Hopper

A Bug's Life, Pixar's action comedy for the ages, introduced a villain for the ages, Hopper, a power hungry grasshopper actually possessing no power at all when the ants finally wake up and realize said villain is a paper tiger after all, a reality that may actually mirror what's beginning to happen to Agent Orange now that Kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden in the most important election this country is having since the Civil War. With this being said, the fever dream of The Donald may finally be ending if  Buttigieg's right regarding the insane, would be dictator who aspires to be king, if the orange menace wins the presidency in 2024.

Photo illustration by Devin Oktar Yalkin

This past month has been one of the most consequential and dizzying periods in modern American politics. It began with President Biden’s disastrous debate in late June. Then came an assassination attempt against former President Trump. A week later, President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. And now Harris is already the de facto Democratic nominee.

What I’m hearing you say, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is if Donald Trump is defeated in this election, then perhaps the Republican Party can be freed from his grip?

I think so. I made myself watch the first couple Republican presidential debates, and we had a lot of Republican candidates this cycle. There were still some things that I thought were pretty fringe, and just about everything I heard I disagreed with, but apart from some of the darkness of Vivek’s populism, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a more normal Republican Party. Look, we have fooled ourselves many times before into thinking that the fever would break. We thought it would happen before he was elected, when the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed that he had boasted about sexual assault. We thought it would happen when he was defeated, but he wasn’t in 2016. We thought it might happen after Jan. 6, and it very, very nearly did. So many of the people who are now kissing up to him basically turned their back on him then. We got so close to the fever breaking, but it didn’t quite break, because Republicans found that their access to power still depended on their standing with Donald Trump. If he leads this party to defeat a third time, I believe that the self-interest, just the internal power dynamics of the G.O.P., the very power dynamics that have kept them enthralled to him, even though so many of them know better(notably including, by the way, JD Vance, who, back when he was speaking truthfully and for himself, referred to Donald Trump as an idiot and compared him to an opioid, which is an exceptionally dark thing to say about somebody if you are from or connected to Appalachia as JD Vance is, right? And that was in public. In private, comparing him to Hitler, and now turning around and supporting him) — all of that finally breaks loose if they realize that attaching yourself to Donald Trump doesn’t just destroy your character; it destroys your access to power.

If is a big word ...