Two Simple Steps Toward De-MAGAfication

[Celerity]

A big reason why Trump II is so much worse than the first time is that the world’s richest man bought Twitter and turned it into a fascist cesspit.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/09/two-simple-steps-toward-de-magafication/


Credit: Photo illustration by Lindsay Ballant. Source: Matt Rourke/AP Photo.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán recently lost power after 16 years of autocratic rule. The defeat was so enormous that the opposition party, led by Péter Magyar, swept past all Orbán’s various bulwarks designed to maintain power, winning the two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament necessary to amend the constitution. Magyar immediately set to work " target="_blank">planning attacks on the various Orbán power bases, like restoring judicial independence and breaking the control over the media held by Orbán allies. This will be necessary to unlock billions in European Union funding, and to restore democracy to Hungary. Should Democrats win the midterms this year and then the presidency in 2028, they will face a similar task. The Trump administration and the broader MAGA movement has done untold damage to the American government.

Fixing the problems on a permanent basis will require a program of de-MAGAfication. But how? A recent article in the Journal of Democracy discussed the problems Donald Tusk’s government in Poland is having trying to clean up a similar authoritarian mess left by the prior Law and Justice party, deeming it a “post-illiberal trilemma.” The government sought “quick, effective, and unimpeachably legal solutions to illiberalism,” the authors write, but “it could often fulfill at best only two of these three conditions at once … A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook.”


Of these three conditions, “unimpeachably legal” is the least important by a wide margin. Any kind of rupture with an authoritarian system is going to involve, well, rupture. It isn’t necessarily “capitulation” to the “illiberal playbook” to give them a taste of their own medicine—should the American revolutionaries in 1776 have stuck to strictly legal forms of protest? That holds double for the term “unimpeachably,” which suggests the kind of bending over backwards to perform scrupulous legality that in practice means letting rich, powerful defendants violate court norms and orders. The prissy, self-aggrandizing processes of former Attorney General Merrick Garland helped Trump run out the clock on all his prosecutions for the attempted putsch on January 6th. A full program of de-MAGAfication would require a book-length project. But for the purposes of this article, I will focus on two of the largest pustules of MAGA corruption, which come from very different ends of the societal spectrum: the Supreme Court, and X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

MAYBE “DEALING WITH A RELATIVELY LOW-TRAFFICKED SOCIAL MEDIA SITE” doesn’t sound high-minded enough for a program of democratic renewal. But much of the catastrophe of the second Trump administration can be attributed to hyper-online brain rot. Recall that during the 2024 campaign, the Heritage Foundation infamously published Project 2025, a psychotically right-wing vision of a future Republican term. Democrats naturally made it a centerpiece of Kamala Harris’s election campaign. Yet in certain key areas, the second Trump administration has been much, much worse than Project 2025. That document did not remotely countenance eliminating USAID—a major component of American diplomatic strength and power projection for decades—but Elon Musk’s DOGE did exactly that (illegally, for that matter). Tens of millions of people, most of them African, lost access to American-provided food, much of it for severely malnourished babies, or medication for people with tuberculosis, HIV, diarrhea, or other diseases.

snip

[underpants]

1. ✅

Marking for a listen tomorrow on my little road trip.

Thanks.

[ms liberty]

2. K&R. At some point in the near term we are going to need to solve this. Preferably sooner rather than later.

[Initech]

3. That's half the problem.

The other half can be summed up in two words: Fox News.

[rustbeltvoice]

4. the correct term is de-nazification

maga is a bullshit acronym

[J_William_Ryan]

5. "The Trump [regime] has done untold damage to the American government."

True – some of it irreparable.

Indeed, it also exposed the faults and failings of American governance – such as rendering political opposition powerless to check authoritarianism, the impeachment process hopelessly crippled by the blind partisan right, and a Supreme Court dominated by partisan conservative ideologues who codified unitary executive dogma in support of a despotic president.

Last, Republicans will aggressively oppose any effort at reform – and they’ll succeed in their opposition, even if in the minority, another fault and failure of American governance.

[scipan]

6. He recommends in passing getting rid of the filibuster.

[niyad]

7. KNR

[Seeking Serenity]

8. How many rehabilitation/re-education camps would we need for 70+ million inmates?

That's too much mathing for me.