The Media Burns The Witch, But The Crops Are Still Dead

If you accidentally wander into the fever swamps of CNN or The New York Times, you learn that there’s a disease in America — just one, a single illness destroying the body of the American republic. It’s Trump. His personality is the sickness.

In its more generous moments, the Captain Ahab media pulls back a bit, and the problem is a package: Trump plus everything he carries with him. MAGA is the sickness, and MAHA is part of the medical syndrome.

We see this argument over and over again, all day and every day. Break MAGA, fix America. It’s the problem. The dumber fanatics have just the one thought, and they chant it without variation. (This, of course, is a reference to the existence of David French.) In his shockingly dumb Politico exit interview, RINO Senator Thom Tillis explicitly said that the task is to dump MAGA and “go back to traditional Republican platform priorities.” See, before Trump, Republicans just did stuff that was smart and good and made America healthy.

Last week, the captured media descended into a kind of collective ecstasy, because voters burned the Mean Orange Witch. Trump was rebuked; the healing begins. Actual post-election headline in the opinion pages of The New York Times: “MAGA Finally Gets What It Deserves.” We hurt you, so problem solved. Now we can be governed by the healthy people who are good, and they can rewind the clock to the America that worked.

But we’re about to test that theory, first in small doses and then with the full procedure. Trump has lost the Republican Congress, and in two years he’ll leave the White House. So if the theory is correct, and MAGA is everything that’s wrong with America, we’re about to slide into a new golden age. I guess there are people who believe that.

To take an example from the lowest form of paste-eating dullard:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trump’s guy, and he’s making America sick, so when he goes, America will become healthier all of a sudden. He’s the cause of sickness. So the country must have been much healthier before Mean Trump made Mean RFK Jr. cause everybody to have to become sick, and we’ll just return to normal when this deviation is terminated. Right?

Here’s what the CDC says about that, and note that Trump and Kennedy weren’t in office this year: “In 2023, 76.4% (representing 194 million) of US adults reported 1 or more chronic conditions, including 59.5%, 78.4%, and 93.0% of young, midlife, and older adults, respectively.” 

So you just terminate the Trump deviation, and America is healthier again. See, easy! Without that monster Kennedy running the Department of Health and Human Services, we can go back to the glorious moment when only 93 percent of older Americans had chronic health conditions. See how much harm that one guy caused?

Pick a topic. The idea that sickness and decline arrive in the form of Mean Orange Man is psychotic, a psychologically profound break with observable reality. When Trump governs, everything is bad. When Trump doesn’t govern, everything is good. Test that. National debt, rates of chronic illness, inflation, whatever. Google up some historical charts, and see if the Trump years map as a period of illness in the middle of a bunch of health. Think about it for yourself, and decide if the theme in media and politics is correct.

As the media and the Democrats plus Thom Tillis explain that Trump broke a healthy system, the obvious reality is that Trump’s arrival was greeted as a moment when we could confront a sick and broken national politics. Trump, the figure sold as the deviation into sickness, arrived on the scene to offer a deviation from the existing sickness. When he goes, and the great distraction is withdrawn, all of the forms of actual sickness will remain.

See clearly what this moment will look like: The cause of all of our sickness will depart, but our sickness will remain. Crushing national debt, expensive institutions that don’t work, chronic illness that we can’t fix no matter how many wonderful pharmaceutical products we consume, fraud everywhere, expensive promises that don’t deliver.

Societies have used a long series of metaphors to describe this moment. Our crops failed, so we found a witch in our village and burned her, but it didn’t bring our crops back to life. We loaded all our sin and failure onto the back of a scapegoat and drove it into the desert to carry away our sin and failure, but we woke up the same people.

You can love Donald Trump and see this point, or you can hate Donald Trump and see this point. For a decade, our legacy media have told a single story about a person and a political movement: MAGA made America sick. The Great Rug Pull is coming. The cause of America’s illness will vanish, but America will not suddenly cure its illness.

They’ll try to transfer it. See, the cause of all our sickness is Donald Tr— uh, I mean, the cause of all our illness is J.D. Vance! Or Ron DeSantis, or whatever. We’ve evolved a narrative mechanism that exists to cover for failure, and it does that by finding a single figure to blame. It explains nothing, it means nothing, and it consumes most of our time and energy.

What do you do when you spend all your energy on the construction of a folk devil whose existence explains all forms of failure and evil, and then your folk devil retires?

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.