"It's The Absurdity, Stupid"

MAGA's recent ridiculous attacks could be what wakes some people up from their Trump cult trance

The MAGA Co-Absurdists in Chiefs

Many MAGA theories, at their core, have an absurdity to them. But it was often in the background, laced with conspiratorial nonsense as opposed to smothered with it. This was because MAGA reached powerful heights in government, so they had to at least seem like they were serious. They needed the modicum of seriousness so that their grievances would get aired and given the light of day by the so-called “serious” media. They held Congressional hearings and spoke in serious tones to invoke legitimacy.

Democrats on these House committees relentlessly showcased the underlying absurdities, so they largely went nowhere. Biden was never impeached. Harris was never investigated nor punished for not invoking the 25th Amendment. Mayorkas was impeached, but that’s as far as that went, as it was DOA at the Senate’s doorstep.

But this was all background rumblings, sort of like the auditions for the not-ready-for-prime-time conspiracies. Would any of them break through and gain respectable momentum for election season? The hope by Republicans is that something would eventually have legs, which they could exploit to damage the Democratic candidate’s chances of victory.

Nothing ever did break through, so MAGA has been stuck with “on the go” exploitation, taking maximum advantage of anything and everything that happened to pop up in the moment. Assassination attempt; one-day stock market crash; one bad month’s jobs report; gunman in the vicinity of a golfing Trump; missing cats in Springfield, OH. According to them, we’ve been on the verge of WWIII, a mass invasion, the fall of the Republic, you name it. The frenetic pace of the political attacks was matched only by the pace of the news cycle.

Kernels of truth

The thing about it is that you could make out some logic in these MAGA attacks, no matter how heinous they were. If you’re prone to view migrants with a skeptical eye, then you could easily blame them for missing pets.

This accusation was, of course, absurd, but did make some logical sense. There was at least a tiny bit of believable cause and effect in there. I mean, other cultures do eat weird things that we don’t. Like, ewww, am I right?

And it’s widely understood that to effectively oppose the party in power, anything and everything negative that happens under their watch is fair game.

These days, if the stock market goes down…. if one country attacks another on the other side of the world…..if a train randomly derails—then it was surely something Joe Biden or Kamala Harris did, probably while dancing around a giant chalk pentacle with blood dripping from their mouths.

All those things are extreme and conspiratorial but do at least have some resemblance to reality. One could argue that an economic policy being implemented is making stocks a less attractive investment; a diplomatic error could result in tensions that start a skirmish overseas; a train derailing could possibly be the result of some faulty regulation or employment law. There are often tiny kernels of truth that can be exploited and exploded to account for the whole effect.

Depths of absurdity

What Republicans have done over the last few weeks, however, is so far out there that there are no kernels of truth. There aren’t even quarks of truth. They are so unbelievable as to have the potential to snap a segment of the MAGA cult out of their trances.

Let’s start with the MAGA claims about FEMA. Soon after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on parts of the southeast, including devastating flooding in western North Carolina, MAGA Republicans immediately started attacking FEMA, not for inefficiency or incompetence, which would have had the necessary kernel of truth to be effective; no, they attacked FEMA for giving money and resources only to illegal migrants.

Where did that come from? In all of FEMA’s history, when have they not been on the scene at a natural disaster, assisting anyone and everyone in the vicinity? When have they not immediately signaled their intention to supply financial assistance, and publicized the help that is available to anyone in need?

Have they always done this perfectly? No. That’s where the kernel of truth comes in. MAGA could have used this as an opportunity to play on people’s fears of government incompetence and distrust of effective government assistance. That probably would have been effective. It may have even swayed a few people still on the fence with their vote to go with the guy that wants to be a dictator so that he can bypass bureaucratic inefficiencies. Getting things done quickly is the most attractive thing about a dictatorship, after all.

But instead of the traditional attacks that seem rooted in reality, they went with something so fantastical as to not be believed. In their chosen method of criticism, FEMA is going out of their way to physically hand over, perhaps even air drop, cash money and food to people that are in this country illegally. They are wading through the flood to only the houses where undocumented people live to start the rebuilding process, according to this account. These victims apparently didn’t even have to apply or wait….FEMA officials were practically on site prior to the storm, in anticipation of the damage that was obviously going to occur (neither the location nor the extent of the damage was obvious to anyone).

It takes about two seconds of thought, something even a cultist is capable of, to recognize the absurdity of this concept. It speaks strongly to what Trump and MAGA think about their own voters and undecideds. Basically, it says “we think you are all complete dumbasses”.

Let’s look at the next fantastical claim by MAGA, also on the heels of Hurricane Helene. This was about the weather and climate change. No, they didn’t come around to finally recognizing the threat that climate change is to the human race. Or rather, they sort of did, but not in the way you might think. I wrote a nice summary about this in my last post, which you can read by clicking the below image.

Led my Marjorie Taylor Greene, MAGA started pushing the idea that the government literally can control specific weather events and direct them where they want in order to inflict damage to those they wish. It’s one of the most cartoonishly ridiculous claims that any political movement has tried to legitimize. And yet, it has picked up momentum among the MAGA faithful.

They could have just gone with the idea that illegal immigrants take up American resources that native-born folks need. Again, there’s a kernel of truth there, and this has been their most effective political play for several years. Why not just keep exploiting that with increasing intensity up through the election?

But no, they had to take it to otherworldly levels that are almost impossible for anyone to actually believe. Grown adults would have to believe they are living in a James Bond movie, or a superhero comic book, for this to be effective.

A numbers game

The phrase “overplaying their hand” is grossly overused these days, but that’s exactly what they are doing. They are so confident in their base that they think that any stretch of the imagination is tenable, and therefore apparently no theory, no matter how insane, is off the table.

However, it seems reasonable to me that there is a point where some percentage, perhaps .01%, maybe even .1%, of the MAGA cult will be shook out of their hypnotic state due to these latest unbelievable attacks. A point where this is going just a bit too far many self-respecting humans, who will consider giving up on the track they’ve chosen for their lives for the last 8-9 years. They will, after all, have lives to live after Trump is gone and MAGA fever has subsided. There will be family members to talk to, other humans to interact with. Can they really say with a straight face they were proud of believing these claims?

I can already hear you saying “Thinker, come on, don’t you get it? They are all irrational cultists they’ll never accept reality. They are too far gone. They’ll only accept what Donald Trump tells them.”

Yes, but would it really be 100% of them? I think, realistically, it could be 99%, or 99.9%, or even 99.99% of them. But that .01-1% could make all the difference necessary in the election. Keep in mind that .01-1% of 75,000,000 (the number of people that voted for Trump) is 7,500-750,000. If 2024 looks anything like 2020, where a couple states were decided by just over 10,000 votes, these people could be the deciding factor. Even if they decide they can’t bring themselves to vote for Harris and stay home, that’s still potentially significant.

I personally believe Kamala Harris will win the election comfortably. But in the event it’s much closer than I expect, any movement whatsoever from one side to the other, or even one side to the couch, could mean everything.

In an appropriate sign of our times, the misuse of extreme absurdity in a presidential campaign could determine whether or not America changes course from its proud history of being the world’s beacon of democracy and opportunity.

This year, “it’s the absurdity, stupid”.