“That idea was, is, and will continue to be hurting people; the change, maybe, is that Trump is now the hammer doing the smashing, and no longer the strong hand swinging it. It is the dream of this movement, of all the people on stage and the people looking up at them, of the rich grotesques funding it and the servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads eager to do their dirty work, to drop the annihilating weight of Trump on their neighbors and coworkers and families, to push a button with Trump’s face on it and turn their own long rosters of enemies into mist. What binds all these people to Trump has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has; they believe that they’ll be able to do that so long as they stay behind him. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends upon that being true.

This is not designed to persuade as a political appeal any more than a slur shouted from a passing limousine is an invitation to conversation. It is just the bloody subtext of the old conservative dream of stopping history and replacing the future with the past raging into the fore, a threat repeated over and over, by people you maybe sort of recognize or remember but who all seem very different now, lit up as they are by this new appetite. One after another, they vow revenge against everyone that is not them and everything that is not already theirs. It is not an argument, or an offer, or a joke. It’s just what it sounds like.”