MAGA is dead serious about lynching Obama and Clinton

You need to know that Donald Trump fully intends to prosecute and possibly execute Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for treason over entirely imaginary crimes. And he’s been trying to manifest that fantasy for most of a decade.

I know that sounds ludicrous to you. And it should. But that doesn’t mean it’s out of the realm of the possible. It means that Donald Trump’s efforts to bifurcate reality have worked.

It’s so goofy that I can’t blame you for not caring

So, how does Trump plan to create an inquisition around two of the pillars of recent American history, or at least bog the nation down with the process of finishing them off for years to deflect from his failings, crimes, and incompetence?

He’s going to frame them using Russian disinformation, something John Durham—the Robert Mueller of the right in the minds of MAGA—has been working on for half a decade now.

Now that probably sounds ridiculous, but the GOP successfully framed Joe Biden when Joe Biden was president! They did this based almost entirely on the word of a Russian spy. And nearly nobody blinked. Those lies were the basis of a GOP effort to impeach Biden that only fell apart because the spy was arrested for trying to frame the Bidens.

Few Americans have any idea this happened. Even fewer cared.

I know this for sure because it was a thread of Marcy Wheeler’s Ball of Thread podcast series that I produced. It was like making a sandcastle out of flour, trying to get anyone to care about some of the most important events of contemporary American history.

But who am I to judge? I didn’t know most of what Marcy covers in Ball of Thread, our attempt to tell the history of the last eight years that brought us to the shores of fascism, a series that, sadly, becomes more relevant every day.

Meanwhile, the feats of John Durham in uncovering the t̶r̶u̶t̶h̶ Russian disinformation about the Trump/Russia investigation are not just legendary on the right, they’re the critical “accelerant” for the founding grievance that made January 6th and Trump’s ill-fated return to power possible.

Trump’s “Coffee Boy, National Security Advisor, Campaign Manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied to cover up his Russian ties,” as Marcy describes some of the core results of the Mueller investigation.

Now, freaks who only exist in public life because they devoted their lives to helping Trump cover up his ties to Putin dominate the regime. 

Foremost among these heroes/villains is Kash Patel. 

He’s now Trump’s FBI Director, who would love nothing more than to waste all of America’s time and treasure prosecuting two senior citizens over emails that Russian spies created.

I’m not just trying to promote the work that has obsessed me for over a year now. I hoped it would only be relevant for scholars and people who wondered how we got so close to electing Trump twice.

Instead, these machinations are essential. You can’t understand life in 2025 without this background, which just about everyone to the left of Sydney Sweeney refuses to give a shit about.

This BS is how Trump wants to cover up his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the most infamous child rape trafficker of our time, which will inevitably include at least an attempt to pardon Epstein’s co-rapist, Ghislaine Maxwell.

And this has geo-political and world historical implications.

This BS is also how Trump is possibly “trying to lay the groundwork for capitulation to Putin by preempting any claim that he’s a Russian agent,” as Marcy warns, which could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, Europe, and democracy.

And to understand how these massive events keep happening essentially without most of America even knowing or caring that they occurred, we need to talk about vision boards.

Remember vision boards?

Back when “The Secret” first titillated dreamers by arming them with “tools” to “manifest” dreams into reality, we were instructed to paste or tape or weld images they wanted to bring into our lives onto something and then wait for the magic to happen. You’d hear stories like, “Five years later, I found my board and realized the infinity pool I included looks precisely like the one my aunt put in. And she may die any day now!”

Well, I have no idea if vision boards or The Secret work for individual humans, but it works for America’s fascists, who are the globe’s fascists, really.

Back in the 90s, building on the success of AM radio as an indoctrination tool that allowed Republicans to take both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since 1954, Rupert Murdoch and former Nixon aide Roger Ailes gave us Fox News. The power that comes from fixating millions of American families on race-and-gender-based grievances and bullshit allowed Republicans to swing a Supreme Court that has not been a majority liberal since the 60s and swing it decidedly toward a Confederate version of conservatism, paving the way for Donald Trump, who may be the greatest “manifester” in human history.

