I can’t look away. Trump is back and for my mental health, I would be better off digging a bunker in my backyard by hand, then crawling into it with a bottle of pinot noir. As a political normie, one who loves the noble experiment in liberal democracy and occasionally flies the stars and stripes next to my garage door, I am fearful that all the guardrails are now gone. A well-oiled team of authoritarian adjacent apparatchiks will join Trump’s malfeasance and blundering stupidity in this second term. Hell, the arrogant pricks published the plan of how they will dismantle our state. While Trump will be the headline, the real threat is, as is almost always the case, the true believers whose names you and I may never know. However, given what is coming (multiply your worst case by 10), I have a plan and you will not like it.

First define the terms:

Constructive: Serving a useful purpose; tending to build up.

Nihilism: The rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.

That’s right. I am going to approach Trump 47 as a constructive nihilist. Hear me out.

Because Biden and the Democrats ignored the voters, MAGA is now in charge. They have all three branches of government. I don’t believe Americans were fooled or are vile morons for supporting MAGA. I believe the data shows that in a change election; they were not offered a change. The MAGA victory resulted from Democratic hubris. But here’s the good news: Trump and MAGA oversee EVERYTHING. At noon on Monday, there is no hiding behind the Democrats. Pottery Barn rules. When they break it, they own it.

This is also why I want Trump to get all his cabinet picks. We need the most refined and potent form of MAGA on the front lines. They need to follow all Trump orders and Democrats, weak as they are, need to stay out of the way. The key to successful Constructive Nihilism posits that the American people have to suffer. MAGA voters, Democratic voters, no one can be exempt from the results of the malign forces that are about to be unleashed. It must be so bad that people yearn for the humble bureaucratic public servant. In essence, MAGA must make government great again.

No matter what the opposition to MAGA does, there will be casualties. Constructive Nihilism makes every loss a victory. We play the long game now. All eyes need to be on the 2026 and 2028 elections. To take down MAGA we need measles outbreaks across the country that kill children. We need endless videos of sprawling migrant concentration camps and American troops standing on the border. More crying children as their parents are hauled away. Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block to secure tax breaks for the wealthy. Shut down every clean energy project and ramp up carbon extraction with hopefully worse air quality in our cities. Tariffs everywhere. Crash the economy. Shut down more rural hospitals, especially in red states. Show endless pictures of celebrating oligarchs at the White House. Make our water less clean, our drugs less reliable, our press less free. And most importantly, the Democratic opposition needs to track every Trump campaign promise and, on a daily basis, remind America about failures to meet those promises.

The awful things are coming anyhow, so why not embrace and exploit them to take down MAGA. Make American Miserable Again. Here’s the good news. The actual window for this damage is 2 years. Ignore the Trump bluster about running again. He has to say that because he knows on 1/20/25 he is a lame duck. Worse yet, for Trump, about the time of the midterms, an internecine war will erupt in the Republican Party as ambitious acolytes fire up campaigns to replace him. This will drive him nuts and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it. Ambition is the one true drug of politicians. Enough damage will have been done in 2 years that new wave MAGA will have to throw shade on the aging despot to claim they are now the change America needs.

All of this seems an odd philosophy for a student of Zen. Yea, I can see that. Where is the compassion for others? I believe the path to a better future comes by embracing and exploiting the pain. This is a political war. Like the American founders did, I have been studying the ancient Roman Republic and its fall. Madison and Jefferson had almost no historical models for a representative democracy, so looked at Rome’s failures to design their constitutional safeguards. It has worked for 250 years, admittedly a long in the tooth test. But my read also tells me that there were several points in the collapse of the Roman Republic where defenders were timid and bargained for power, made deals with the devil to save the republic. Those defenders ended up hung on crosses or beheaded or bleeding out in their own bathtubs with a knife in their hand. If we are to save our republic, we need to be as clear-eyed and ruthless as our opposition. One founder, Thomas Paine was a fanatic for democracy and freedom. He wrote, “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”

It’s past time to purge the cautious and the politically correct from the Democratic Party. Dump the old folks and promote a new generation of leadership steeped in the last decade of MAGA vileness. You can read my call to Democrats here. MAGA is not designed to govern. It only thrives as outside anger. When in power, these fanatics will overreach repeatedly. Constructive Nihilism is an ugly philosophy for an ugly time. Exploit every horror so we can retire the concept in 4 years.