Donald Trump is nothing. America's true enemies are those who enabled his crimes

Lindsey Graham. Mitch McConnell. John Thune. Tom Cotton. Joni Ernst. Susan Collins. Mike Johnson. James Comer. Every Republican pundit you see on television. Every Republican lawmaker who supported Trump's first coup attempt and immunized him from consequences. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. David Zaslav.

Without these figures, Donald Trump would be nothing. He would likely be in prison right now; Mitch McConnell's long campaign to belittle and mock all those who objected to The Criminal breaking ethics regulations with compulsive indifference began before his first inauguration, continued through his first impeachment, continued with only the barest of breaks after McConnell and his fellow senators had to flee a Trump-unleashed rioting mob, and has now been inherited by new Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

A close ally in Trump's attempt to overthrow the government by manufacturing hoax claims of "fraud," Mike Johnson may well be the most intentionally corrupt figure in Washington—or it may be any of his allied pro-fascist accomplices. House Republicans have acted as something of a crime ring since Newt Gingrich's days, but Johnson has done the most to make the corruption explicit. House hearing after house hearing screams in suspicion that one perceived Trump enemy or another must clearly have broken a law, in selling a too-expensive painting or getting a too-cushy job or authoring a memo that His Royal Emperor The Criminal got uncontrollably angry over. There are no end of political enemies that need to be smeared, ruined, or jailed.

But when Johnson discovers an ally is a statutory rapist, he presses to hide the truth. When a Republican White House adviser turns four years of handshaking into a billion-dollar payout, there is no peep.

Trump is entering office by lighting a match to another part of the Constitution; over the weekend he released a crypto offering that he retains control of 80% of, and which will be distributed for sale in chunks over his "presidency." It is a bribecoin. It is transparently a mechanism by which supplicants can, at whatever intervals The Criminal arranges, purchase a billion dollars of Nothing directly from Donald Trump, at which point they become the most important persons or companies or governments or crime rings in The Criminal's world. They can ask for favors, and expect to get them. They can threaten to dump their new purchase all at once, doing immense damage to Trump's own supposed net worth, and The Criminal will suddenly become the target of the financial coercion he has spent his cheap life trying to dish out.

There is no peep about this, from Republican accomplices. This is not because they are cowards; it is because they have chosen to be complicit, have chosen to allow a string of impeachable offenses and crimes that they would once have boiled over in outrage over, in order to maintain their own power and influence. They are all criminals, at this point, every last damn one of them, because they have watched their party descend into celebrations of criminality and organized, nationwide hoaxes, and the full list of fascism's own obsessions.

Donald Trump is nothing. He is a petty little man who lies about everything, a compulsive criminal, a transparently mentally ill creature of rage who would have likely died in a gutter long ago if he had not had the glorious luck to be born rich. Trump, by himself, is as powerless as a single louse. I do not give a flying fuck about Donald Trump, a feeling seemingly shared by everyone he has ever come in contact with, his every wife, and his every child.

It is those who have built their own scaffoldings of corruption off of the man's rage and ego who are of more consequence. They are the ones who allowed a petty liar and vengeful little manslut to take a knife to their whole party, all of it, carving away any pretense of decency or morals and turning it into this. They are the nation's enemy, not Trump. They are the ones who hold Trump's leash—and extend it until it is stretched to the law's breaking point.

Those who allied with Trump even after a coup attempt are the ones now imperiling America, and not out of cowardice but in true eagerness to see just what they and their party can accomplish, if they can convince America that the old laws are meaningless and the new laws are whatever the day requires.

Trump is nothing. He is ignorable. At the apparent rate of his current mortal decay, he may not even be with us four years on. It is his accomplices—an organized crime ring masquerading as political movement—who are democracy's true enemies. It is the parade of corrupt men and women that press, boldly, for Trump's crimes to be allowed even as they spasm in outrage over petty and imaginary overreach by others—they are who sold their country out in order to enable themselves, and only themselves.

Forget Trump. Focus your ire and rage on them.