Burn Down the Mission

By James Moore  

“I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists).

Every generation of Americans has faced the moment when the republic their ancestors bled for demanded something of them in return. The Civil War generation answered with rifles. The Greatest Generation answered on the beaches of Normandy. Our generation’s test is more mundane in its theater but no less consequential in its stakes. Ours happens at the voting booth, the county courthouse, the state legislature, the school board meeting held on a Tuesday night in a church gymnasium that smells of industrial cleaner and old folding chairs. The founders called it self-governance. What we are about to decide is whether we deserve it.

We have to begin by acknowledging the fact that Republican Party and its bastard child MAGA must be destroyed. I don’t believe there is a common ground on which to meet. I’ve not met a single MAGA maven who thinks anything their president has done is wrong. They consider him God’s imperfect messenger, which is why they and their party must be destroyed, not just defeated. Whatever comes next for conservatives cannot look anything like the current totem pole around which they dance. The language of polite political commentary has spent thirty years dancing around this conclusion while the patient bled out on the table.

The party cannot be reformed, rehabilitated, or reasoned with. Its current form is a political form of ebola to the American experiment, and the MAGA movement that seized it must die alongside it, defeated so thoroughly, at so many levels of American government, that those who survive are compelled to either build something genuinely new or accept permanent irrelevance. The founders warned us about the hijacking of democratic institutions by men whose appetite for power exceeded their reverence for the law. Hell, they didn’t just warn us; they begged us to be diligent, aware, and involved. We should have listened to history instead of 30-second TV commercials without basis in fact and funded by corporate interests.

But we are here now, and here is what here looks like.

The Trump administration has set aside $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people convicted of attacking the United States Capitol. The dollar figure is a message, and an insult to what’s left of our democracy. Researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations confirmed it immediately. The name of the fund is a winking salute to the rioters who stormed the building chanting “1776,” who carried flags bearing that number, who drafted planning documents titled “1776 Returns” while laying out schemes to seize federal buildings and force a new election. These are the people who beat police officers with flagpoles. Who smeared feces on the walls of the People’s House. Who erected gallows outside and chanted for the hanging of the Vice President. And the President of the United States, on the first day of his second term, pardoned over 1,500 of them, wiped out $1.3 billion in court-ordered restitution they owed their victims, and then built them a tip jar with your money.

One of those pardoned men, Andrew Paul Johnson of Florida, went on to molest two preteen children. He allegedly tried to bribe one of his victims with promises of a Trump payout, telling the child he was owed millions for his heroic service on January 6. Former federal prosecutors called the fund a signal to the MAGA movement to commit crimes for Trump and then get paid. That is their covenant and the Republican Party in the spring of 2026, and every elected Republican in America has looked at it and decided they can live with it. Not one of them has stood up and said otherwise. The silence is its own answer, and why the GOP, which enabled our current crisis, must cease to exist.

This did not happen because Donald Trump is uniquely monstrous, though, demonstrably, he is. This has transpired because the Republican Party built the road he drove in on and bought him a luxury vehicle to steer, and he kept turning it to the right. Decade by decade, trade by corrupt trade, the GOP sold the Lincoln legacy for the Southern Strategy along with fiscal responsibility for tax cuts engineered to make billionaires weep with gratitude. A constitutional backbone bartered off for an executive power theory so expansive it would have made Richard Nixon blush. The Republican Party’s commitment to democratic outcomes disappeared the moment enough of its voters decided that democracy was only legitimate when they won.

Trump didn’t hijack this party. He just stepped in front of everyone that was marching it toward a moral and political cliff. The tariffs are the clearest proof of what MAGA immorality has produced. Without a vote of Congress or a public debate or a shred of economic modeling that survived contact with reality, Trump launched a trade war against the entire industrialized world, a war of pure choice born of vanity and his pathological need to be seen as the toughest man in every room. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics spent a year watching the data and then stated it with the clinical disconnect that economists reserve for things they find almost too depressing to quantify. The tariffs, he concluded, have done “significant damage to the economy.” A huge portion of American families are living in recession conditions. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have said as much. The chief economist at UBS colorfully insisted America was hacking off its own limb. Even Ted Cruz, a man who has spent his career treating his own dignity as an optional accessory, admitted that if the tariffs sank the economy, the 2026 elections would be a “bloodbath” for Republicans.

