Goodbye 2024, hello imploding MAGAland

With 23 days til Trump 2.0 officially takes office, it's Musk vs. Loomer, Greenland or Bust, and Queen Bey-who-Slays.

Photo: Toby Harriman | Flickr

12.29.24 – Oakland.

I made the annual end-year return to the Bay Area a week ago for our blended family holiday gathering. I never quite jibed with the Bay, but I cherish Christmas with the fam and catching up with the close friends I made while living here for many years. Lost years, as I think of them when I’m uncharitable. Good place to raise children in a safer, less hectic environment than New York, I think, when I feel more charitable. Whenever I’m here, both San Francisco and Oakland serve as personal yardsticks to consider what’s changed. Not about the city, but about me and my life, what I felt wasn’t happening when I was living here, and what may or may not be happening now that I’ve left the Bay.

As I write, there’s a rare slice of blue sky that opened up earlier above a broad new low horizon of gray clouds that ring the Oakland hills. Every morning, the sidewalk outside is covered in a wash of wet though it hasn’t quite rained. It’s sort of been always almost raining since I got here, a semi-drizzle, light enough to walk without an umbrella most of the time, but the dampness soaks through after a while. Every day, the weather has been this veil of grey with the temperature cold enough to wear a sweater and jacket, then requiring me to shed a layer at some point, only to re-layer again. It’s not really depressing, but it’s not a nice day, either. It’s some way station weather, like what the sky in a bardo would look like if someone was casting purgatory in a movie. Some limbo weather, not hell, definitely not heaven. A rather impenetrable light grey skein. It’s hard to know what time it is until suddenly it’s grayer and I think it’s close dusk, but maybe only four or five o’clock.

Somehow, the weather and the sky are a kind of mirror for my political emotions, and maybe I think, for our collective feelings at the end-year point. We are all still holding our breath, post-election, looking at the sky with hope for more warmth and sun before the storm to come next year, and mostly taking note of a panorama of what’s feels a bit grey and bleak and chilling. We’re all anticipating the awful official start of Trump 2.0, in other words. But we’re also taking a needed holiday break from the whole of it: him, Elon, Vivek, the day’s MAGA rants, a new headline cycle of some bad thing that is coming or anticipated.

At least I am. I took the days before Christmas to start a needed mental break, all the while keeping an eye on the headlines, all the while storing away news and facts about the resistance, for a reckoning of what continues to unfold as I take momentary refuge. There’s a lot that keeps happening hour by hour, and I’ve divided up these updates into loose folders on my phone notes. I scan a story, I cut and paste the essentials, put it away to read later – after January, when I return to real life, as I think of it. I have a folder on the nominees, on immigration and the latest moves to resist the planned mass deportation, on transgender attacks and the war on gender, on DEI and public education, on Europe and the latest news related to its myriad far right parties and would -be autocrats, and finally, a catch-all folder on the broader subject of autocracy and illiberalism and anything that falls into that, including the names of scholars and activists or books or ideas that merit further attention later. All of it being duly noted, but stored for later, when I can properly address it. When I regain some bandwidth.

I do this cut-and-paste thing automatically, quickly, fast enough to prevent it from really getting deep into my brain. I want to keep track, but I’m playing defense. I’ve benched myself for another ten days or so, and I’m determined to stay on the metaphorical sidelines while I make room for other things to read, to take delight in, to absorb and ruminate upon, or to do very little if that’s what I want to do. I’m off the clock, in other words, all the while noting the gathering storm clouds just above the tree line whenever I lift my had to look around. As a metaphor, then, I’m seeking sun, something to restore me and warm me up as an advance coat of inner defense against the coming tempest of Trump 2.0.

For Love and, for Country, Amy Sherald

Right now, we still have three days before the new year. A total of 23 ‘til the inauguration.

I’ve used my first ten days of holiday to think about personal resistance, which is how I’m thinking of my time here and my use of open time. I’m in a self-created moment of political education which I project will continue all year at least. Personal resistance calls for a reclaiming of personal space for my mind to be less full of daily news, to have new space to ingest, and flex mental muscles, and probably store a whole new library of information and thoughts as I go along. My eyes are open to anything that can serve as a positive lesson in effective responses to the assaults on democracy, both political and personal. But I’m also deliberately emptying out my brain of all the daily punditry and Twitter chatter and information and toxic right-wing energy I took in over the past year, immersed to the gills in all things Project 2025. I haven’t stopped getting dozens of great Substacks I read regularly on top of a few chosen news sources, but I’m only very selectively opening them. Mostly, I don’t.

