I don’t like the guys on the Showtime show The Circus. I have talked about enjoying that show in the past, but that was during Trump’s first run for president and the world was a much different place. These days, everyone knows what everyone thinks of each other, so some pretense of fairness is no longer needed, as it was back then. But I find that The Circus is a good political show, even if I don’t like the people who put it on. It accurately reflects the political tides of the moment, which was alarming to them when they interviewed Steve Bannon and tried to interview Kari Lake but couldn’t even get enough material to do a segment with her. Astonishingly, as knowledgeable as they are about politics, they are missing the signals going into the 2024 election. They do not understand the MAGA movement, as most people obviously don’t. And they were nothing short of stunned when they heard Steve Bannon from the Warroom podcast, who used to be a chief strategist for the Trump White House, so he’s no slack-jawed loser, tell them that Trump was a moderate in the MAGA movement and that one day in the near future, they were going to wish they had Trump back. There was a kind of stunned silence, even for them. There has been an acceptance that we live in a world where co-existence with evil was always going to be the case, and increasingly, there are people in the MAGA movement who are supporting Trump, hell or high water, for militant reasons that defy conventional politics, to put it nicely. I’ve said it since before 2015 when Trump came down the elevator of Trump Tower, and just about every day since, I want to run campaigns against Trump as a liberal because, to me, he will always be a New York Democrat. That’s the world I’m fighting for.

It didn’t have to be that way, which was my thoughts when essentially all the Butler County judges had to recuse themselves on the Darbi Boddy case, which is a screenshot of the future of politics.  There are thousands of Darbi Boddys out there, the school board member at Lakota that I have talked about so much.  The belief was that the established order would play games and prosecute her with some power over the law and order society and that everyone would bow down and kiss some ring of party politics.  That is exactly what is wrong with the Republican Party in the wake of Trump.  That the Koch Brothers and Fox News still think they have some power to steer people away from Trump, that people are so stupid that they’ll vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump.  These are all people smoking crack and are way off the political trajectory of modern sentiment.  They aren’t even in the room of consideration regarding reality.  I tried to warn everyone about the Darbi Boddy case.  These days, some lazy attorneys hiding in the background who are looking for an easy negotiation with the next unionized labor contract by getting rid of politicians who might stand in the way of that task with threats of jail, or even worse, are over.  That kind of local political abuse of power is what gave rise to Trump and the MAGA movement.  There is no control that the system of before has over people.  They have lost it, by their own incompetence.  That is what Steve Bannon meant when he said about Trump to the interviewers of The Circus that not far in the future, they will wish they had Trump back.

Darbi’s case in Butler County should have never even seen a courtroom, and now it’s going to go to the Supreme Court, and an impartial judge will have to be selected, and the party politics that has stuck its nose in all this business has screwed things up.  Darbi Boddy certainly didn’t do anything wrong.  And the judges involved in this case knew that from the outset. Instead, they played along with some assumption that they were in control and had a right to abuse their authority for some view of the world that has long been outdated.  And that is among people I know, that they have an entrenched view of the world that is not represented by reality that they refuse to see beyond.  I could have told them if only they had listened.  But the same could be said nationally and internationally.  Most people who work in politics don’t understand.  There will be a day when Trump is no longer in politics.  Right now, Trump has broad celebrity appeal, and he has a lot of Democrats voting for him.  He has broken down the blue firewall by changing how people can support political candidates.  I like that Trump ran his White House as a strong conservative, but he is way too liberal for my taste, and I am sure there will be a future with people much further to the right than he is, that I will happily support.  Yet people who hate Trump, Darbi Boddy, and thousands of politicians who are rising in the wake of all this, who will run and win future political offices, are mystified by this process and are refusing to deal with reality, as they did in Butler County, Ohio until it was too late.  The world will move on without them because they were never in charge. 

And it’s true, in just a few years, most of the people who have declared their hatred of Trump and fought so hard to keep him out of the White House with every legal maneuver available to them, and then some, are going to wish they had Trump back.  They will not like a world run by the Darbi Boddy’s of politics.  The Lakota school district will wish they had her back, too, when she’s not there anymore.  Essentially, what we have in government are radical labor union types deeply committed to Marxism who are using old tactics of resistance to stop needed changes.  And our political system has kicked the can down the road all this time to reach this point where there is no more road.  The belief that elections could be controlled to protect the thieves looting off it is over.  And Trump is viewed among MAGA Republicans, like me, as being entirely too nice.  I think of Trump as a liberal moderate.  I see him as a Democrat.  He is far better than the other alternatives and committed to stopping kicking the can down the road. And I am very supportive of that kind of talk.  But for me, he’s not even on the conservative radar.  Once he is done with politics, I will expect people far to the right of Trump to occupy positions in the Senate and the House and at state and federal levels; I plan to see the destruction of the Department of Education and many other assumptions of labor-controlled government that have ruined our country.  Trump is just the beginning.  Over the next ten years, I expect drastic changes.  Like Darbi Boddy in Butler County, Ohio, everyone has choked on the chicken over just one person.  The political world hasn’t seen anything yet, as the recent Argentina election indicates.  This isn’t just an American thing.  But it’s a sentiment worldwide, and it’s not going back to how it was…..ever.  History will never let people forget. 

Rich Hoffman