The Power of a Positive Pervert

Trump saw the vision board of Fox News and knew exactly what to do with it. That’s because if he has any religion at all, it is a direct precursor of The Secret—the Gospel of “Positive Thinking” as taught by Norman Vincent Peale. And I mean taught by Norman Vincent Peale.

“On Sundays, [the Trumps] drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor,” Gwenda Blair wrote in 2015. “Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary.”

What did Trump learn from the man who said, “Prayerize, visualize, actualize—that is the formula for successful imaging”?

How about… everything?

Blair explained:

“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”

Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”

This nurtured desire to create a reality where you are infallible leads me to one of my current obsessions, which is the split-screen world Ailes and Murdoch created.

What’s that on your screen?

On one screen, the one you watch, we have reality, where narratives grapple for attention and are limited in some ways by an adherence to the belief that objective facts exist.

On the other hand, there is the Fox/Trump/Musk screen. This screen is where the right fixates its audience on the information most advantageous to the fascist elements of capitalism, which include corporate wealth mongers, religious fundamentalists, and the sick hybrid of those two groups that’s gestated in Silicon Valley.

There are many problems for democracy born of the “For You” algorithmic, interest-based hell our digital lives have become.

First, most Americans only watch their screen, which they literally “manifest” based on whatever content they consume. That makes their grasp of reality entirely personal and diverse, and the vast majority actively tune news out based on a conscious choice or the clicks they make.

Second, we increasingly have no idea what’s going on the other screens. Why would we? The algorithm knows that’s not our jam. And the algorithm wants to keep us from leaving it.

Third, MAGA and other fascist-leaning Americans are mostly watching the same screen. They’re all getting some variety of the Trump/MAGA party line served to them at whatever level of extremism they’ll click on.

This is the information landscape that began to form in 2016 when fascists at home and abroad realized that social media had more power to corrupt than connect. It got worse as TikTok made the algorithm everything for everyone over the last five years. It came into its present most disastrous form when Elon Musk bought Twitter and purposely broke that site’s unique ability to let information, news, and voices rise and spread somewhat organically. Musk also took down nearly all ability to moderate, contain, or constrain the worst instincts of social media by proving to other tech freaks that you can drown users in Nazis, crypto scams, and AI slop without suffering any consequences that matter.

This is the information landscape that makes fascism and the horrible things fascists want to do possible. The truth is, we can avoid the bulk of it.

And if you can avoid it, why wouldn’t you?

If you’re a somewhat normal American, you’ve been living your life, trying to process how fascism is destroying everything from vaccines to higher education to any pretensions of decency without letting it ruin every moment of your lives. And on your feeds, you’ve been hearing a lot about Epstein and Maxwell and jeans and breasts.

Why would you want to listen to Stephen Miller scream about immigrants or his plan to execute a former president and the winner of the 2016 popular vote for treason? Life is hard enough.

But this is fascism

How do we save ourselves from fascism? No one can say for sure.

But I know a few things with certainty: We can’t do what brought us to the shores of fascism and expect fascism to defeat itself on its own.

Only a million different actions by a million next-door heroes will save us.

And the thing fascists hate the most is the truth.

We have to stare into the reality we face. We have to figure out how to get around the algorithms to build a popular front to preserve any freedoms we have left.

That can only happen if we first confront the reality that reality is broken, the information landscape has been purposely warped to favor fascism, and all the vice that goes with it. And that mirrors in many ways what’s happened to our Supreme Court.

Restoring any of these things will take a lifetime, but we still have time to preserve what freedom we have left, which may not seem like much now, but is a heaven compared to what Trump’s role model, Putin, offers his plebs.

In blooming fascism, history happens fast. And whether we like it or not, we’re writing the future that will either help bind or liberate anyone who follows us. And we can still stop the worst from happening.

And that will only happen if we first begin to reckon with how deadly serious these freaks are, even if all their clownery is obvious and laughable to us.

We can no longer ignore what is on the right’s vision board.

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