So far, so good.

Over the past week, I actually managed to read two books, including a novel, and went to the movies, and saw a friend almost every day, and spent hours of the first part of the holiday making art-as-presents for my daughters — all items that had been on my to-do list for after the election. I did some cooking and I let myself scroll through the Best Reads of the New York Times to see the good long articles I missed these past months. I caught the terrific Kara Walker and Amy Sherald exhibits at SF Moma, including the above painting For Love, and for Country, a gorgeous riposte to Trump 2.0’s attacks on les gays in the military. Art as resistance, toujour.

I let myself stay up until 3 am trolling European museums online to see what is coming in 2025 in case I decide it’s a must-see. I also read articles about people’s favorite places to go in 2024, and read about why Malaga is the go-to place for Americans fleeing Trump versus, say, Lisbon or Vienna – prior top digital nomad choices. (The topic of where to possibly flee if the politically unbearable shit really hits the fan was a Christmas-Channukah party topic here in the Bay Area, too.) I researched international film festivals that might be happening in places that were warm in January, February, or March, and made a final decision to not go to the Berlin Film Festival in February (way too cold), even though it’s likely to be great and have fun queer parties, and I would have no reason to be there apart from the pure pleasure of my wanting to go. That last part is a reason to definitely go. Oh well. Next time.

That in essence is what my personal resistance vaca break looks like – an indulgence in fantasizing about where I might go or what I might do and what would be stimulating and exciting or fun and not about work necessarily but about creative talent and ideas and new energy, all of which I’m seeking to soak up as a kind of antidote to the return of the shitshow of Trump. I’m in for fun, in other words, and discovery, which I realize may strike others as odd or certainly surprising, given the terrible moment we face, and the seriousness of the political attacks.

I’ve been joking to friends all week, though I’m somewhat serious, that if they feel really depressed or scared or just really anxious about what’s ahead, then they should hang with me. Because I’m all about accepting reality but refocusing myself, at least intentionally, in order to invite light, and a lightness of energy, and political faith and curiosity, and whatever positive surprises may arrive alongside and in a parallel yin-yang dynamic, with the expected shitshow of Trump 2.0 and the weaponization of Project 2025.

I’m not being naïve or unrealistic about the gravity of what we face as I say this, either. People who are immigrants and lack paperwork are terrified about being deported; many wonder if it’s their last Christmas with their families. Young people who are Dreamers try to imagine being deported to countries of birth they left as infants, where they don’t speak the language or know anyone. Trans families living in red states are fast tracking moves to blue states. The threat of criminalization is terrible and real and disgusting and heartbreaking.

For all these attacks, I also note growing resistance. I see the start of a great mobilization. I’m not going to write about that here, now, but it makes me feel relief to see this major groundswell of organization and protection and legal defense unfolding in tandem with the threat of mass arrests of immigrants and stripping of civil rights to transgender Americans. Trump 2.0 has a major battle on its hands, this I can report already. Democracy will not stay silent or quiet. Not now.

But my attention has also pivoted to what is, or could be, also very compelling to me on the positive side of political possibility, which is the people and ideas and new organizing that arises in response to autocracy. I thought about that as I was watching the popular Dylan biopic with Timmy Chalamet, which captures a shifting moment of American political culture (without actually discussing the larger politics of the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement that was unfolding around Dylan. The movie is rather apolitical in that way, or at least implies Dylan mostly was, especially compared to say, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie.).

I’m acutely aware, as I think so many people are, that we are in this remarkable, uncharted moment of American history. And that’s what makes it so compelling, even as it’s full of dark stuff, meaning so much of what is truly ugly about American empire. Every attack will yield a counter-attack. As in the 60s and 80s and 90s, especially, the present moment is full of things cracking and cracking open, including political structures and assumptions. Trump’s win has cast the harshest light to date on the failure of the Democratic party and the two-party system, something that’s been building for years. It’s so clear that so many of the lefties who found their political home in the Gaza movement and refused to vote for Kamala are also those who remain enraged that the Democratic party never embraced Bernie Sanders and failed to change when it should have. Now, imho, there’s a lot more interest in alternatives to the two-party system than ever. That’s just my sense of it, my tea leaves read. We’re closer to autocracy, and because of that, we may be willing to try what we would not before. Some more representative political system to emerge in the future.

