#45 onepigheadedsmoothbrainaut lies when s/he says, "bonus question: My friend A_Moron said gas prices don't affect him because it always costs $20, is this a true or false statement?"

Never said or intimated that. Ever.

Plus, "it always costs $20" doesn't make any sense whatsoever. What "always costs $20" ? ? ? ?

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The instinct on our side is to treat this as a riddle, or a mass delusion, or a failure of messaging that one more chart will fix. It's none of those things.

It's the most rational thing in the world once you understand what MAGA was actually buying. They were never buying cheaper eggs. They were buying a feeling, a warm glow off the engine block of the Hate Machine, the feeling of winning, of dominance, of watching the people they resent get humiliated in real time. And culture war is the only product Trump sells that reliably delivers that feeling on schedule.

That's why Democrats need to prepare for the pivot, and not allow it.

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Here's the question that should be keeping every Democratic strategist up at night, somewhere between the third organic fair-trade Erehown matcha and the fourth existential crisis: why is it enough? Why don't the MAGA hardcores understand how well and truly Trump is screwing them?

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. Foreclosure filings are at a six-year high. Trump's approval is mired in the low 30s. He hasn't ended a war; he's threatening two more. The grocery bill that was supposed to crater on Day One has done the opposite. By every transactional measure, the measure we were all trained to believe decides elections, this administration is a failure in a saggy Brioni suit.

The 2026 election will be regarded in this space, this moment, this misery that will not stop and will not improve. A reader asked me a question earlier this week, asking for a deeper "why" on the sticky 30% of so who will not leave Trump. It percolated in my head for a few days.

And the base does not care. Not a little. Not at the margins. They do not care.

#69 bell boi says, "Elections are decided by electoral vote, not popular vote."

Here's a dime, buy a clue:

The Electoral College does NOT reflect the will of the people.

Kids, this is what happens when a little boi remains willfully ignorant of civics.

#71 bell boi actually claims, "...Harris was God-awful and was an even worse choice."

What was the average price per gallon of gasoline on January 19, 2025?

What is the average price per gallon of gasoline today?

Your POV, even with 20/20 hindsight, makes you seem small and insignificant, bell boi.

#38 Donnerboy says, "Sometimes I just pull in and look at the ridiculous prices then just drive away laughing.

"It's so much fun!"

Not too long ago, my bride and I stopped at the filling station to top off the tank before hitting the road.

A Lambo Huracan pulled in to the pump and Mrs. A_Friend asked, "What kind of car is that?"

I told her, and then I mentioned that Lamborghinis can pass anything and everything on the road ...

...except a gas station!

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He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him. Philosophy departments around the world now use him as a thought experiment: "Imagine a being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus." He is the null set of conscience. A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man.

He has no empathy. Scientists have confirmed this. They put him in a brain scanner and watched his amygdala just sit there, inert, like a raisin, unmoved by footage of suffering, by crying children, by injured animals, by literally anything. The researchers wept. He asked if there were snacks.

He has no sympathy either, which is worse, because sympathy doesn't even require feeling. It only requires pretending. He cannot manage the performance. He cannot fake it. When people around him suffer, his face rearranges itself into an expression that experts have described as "a beige wall trying to look interested." He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage. He makes sociopaths look like Florence Nightingale.

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There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them.

Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that.

To call him despicable is to call the sun "a little warm." To call him hatable is to say that the Black Death was "somewhat inconvenient." He does not merely inspire hatred. He manufactures it, industrializes it, ships it wholesale to people who had never previously experienced a single negative emotion in their lives.

Buddhists who have spent forty years meditating toward unconditional love have encountered him briefly and immediately relapsed into pure, screaming fury. Pacifists clench their fists. Quakers throw things. He has caused more apostasy, more broken vows, more abandoned philosophies than any theological crisis in recorded history, simply by existing in the same zip code as decent people.

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My biggest specific policy disagreement was the Affordable Care Act. I felt like he was forcing it on the country, and in some procedural sense, he was. That feeling was real. What has changed is not the memory of it but the lens through which I'm looking back. I no longer see a healthcare model that works for everyone as a liberal carrot to dangle. I see it as something closer to what the Good Samaritan actually did: meeting the person in front of you who needs help, without calculating whether they've earned it.

I want to say all of this plainly, because the essay that follows depends on honesty about where it starts.

I was not a birther. Even at my most ideologically rigid, the conspiracy that Obama was foreign-born or somehow illegitimate struck me as overreach, the kind of paranoid tribalism I could distinguish from principled disagreement. My opposition was principled, I believed. Biblical, even. Obama's progressive theology, his social policies, his vision of government's role in human flourishing were, in my reading, antithetical to what Scripture actually taught. I was defending a faith and the truth it contained, or so I was entirely convinced.

That is what I thought I was doing. I was wrong, and the wrongness is interesting, because it is not the simple kind.

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I used to watch Barack Obama give a press conference and feel something close to contempt.

There he was, behind the podium, measured and careful and professorial, parsing every question with the kind of precision that made it clear he had thought about this longer than the reporter had. And something about that made my skin crawl. I read it as smugness, as arrogance, as a man who believed he was the smartest person in any room he entered and wanted everyone in that room to know it. I thought he was ideologically dangerous, theologically liberal, and determined to impose his vision on a country that hadn't really asked for it.