Trump is the salesman keeping you busy gawking at the classic cars in the showroom while his cronies strip your ride in the parking lot down to the frame and snatch the loose change out of the cup holders.

This entire operation, like all fascists and neo-fascists before it, is about weaponizing nostalgia, selling it to a angry population as the country declines, and then focusing the wrath in another direction while the buzzards can feed off the body.

There's no intention here with Trump other than fleecing literally everyone. It's about fast-tracking corruption and destroying government as a public good.

Everything else, the fascism, the cruelty, this nightmarish dystopia, is an unfortunate means to a hellish end.

There are people around Trump with ideology. The white-identity evangelicals obsessed with control and apocalypse. The fascists who want to end cultural pluralism and oppress people of color.

The problem is that Trump is willing to do it all if it means maintaining power.

It is the toxic, poisonous blend of fascistic ideology and Trump's shamelessness and complete lack of patriotism, duty, or responsibility that has created this moment of existential crisis.

It is the grift and the oppression and the decay. All of it.