They sank the economy and the blood is running in the bathtub. My belief is that what decides whether we survive as a nation depends entirely on if the American people are paying attention. What Trump and his authoritarian lickspittles are hoping is that the voters have made their peace with the long, grinding numbness that comes from being horrified but without the power to change anything. Fascists and all authoritarians count on that public weariness like it’s their pension.

The SAVE Act, meanwhile, reveals what Republicans plan to do when they conclude the political winds are about to shift. Sold as a safeguard against non-citizen voting, a crime so rare that investigators in Utah, Louisiana, Texas, and Nevada found essentially zero verified instances of it, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is the most transparent voter suppression scheme since the poll tax, and considerably more sophisticated. The Brennan Center calculated that over 21 million Americans lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate. Roughly half the country doesn’t have a passport. Seventy million women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates would face bureaucratic gauntlets just to exercise the franchise they were born into. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called it Jim Crow 2.0, and the label hums like a tune for the times.

The House passed the SAVE Act 220 to 208. Zero Republicans dissented. Zero. The party looked at a bill designed to strip millions of eligible citizens of the vote and every single one of its members decided that was just fine. The Republican Party, having run out of persuasive arguments for its agenda, has decided that the cleaner, final solution to save its failed polity, is to shrink the electorate until the remaining shreds line up with MAGA. Disagreement is viewed as a disease. This is the move of a party that has stopped believing in its own ideas and started believing only in its own survival, and the pathological lying of its leader.

The MAGA movement, though, will only outlast Trump if we let it. The personality cult structured around grievance, sustained by manufactured outrage, and wielded against the very institutions it claims to revere, must not be allowed to survive. If conservatism is to have any future in American politics, MAGA and the current GOP must self-immolate. Not even its ashes should be allowed to be blown into the wind. MAGA will not moderate when Trump leaves the stage because it was never about him, though he is the most useful vessel American resentment has found in a generation. The resentment predates him, however, and will survive him, hunting for its next container, which we can anticipate will be younger, more disciplined, more familiar with the machinery of government that this administration has been quietly disassembling. The time to defeat it is now, before it learns everything it needs to know, and much of that responsibility lies with the people who have allowed Trump to do what he wants without consequences.

Trump has killed American conservatism and replaced it with a political cult that serves his ego and wallet. A new GOP, which will take a generation or two for viability, must be a conservatism that truly conserves things. Institutions. Democratic norms. The rules of engagement that allow a free people to disagree without one side deciding the other side shouldn’t be allowed to vote. A party that competes for the public’s trust rather than engineering its own majority through suppression and intimidation. A party that would never, under any conceivable set of circumstances, write checks to the people who attacked the Capitol. That party is worth building, but it will take time, and the first requirement is to dismantle and burn to the ground the MAGA movement and the GOP that enabled its ascension.

The men counting on our exhaustion right now, who set up the slush fund, passed the voter suppression bill, blew up the global trading system on a whim and left us holding the bill, they are betting that we are tired, and, of course, we are tired of their evil and greed. They aren’t too worried though because they believe cynicism has won and that we have concluded the whole enterprise is rotten and there is no point in fighting a rigged game. Damn sure seems that way, doesn’t it?

Despair is not wisdom, though, but they have turned it into a weapon they are pointing at all of us. We are the consequence they fear. The question that remains, the only question that has ever really mattered in a democracy, is whether enough voters will show up to put an end to the depredations being visited upon a once hopeful republic. We need to vote like the union depends on it, because it does.

And the people trying to stop us know that better than we do.

 

 

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

 

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

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