MAGA’s strategy

He doesn't tell people he broke a lot of it and

has no intention of ever fixing it for us

The MAGA 3-step plan

An article, The GOP’s 3-Step Scam: Break the Country, Blame Others, Then Claim Only They Can Fix It, published by Common Dreams nicely states a major part of MAGA’s authoritarian-kleptocrat strategy. The title is self-explanatory. The article fleshes it out commenting that MAGA creates crises, makes working Americans suffer while (1) rewarding billionaires with more wealth and power, and (2) blaming Dems for their wreckage. Now, while they are in campaign mode they say that Trump and MAGA politicians are the only people who can fix the vast damage. Obviously, MAGA demagoguery conveniently ignores the fact that most of the damage, maybe ~97%, is caused by MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic politics and policies.

A toxic blast from the past: Carl Rove rises again!

In addition to the MAGA 3-step scam, the war on democracy and truth also includes coddling of criminals via Trump’s pardons-for-profit grift, and MAGA’s demagogic appeals to kleptocrats, oligarchs, bigots, racists, and extremists. Speaking of welcoming extremists into the MAGA party, a San Antonio Current article, Karl Rove says Republican Party is being taken over by ‘Nazis’, conveys blunt criticisms from a surprising source.[1] Rove never seemed to be bothered by extremism, or sophisticated, reality-trashing demagoguery.

In an extremely rare moment of candor from a MAGA-aligned elite, Rove is quoted: “If [U.S. Sen.] John Cornyn were the nominee, this race would be over. But when you’ve got a guy [Ken Paxton] that has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of improvements in his house from a corrupt business guy whom he does favors. Can you make this shit up? ….. I mean, really. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’”

Well, yeah, some of us could make up morally rotted stuff approximately this, especially after Trump’s treasonous 1/6 coup attempt and the 2024 elections putting the traitor-kleptocrat back in office. But opinions on this differ a lot.

Q: About how important is MAGA’s 3-step plan compared to everything else in the overall scheme of MAGA’s goal to empower and advance authoritarianism and kleptocracy, unimportant, moderately important, highly important, dominant, etc.?

Footnote:

1. One confused member of the public fretted: It’s really really confusing seeing this. I always thought Karl Rove was a Nazi so I am perplexed. I’m an older millennial. Back in the W era, all of us anywhere near the left, watched as this guy and his crew used the Iraq war to drive a wedge into society. If you weren’t for it, you were unamerican and filth. They finished what the southern strategy started – brought in racist backwoods idiots, religious zealots, etc. thinking they were easy votes and they could control them later. You can’t start using the “us vs them = good vs evil” messaging and be surprised when the new “us” start taking control. All the rest of us saw this shit coming in 2003-2004. It was so obvious. How did they not understand this would be the outcome?

Trump and MAGA aren’t “taking over” the GOP. MAGA is the natural end result of decades of GOP practices and policies. This includes the “us vs them” and “we are good; they are evil” as well as “never compromise” and many other aspects of standard Republican and radical extremism. Karl Rove is very much responsible for this.

Isn’t a little blast of history like this refreshing to help the mind maintain context and good feng-shui?

Some info sources:

ASYMMETRIC CONSTITUTIONAL HARDBALL — Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Administrative Sabotage — This Article offers an account of the “what, why, and how” of administrative sabotage that answers those questions. It contends that sabotage reflects a distinct mode of agency action that is more permanent, more destructive, and more democratically illegitimate than more-studied forms of maladministration. In contrast to an agency that shirks its statutory duties or drifts away from Congress’s policy goals, one engaged in sabotage aims deliberately to kill or nullify a program it administers. Agencies sabotage because presidents ask them to.