People are missing the point. It is not that the phrase Trump insisted be on new passports confirms that he doesn't know what a passport is. It's that for a year not one person who works for him was willing to tell him so. They will remain cowards when he declares martial law.

Donald Trump is a rabid dog. He has been a menace his whole life, assaulting and raping and defrauding with impunity. That is no longer news. What is news is that he is surrounded by an impenetrable cloud of cowardice. No one will stop him from the things he is about to do to us.

Because he's not just a rabid dog and a moral troglodyte but a knuckle-dragging moron, Trump told everyone around him to put a message on new passports that only makes sense if you've no idea what a passport is. No one stopped him. Not one corrected him. And hundreds *complied*.

If you're a systems person, you understand that that's the true horror here. A man with absolute power and no evident soul is surrounded by a swarming cloud of spineless parasites who will do his will no matter how it many people it hurts and no matter how utterly deranged it is.

It's not just that they'll do his will no matter who it hurts, it's that not one of them has the courage to speak the barest word of sense to him. So terrified are they that he will cut them off from his largesse if he's corrected *once* that they willingly produce *insanities*.

If America is to survive the next two years—I have my doubts—we must speak in terms of systems rather than merely one antichristic goblin. He may be the *primary* danger, but it is the networks of institutional and individual instruments around him that will proximately harm us.

The terror fast approaching isn't an evil octogenarian who doesn't know anything about anything and never has, the terror is hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people who *know better* but will pretend they don't in order to access one more *iota* of elusive terrestrial power.

That is, the danger is not the Orc King, it's The Horde. The Orc King may have shrieked in his guttural hork that he wanted new passports that in no way resembled passports, but it was the teeming grasping masses of The Horde that put a new nonsensical artifact in so many hands.

This is also how best to understand what's happening inside our military as we approach martial law. It's not about the Orc King or even his alcoholic, woman-abusing, knuckle-dragging lieutenant—it's about a Horde of men who'll never say "no" taking up new and farflung positions.

If you won't tell the Orc King that passports are only seen by foreign customs officials, so a note about foreigners behaving themselves while in America makes no sense in such a document, you won't speak up to stop an illegal coup when you believe your death could be the result.

So now take everything I've just said, and the deliberately provocative way in which I've said it, and consider that no one in American corporate media appears to understand that nearly every Trump scandal is not about him but how large the army of his corrupted souls has become.

Because of course while I may speak of The Horde here, their number is dwarfed by rank-and-file MAGAs— who now line the esophagus of America in much the same way Ursula had little tadpole-shaped stolen souls infesting the very walls of her sea cave. They're literally everywhere.

So the broader executive instrument we must now apprehend encompasses not only the Orc King and his ducal orcs—like Musk—and orc lieutnants like Hegseth, but a Horde of sycophantic-yet-powerful agents *and then* tens of millions of lost souls with almost no free will left at all.

This last, largest group is surrounded by yapping hobgoblins cracking their whips and shouting nearly incoherent war exhortations. Who are they? The MAGA influencers, propagandists, sergeants-at-arms and fake journalists. Think whatever the hell Jesse Watters or Greg Gutfeld are.

So you see how insufficient it is to speak of the Orc King. Yes—he's a serial rapist, war criminal, career fraudster, pedophile, pathological liar, draft-dodger and insurrectionist plotting the end of our democracy. But he's nothing without the evil edifice that arose around him.

@SethAbramson @threadreaderapp unroll

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