A massive earthquake is coming and the GOP has only one move left

(REUTERS)

Fear Is the Platform When Power Has No Defense

The Party in Charge

Republicans gathered in Dallas as the party controlling the presidency and the House. That is the essential fact beneath the spectacle. Donald Trump sets federal policy. Steve Scalise leads the House majority. Republican lawmakers passed Trump’s budget legislation. The consequences flowing from tariffs, war, immigration raids, and safety-net cuts belong to officials exercising power—not to Democrats caricatured from a convention stage.

The gathering’s message was nevertheless relentless: Democrats are “evil,” communist, anarchist, and determined to build a “socialist hellscape.” That was not a governing argument. It was an attempt to replace scrutiny of Republican decisions with fear of an internal enemy.

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A Record They Would Rather Not Discuss

The reporting describes a party facing public dissatisfaction with several of Trump’s signature policies, including tariffs, the Iran war, ICE raids, and costly renovation projects in Washington. It also notes red-state legislatures struggling with holes in safety-net programs created by the administration’s new budget.

Republican candidates reportedly said little about that record. The omission is the point. When a governing party cannot confidently defend what it has done with power, it has two choices: change course or change the subject. In Dallas, it chose the latter.

Trump boasted about tariffs, celebrated work on a White House ballroom, and promised victory in a war he initiated. But the broader program placed Democratic “extremism” at its center. Republican officials were not confused about their campaign strategy. They selected an imaginary Bolshevik emergency because their actual exercise of power had become politically costly.

The Scapegoat Does the Governing Party’s Work

Calling congressional Democrats communists and anarchists shifts attention away from identifiable decisions made by identifiable officials. “Socialism” becomes a catchall accusation broad enough to absorb every voter anxiety and empty enough to require no evidence.

This is propaganda’s practical value. It does not need to explain why tariffs are unpopular, why an overseas war became a liability, or why state governments are scrambling to patch damaged programs. It only needs to make the opposition seem more frightening than the governing party’s record.

The weaker actor in this story is not the administration directing federal policy. It is the opposition being blamed for a country shaped by Republican choices. Yet the campaign asks voters to judge Democrats as if they had imposed Trump’s agenda—and to treat Republicans as bystanders bravely responding to the resulting disorder.

Fear Is an Instrument of Power

The source frames Trump as returning to a familiar politics of fear, especially around immigration and crime. But “fear” can sound like a campaign mood or rhetorical habit. Here it functions more concretely: it shields institutional power from accountability.

The language of evil, revolution, and national ruin turns an election into a loyalty test. Policy disagreement becomes subversion. Opposition becomes contamination. Once that frame is accepted, the governing party no longer has to justify cuts, raids, tariffs, or war. Its failures can be recast as minor imperfections beside the supposedly existential danger posed by its critics.

That is authoritarian political logic: the leader’s actions are exempt from ordinary judgment because his opponents are portrayed as enemies of the nation itself.

The Alibi of Electoral Anxiety

Republican anxiety about the midterms is presented as the setting for this escalation. It is also the motive. Trump’s reported unpopularity and declining support on the economy, national security, and immigration create a direct incentive to prevent the election from becoming a referendum on Republican governance.

The party’s answer is not subtle. It is trying to make material consequences politically invisible by flooding the campaign with ideological panic. The more voters discuss vanished benefits, unpopular raids, economic disruption, or war, the weaker the Republican position becomes. The more they debate whether Democrats are secret Bolsheviks, the less time remains to examine who actually holds office and what those officials have done.

The System Rewards Manufactured Enemies

This episode reveals a durable pattern: powerful institutions evade judgment by assigning responsibility downward and outward. The administration acts; legislators enable it; state governments absorb the damage; opponents receive the blame.

The Republican campaign emerging from Dallas is therefore more than overheated election rhetoric. It is an accountability-avoidance system. Concrete failures are converted into abstract menace, governing decisions disappear behind ideological labels, and officials with command of the state present themselves as victims of people who do not control it.

When power cannot defend its consequences, it manufactures an enemy large enough to hide them.

Thanks to Alter Net

Source: A massive earthquake is coming and the GOP has only one move left

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We warned them.We told them.We shouted from the rooftops.We plead.We begged.They didn’t listen.Now, we all will suffer.Y’all know what to do, right?VOTE BLUE! 💙Vote as if your life — nay, our country — depend on it.Because, this time, and every time, it does.