A recent extended social media exchange brought to the fore the attempt by many to explain what is going on in the Trump admin. There seems to be two schools of thought on what is happening:

First is the OMG! They are trying to crash the economy! which consists of the idea that they’re deliberately driving us towards a major depression to rival the Great Depression ostensibly so that billionaires can buy up the bankrupt business and establish The Age of Global Oligarchy.

The second is the OMG! These are all blithering idiots who have no idea what they are doing! which is self explanatory. I mean, have you followed Pete Hegseth’s and RFK’s antics in the news? Have you HEARD Caroline Leavitt speak?

To me, the GOP, and especially the cabinet, divides into two broad camps: the useful idiots and the movers and shakers.

The Useful Idiots of Our Time

The useful idiots are Day Drinking Pete, Signal Spokesmodel Waltz, Boobert, Mad Dog Greene, Lil Marco, Pam “$25,000 Same As In Town” Bondi, RFK, Mehmet Oz, and the bottomless pit of seething stupid, gullible, and self-serving short-sightedness. Their role is to be a distraction much like the clowns in a rodeo are their to distract the angry bulls when their riders get thrown.

Signalgate is a great example of how the useful idiot brigade works. While the regular and frequent use of Signal for communicating sensitive government information has seriously damaged our national security, it has two more important purposes: (1) it provides a massive outrage distraction for everyone on the left looking to score cheap social media shares, likes, and follows to light their hair on fire over and (2) it avoids any record of their, likely, illegal communications. I guess it also fulfills whatever contractual obligations Trump has to Putin and Xi for supplying them with ALL of the US’s secrets, too, but that is just Trump’s grift quota being met.

Signalgate fits the government by Keystone Kop bit that the GOP has been perfecting since W kicked off the new millennia with bookend disasters to his term, 9/11 and the Great Recession, by avoiding any and all governing responsibilities. It shows us just how insulated they think they are from any real accountability — they don’t think they’re losing another election, y’all. The idiocracy’s job is to set us all on fire, keep us just distracted and bickering enough for the firestorm to be unstoppable, and, then, dance upon the ashes singing “Hallelujah,” or swing from the gallows as the mob with pitchforks and torches comes for them.

The Movers and Shakers Doing the Real Damage

The movers and shakers are those who are actively directing the destruction of our democracy, rule of law, and economy. They are the Project 2025 architects and cheerleaders. Stephen “Goebbles” Miller, Howard “Goring” Lutnick, and Comrade Tulsi Gabbard. Elon Musk belongs in this group as well given the amount of sheer destruction he has wrought to our government. Whether he is motivated by his own greed or by his pursuit of his own technocratic nightmarish vision of dystopia, I don’t know. Probably, some combination of both.

The people who are doing the most damage to our democracy, standing in the world, and economy are not the ones you see in the for-profit media, but they are the ones making the decisions. Kilmar Abrego Garcia makes the perfect example. Sent to an El Salvadoran gulag due to administrative error, the administration is refusing to do anything to get him returned in spite of a judges direct order to do so. Even though Merde-A-Lardo faced Kristi “Dog Killer” Noem cosplayed an administrative official at the prison, she is just another in the long conga line of useful idiots that the admin dances out for the cameras when needed. Undoubtedly, the real culprit is Tom “Himmler” Homan.

Knowing this basic division really means that Congress, the for-profit press, and social media mavens should waste as little energy and time as possible on the useful idiots and their antics. Some of it has to be attended to, like Signalgate, but most of it should just be ridiculed and forgotten about.

We should be focused on the real damage being done: DOGE destroying government departments, privatization of Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs, the tariffs, and deportations. These are the things that are doing the real irrevocable damage. These are the issues that our contact with our folks in Congress should center upon.

Trump and the oligarchs are relying on the Explosive Diarrhea of Falsehood to keep us all gagging and wallowing in the filth of misinformation and disinformation while they usher in The Age of Global Oligarchy and create a pseudo-democratic, single-party, minority-rule autocratic dystopia like they have in Russia right here in the good ol’ USA! Don’t be distracted by that. Keep your eye on the issues that matter and do what you can, when you can to disrupt them.

Image Attribution

This image was found on m1m3m3‘s Deviant Art page using a DuckDuckGo Creative Commons image search.