Alan Zerndell, July 3, 2026

As we celebrate our 250^th Fourth of July, we seem to be traversing a long, slow inflection, one which I believe historians will view as the transition from Trump/MAGA mania back to common sense and respect for our laws and Constitution. It’s fair to say that the great majority of Americans are shocked that it’s taken this long.

But cults are hard to stamp out, and this one, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and a weird coalition of racists, xenophobes, poorly educated people who’ve been left behind by everyone else’s prosperity, and of course the greedy billionaires who wish to create an American oligarchy may be as hard to recover from as the cult of greed that made slavery acceptable. Killing that one almost destroyed our country.

That we’re at this juncture points to the massive fraud and corruption of the president, his family, and his hangers-on who hope to scoop up the coins he tosses to maintain their loyalty. Even the dimmest of Trump’s supporters are smart enough to realize something’s wrong when alarm bells are going off all around them, and they’re getting louder and more frequent.

Trump’s Iran war made it harder for people to live their lives without falling into debt, as millions were still struggling to adapt to the theft of their health care benefits by the MAGA Congress that needed its money to assure billionaires could avoid paying ttaxes. As lie after lie is obliterated by facts and what we can all see with our own eyes, now that it has been revealed that Trump’s corruption added more than $2.4 billion dollars to his personal wealth, everyone who has to live on hamburger instead of steak feels it personally.

After eighteen months of the most corrupt administration anyone can remember and Trump’s total focus on rigging the midterm election and completing his vastly unpopular vanity projects, his base is beginning to crumble. Trump has been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars directly from his most loyal supporters with his cries of being victimized by witch hunts and appeals for donations, but this week’s legally required disclosure of Trump’s 2025 income has produced dead silence from his base.

If you wonder why the same people who’ve been drinking his Kool-Aid and cheering everything he did since 2015 are now either silent or quietly backing away, maybe it’s because of what Trump told a New York Times reporter last January. When asked how he responds to accusations of corruption and conflicts of interest, he said, “I found out that nobody cared.” The most shocking thing about that statement was that it was true. I doubt that Trump has ever spoken more truthfully. When I heard it, I immediately translated it from Trump speech to basic English: “as long as no one’s watching, I’m going to steal everything I can lay my hands on.”

Another thing that’s coming clear that should have been obvious when MAGA’s Project 2025 was released, was that the entire focus of Trump’s second term has been an attempt at a bloodless coup. Not that millions of lives wouldn’t have been lost as a result the madness of RFK Junior’s health decrees, the inability to obtain health care for more than twenty million American families, and a FEMA so decimated by firings that it cannot respond to most natural disasters – but we only notice civilian casualties when they’re riddled with bullets fired by an authoritarian regime suppressing open rebellion.

The only places where people still march in lockstep to Trump’s orders are those where he has been able to install loyalists in positions from which they can’t be easily removed. Everywhere else, the cracks are widening, and once his base realizes how they’ve been had, when they hear Trump brag, as he did yesterday, that he’s always been great at making money, so why stop now, when they can’t pay to repair the truck their job depends on, they’re going to wake up with anger that will not be assuaged by Trump’s smooth talking. And I doubt that his base believes making money is the same thing as theft and grift.

Think about how his base will react when they learn that Trump’s $2.4 billion in income, most of which arose from serious conflicts of interest was enough to pay for the Obamacare cost sharing subsidies he canceled. The subsidies’ total cost to the government was $1,100 per recipient, so Trump’s very questionable income alone could have paid to restore health premium subsidy to 22 million Americans. Think about what that says about the massive scale of Trump’s corruption.

I don’t know how to assign a dollar value to my vote, but apparently, with the Supreme Court’s help, we’re about to learn that MAGA billionaires (and one newly minted trillionaire) are about to spend the operating budget of a small city to try to buy it. Even the MAGA base has to be outraged.