A Boring Dystopia

Until the last three days, I've actually been fairly optimistic.

While slow, the courts had acted to curb Donald's worst abuses. The tariffs wreaked havoc, but we saw when the bond markets reacted that someone in his administration was able to make him see reason. (My own retirement has recovered its losses from February.) Elon Musk was finally being thrown out of the administration.

But here we are now, and this is genuinely scary stuff for absolutely everyone that isn't independently wealthy. The reaction of California and the courts will dictate how things proceed. This isn't the well-organized, institutionalized abuses of immigrants of Dubya, Obama and Biden. It's the heavy-handed, sloppy, careless and unmitigated cruelty of the Gestapo.

And, for me, I just can't get around the fact that this is probably happening because a meme hurt Donald's ego.