. They see themselves as the heroes, saving America from the miscreants and restoring the greatness of the US by getting rid of the ‘enemy within’ and empowering our ‘true leaders’ to act ‘in our best interest’.
tRump is not ‘Rambo’ in office.
He’s more like ‘Faux Goldfinger’. Yes, that one. 007, Odd Job, dun dun dunnnnnn!
They’re both fat, criminal, heartless, extravagant, deceitful tyrants and horrible golfers who want everything around them layered in gold.
Except, Goldfinger was pretty smart, but deeply evil. tRump is deeply evil, but astonishingly stupid, vain, selfish, cruel, we don’t have time for all of them.
It’s far more than sabotaging Fort Knox, as Goldfinger attempted in the famous Bond movie. Remember, he didn’t plan to steal the gold, but to irradiate it so it would be worthless on the market for 50,000 years, boosting the value of his gold and of his Chinese partners in the heist.
This is far worse.
This ‘tRumpfinger’ movie we’re all extras in has a cast of over 300 villains in the US government, committing crimes from subverting government office functions, bribery, embezzlement through allocations, illegal donations, bribery, kidnapping, insider trading, bribery, illegal rendition, crypto fraud, bribery and extortion to outright murder and, of course, bribery. (You said ‘bribery five times.) (Yea, he does it a lot.)
‘tRumpfinger’ is raiding the country’s GDP. Brutalizing a segment of the population as a scapegoat. Abusing the justice system for personal gain and retribution. Attacking civilians and threatening to invade innocent nations. Destabilizing the economy and international trade with pump and dump tariff scams. Seizing citizens off the street. Detaining them with no process. Even blowing up fishing boats at sea. And the cherry on top- troops deployed into US cities to ‘guard’ us.
So, it really is a movie.
Yes, I’m afraid it’s that one.
Yes, it’s pedestrian, pedantic, predictable and a few other ‘p’ words I’m too lazy to look up, but, it’s unfortunately true.
You knew.
You were hoping I’d say ‘Idiocracy’. But, we’re way past that.
You knew as soon as I said ‘it’s a movie’. (I held it off for a chilling climax. Did it work?)
But, you see it.
Most of us do.
Yup, it’s Orwell’s ‘1984’.
Just because we’ve all been dragged screaming into it, we can’t let this movie end that way. (I know it was a book first. Try to stay with me here.)
We can’t let fascism win.
We can’t let tRump take us down that road.
In real life, the good guys can’t just bomb people just because. They can’t ‘send in Seal Team 6’.
Good guys don’t do that shit.
Bad guys do.
Putin will.
tRump already has, and will again, against an innocent nation, like, oh, say, Venezuela.
Biden didn’t, wouldn’t and couldn’t.
Nobody on the planet would have defended Biden taking any kind of vaguely authoritarian action.
But, tRump decreed that he ‘is the law’, and there was no push-back from the media or the right.
Folks, that is some fucking autocratic 1984 shit right there.
We need to expose the real evil- call it out at such a wide and deep level that the whole populace is outraged. When the voters/consumers become a bigger threat to re-election than tRump, Republicans/oligarchs will rapidly peel off.
And, with all the Constitutional crimes we’ve seen, especially brazen ones on orders from tRump, there is way more than a movie’s worth of shenanigans here to expose.
So, this is our challenge- we have to rewrite the ending to ’tRumpfinger-1984’. Winston must be saved. We have to defeat the evil enemy and free everyone, just like we did in 1945 and in the movies forever after.
We kicked fascism’s ass and founded a peaceful world order based on those good guy rules. Now we have to beat it again, in our own backyard, and restore that order. (Wow- it really is a movie sequel!)
No, it does not have to end with a big patriotic dance number.
But, it does have to end with the good guys- democracy and fair play- winning, and the bad guys being punished their evil plans thwarted.
No, we don’t have to hang them. Prison is enough. Hell, just losing McDonald’s will be severe punishment for tRump.
No, that doesn’t mean the dance number is back in.
Yes, the beagle in the Uncle Sam suit is adorable, but the number is out.
Can we cut to the flag and fade, please?
C.2025 Cousin B