Yes, real change can take years, even decades, as Putin’s control of Russia shows us. And yet, as the toppling of Bashar Assad just revealed in Syria, and before that, the student protests that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule in Bangladesh, small acts of persistent civil resistance can also yield a moment of opening, and then suddenly, the seemingly invincible hardline regime topples like falling dominoes.

What I’m saying is that I’ve got my eyes trained on what new opening, what new visions, what new voices, may emerge as a result of the arrival of what others are calling a Trump oligarchy, with its Christian nationalist contours. It’s already such a remarkable spectacle. When I look back at our US history and revolutionary moments, or I look at prior chapters of autocracy elsewhere, I find myself more focused on learning who stepped up during those times, what emerged as a counter-current to the repression.

So that’s what I’m doing. I find myself very interested in what could happen as a result of our profound disillusion with the political world, and our total rejection of Trump and his wild cast of broligarchs – the Elons, and Viveks, and Peter Thiels – and the Project 2025 Christian end-times dominionists. Wild man Pete Hegseth. I am actively looking for the sharp activists in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Argentina, India who are busy organizing resistance to their hardline leaders. I’m looking around for the novelists, the creatives, the dramatists, the artists, who are responding. I’m feeling curiouser and curiouser a la Alice.

We are in such a remarkable moment. How we respond to it is what deserves our interest and attention; the rogues are secondary. What we do to claim our country is what I care about more than who is trying to take us back to some Handmaiden’s Tale of 1950s religious patriarchy.

So that’s me. That’s the light that I’m seeking out amid the grey and the dark clouds. What illuminates.

I don’t want to close this entry without taking note of what the week’s top story has been, if only to voice my ongoing frustration at the big media’s failure to report on it with the right focus. The headlines are gleefully capturing the first big fissure of Trump 2.0, which has pit what journos call Tech Maga against QAnon MAGA, or Elon Musk vs. Laura Loomer. The conflict erupted online, causing a MAGA convulsion, when the Indian-born tech bro Trump named to oversee AI for his administration, Sriram Krishnan, made the grievous error of saying that Trump needed to expand, not shut down, H-1B visas for so-called “elite” workers in order to attract top-tier engineers so the US could compete with China and India, among technology leaders.

Krishnan made a fatal mistake of insulting the MAGA base by suggesting that an American culture of “mediocrity” was one reason why the US produced too few great engineers and needed to import them. Elon Musk, now head of the totally-made up future Dept of Government Efficiency, DOGE, got involved by agreeing; so did his co-DOGE partner, Vivek Ramaswamy. Then Trump seemed to agree too.

All online hell then broke loose when far right media gadfly and provocateur Laura Loomer jumped into the ring, leading the MAGA call for a focus on an ‘America First’ hiring of only US engineers. She demanded that Trump end H-1B visas as part of his promise of a scorched-earth immigration policy. Never mind that Krishnan is a US citizen; he’s part of a wave of “third world invaders,” Loomer screeched on social media. A wave of racist anti-Indian and anti-Asian rhetoric has followed from all corners of MAGAland. Then Musk banned Loomer from X, taking away not only her online bully pulpit, but a source of ad income.

That really got MAGAland incensed. Suddenly Musk was the great censor that lefties has been warning about. He’s also called MAGA hardliners “contemptible fools” who must removed from the Republican Party. Fighting words indeed. As pundits declare, a new uncivil war is on, pitting traditional (read Q-Anon) MAGA against tech MAGA, and Trump has been backing his DOGE bros. All the while, the left and center of America are watching the right-wing dog fight implode, popcorn in hand, cheering.

But the story the media has failed to spotlight in all this is the fact that Trump’s position mimics Project 2025, which calls for increasing H-1B visas, and encourages immigration from European countries (code-read white and Christian over brown and Hindu or other non-Christians). That’s the sticky wicket here. The other critical story is white supremacy that underlies MAGA world — not the US vs. India or nativism vs. globalism. It’s America can only hire and be white. That is America First. But ny point is that Trump is not solely calling the shots: he’s following what his benefactors suggest, including the shadow billionaire cabinet of Leonard Leo and others who developed Project 2025. Money talks loudest in Trumpdom.

