On a daily basis, one might wonder what the latest headline is going to be, the latest news out of the Oval Office and this sad and tragic entity people call an administration. Or regime, cabal, whatever.

On a daily basis, many of us roll our eyes, offer up heavy sighs or emit long, profane utterances because it’s difficult to believe we could find ourselves in such a predicament. Again. And this time on steroids.

“Clown car” is cliché anymore. We’re running out of ways to describe the lunacy, the incompetence, the sheer magnitude of awfulness. Pretenders, fish out of water—most descriptors come up short when trying to capture this intentional placement of such a cadre of misfits.

What we’re witnessing is what can happen when a group of malcontented, cold-hearted, angry fringe players have time to work on a plan. They find their needy, vengeful child, their hapless front man, and then feed him what he needs to say, who he needs in place. They throw competent, responsive governance out the window and replace it with self-serving indulgence and wanton destructiveness.

Their tools are minimal: time-consuming and costly litigation at every turn, and heavy-handedness. Fear. It’s a formidable attempt at running into the ground a perfectly good experiment in government of and by and for the people.

They can’t prevail.

It’s both fitting, and ironic bordering on tragic, that we’ve arrived at the 250^th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord and find ourselves facing the prospect of fighting an enemy from within, a homegrown megalomaniac who dreams of being king. An authoritarian wannabe who counts Vladimir Putin and his ilk as heroic role models. He likes their style, cares way more about emulating their tactics than tending to the republic.

To no one’s surprise, the voters who put him in office matter little to him. Legitimate, capable governance matters little to him. He’s just a kid in a candy store, drunk on the power and how people prostrate themselves in his presence.

He’s also a willing surrogate, putty in the hands of the real masterminds of this assault on the republic that we are actively being challenged to keep.

It’s always running in the background. It’s always here. A relentless hum, a buzzing in our ears.

Even if it’s a good day, for whatever reason, it rears its ugly head at some point, like a chronic headache, an unwanted pall that settles in and ruins the vibe. It sometimes feels like we’re all living on borrowed time, like we’re trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy, hoping we’re not seeing what we’re seeing, maybe sticking our heads in the sand, or plugging our ears and singing “la, la, la…” while the foundation crumbles around us.

There is a growing sense of inevitability, though, because the cast of black hats in Washington D.C. are intentionally thwarting the rule of law, thumbing their noses at it, and getting away with it. Who can stop them, and what’s it gonna take?

Sure, there are demonstrations nationwide. People are unhappy and letting that be known. But doesn’t everyone also know that violence is likely to be where this is heading?

It seems we’re taking every step to ward that off, to hold it off. But what are the options when Trump ignores the SCOTUS rulings and in general scoffs at the Constitution and circumvents everything created to avoid this exact scenario? What happens when someone attempts to enforce the laws and find Trump in contempt? Does he cue the January 6 pardonees to make trouble because their time has finally arrived? Does he have sway over our armed forces and law enforcement in general—enough to get them to turn on their fellow countrymen and women? It could be like Kent State, on steroids, and then it’s a snowball running down a steep incline from there.

What should boil everyone’s blood is that the cracked minds who conceived Project 2025 are likely to have anticipated most of what has unfolded thus far, including the anti-oligarchy tour and the nationwide protests and the SCOTUS rulings and all the roadblocks people have attempted to put up. Roberts, Vought, Vance, Miller, Bannon—they all want revolution, and they don’t care how it unfolds.

Remember what Kevin Roberts said back before the election, about an ongoing second American revolution that will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be…”– as if we’re all supposed to take what’s currently happening sitting down?

What should boil our blood is that there were plain-as-day, bright and bold and massive signs of foreboding all along the way. And voters either ignored or blew right past them, electing a nightmare with teeth this time around.

Limited media access, huh? Sounds like someone is a-scayewed.

Come on, Donald. You don’t get the concept, do you? You’re so thin-skinned and ill-equipped that it hurts you to the core when someone finds fault or simply disagrees with you. You’re easily dented. It might have occurred to you by now, but in case it hasn’t… did you ever think that maybe you’re in the wrong line of work?

You shouldn’t be POTUS. You shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office. Presidents of the United States need to roll with the punches and take the heat from people who are legitimately hurting and angry. Presidents, whether fair or not, are often the focal point of the anger and frustration of the people they serve.

But you, of course, don’t really serve anyone. Elections don’t matter; the Constitution doesn’t matter; the will of the people doesn’t matter. You lie to get what you want, and the people are left hanging. It’s always been a one-way street with you, hasn’t it?

“Feed me,” you beg. “Look at me, adore me, indulge me. Let me stand at a microphone and pontificate nonsensically and irrelevantly while you give me your undivided attention. Please?”

To hear Rachel Maddow tell it, the assault is on, and has been since before Trump took office. The Heritage Foundation’s deranged brainchild is finding its footing, currently focused on bringing the nation’s institutions of higher learning to their knees, freezing grant money and other funding under the sham pretense of rooting out anti-Semitism, trying to put Columbia and Cornell and Harvard and the rest out of business and selling the real estate, or at least hobbling them to the point that they have no voice, can no longer produce graduates with heads on their shoulders and functioning bullshit meters that can assess Project 2025 for what it is: an ugly, dystopian, oppressive tool of paranoid tyrants and convenient Christians.

It should be clear by now that Matt Gaetz’s nomination was a mere trial balloon, as if the powers that be were testing the waters, and trying to make the rest who amazingly made it through the confirmation process look… normal?

Anyway, if they get their way, there will be many fewer around who are savvy and brave enough to point to Kevin Roberts or Russell Vought or JD Vance or Steve Bannon and the rest and convince anyone that these are the bad guys.

Ms. Maddow is smart and thorough and insightful, but she’s been raising her voice a lot lately, alarmed and trying to sound the alarm, highlighting all the protests big and small, in an attempt at giving her listeners both a little hope but also a warning that this is an actual emergency of the first magnitude.

If we don’t awaken now, it’ll be a case of waking up one morning in the not-so-distant future and discovering the hard way that everything familiar and dependable, everything that once made sense, is gone. Just like that.

Trump and the rest truly don’t care about America or anyone who lives here. They only care about themselves and the power they can acquire and wield. Their “new world order” is nothing more than America eviscerated, in isolation and ruins, and their pockets lined. There are, apparently, a lot of people willing to sell their souls.

Voters thought it was all about the price of eggs and their pocketbooks? Not even close.