There’s a new twist today too: Loomer just apologized to Krihnan for “accidentally doxxing” him by releasing FEC records that suggested he donated to Kamala Harris. Score one for the tech bros and “President Musk” as critics have nicknamed him in an effort to needle Trump. Steve Bannon is now involved, raging against the Silicon Valley cabal, as he views them, and casting this as a class war. Nobody is talking much about the fact that Ramaswamy and some of the H-1B visa applicants are Hindu or non-Christian. But that is the other thing distressing Loomer et al. They want white Christians not brilliant brown tekkies who worship what they call false gods.

Anyway, I’ll keep saying it. If you want to know what Trump is doing or why, or why he chose a guy like Krishnan, pay closer attention to Project 2025. Who put big money into Project 2025? Leo’s Teneo Network tech bros, including cheerleader Peter Thiel. They coughed up big campaign bucks, in exchange for a tacit promise that Trump would have their Silicon Valley backs to make millions. HB-1 visas were part of the conversation, ‘cuz they rely on them. It’s all there.

Meantime, you may have seen the news stories about the big ag producers in Texas and other states who’ve let Trump know that they do not want him to carry out Project 2025’s suggestion of cutting seasonal visas for agricultural workers or the seasonal construction workforce. They’ve put forth figures to show the devastating economic impact cutting or curbing H-2A and H-2B visas will have on Texas and other states where they can’t keep up now with the demand for new homes, and where the cost of eggs will only go up if the field and factory farm labor force is rounded up and deported.

In response, Trump has privately reassured these corporate ag leaders that he’s just going to start by going after the really bad criminals – the Tren de Aragua street gang leaders from Venezuela, for starters. He just needs to give his MAGA base give red meat – some token of an immigration crackdown -- to satisfy them.

In other words, we are 23 days from the start of the new rogue administration and the MAGA camp is vying for power while Trump backpedals and wavers, seeking to please everyone and no one at the same time. He’s also facing stiff resistance from blue sanctuary state leaders -- governors and attorneys general and civil groups -- who are just ignoring or plan to refuse to cooperate with Trump 2.0 and ICE deportation orders.

Those are just some of the nuggets of resistance I’ve taken notice of this week. Among my favorite stories is one that is likely false: a gone-viral tweet announcing and inviting tuba players across America to attend the inauguration and drown out Trump’s speech. I thought: wow, someone took a page from Trump and MAGA’s disinformation strategy and is just putting out fake news and look, it’s making MAGAland go even more crazy.

The tuba: a weapon of political resistance. Inspiring.

The other story that I appreciate is the response of Danish leaders to Trump’s empire dream of owning Greenland, and perhaps trading it for Puerto Rico, which Trump doesn’t really consider part of the US. Trump claims America needs Greenland for strategic military reasons, never mind its mineral reserves. Give it to us, he said to the Danes. What a deal maker he is, right? Jayzus. Quel catastrophe. Greenland’s leaders not only reiterated that that the Arctic territory is not for sale, but kindly offered to take control of the US instead, to help the rest of us out. They also announced a double-digit $1.2 billion dollar increase in Danish krone in defense spending for Greenland. Take that Donald!

As I watch that drama unfold, virtual popcorn in hand, I immediately saw myself in my inauguration T-shirt and outfit: We are all Greenland. Or, I stand with Greenland. Maybe paired with a Queen Bey Cowboy Carter cowboy hat and a sparkly lasso. I missed Beyonce’s much heralded dominating brill Super Bowl half-time show, but I have enjoyed the sputtering of MAGAland complaints that Bey took prime time media attention away from Trump. I also love that her performance is a sly and clear rebuke and challenge to the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness of America’s cowboy mythology and that she celebrates and reclaims Black country history and culture. I love thinking about all the Laura Looper MAGA followers following her X complaint-tweets about brown foreign bro tech “termites” and H-1B visas as they watched Queen Bey and her half-time show slay.

Clearly, we are in the wild west and the real show hasn’t even really begun. Saddle up.