Fascism and Bad Faith

The Leopards Are Getting Fat

It's fun to pretend elected leaders in charge of a nation of 350 million people can handpick who suffers and who does not.

Fox News host and avid hair dye enthusiast Jesse Waters looked into the camera, and therefore into the eyes of the president of the United States, and told his audience – the president – that illegal and indiscriminate cuts to the federal government carried out by a foreign entity called DOGE had hurt the wrong person.

Waters’ buddy, who works for the Pentagon, was one of the thousands of probationary federal workers laid off for no particular reason by Elon Musk’s hackers determined to replace the American government with AI designed to carry out any and every fascist command.

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Waters delivered his plea for clemency in the closing moments of The Five, a show where one or two liberals – depending on the night – are paid to get their teeth kicked in by fascism fanboys and girls. This Pentagon employee, Waters told his audience (Trump), was not among those who deserved the pain Trump and Musk had promised on the campaign trail. This federal employee had been part of an “elite” military unit and killed “enemies” of the United States, Waters said. And most importantly, he was not a DEI hire.

Waters, like so many Americans in these first nightmarish weeks of the second Trump administration, was flummoxed. How could one of us be punished by the president we voted for specifically because he promised to use his power to deliver pain, and lots of it? Waters seemed to wonder aloud: How can the president not micro-target his vengeance?

It’s a question on the lips of many who enthusiastically backed Trump last year as he promised to unravel the constitutional order and punish anyone who has ever opposed him in his decade-long attack on the United States. They say: I voted for you so you could terrorize immigrants and trans folks and destroy the lives of women and LGBTQ people and people of color who work for the U.S. government. I voted for you so you would bully major corporations into normalizing and accepting fascist politics and goals.

How, they ask, could you not be more careful in your assault on the civil service, higher education, and any other sector of society swept up in Musk’s coup? How did I get a taste of the pain?

Waters gave away the game in his live TV plea to the president. The Right People were not supposed to feel any pain.

A Two-Fold Fascist Promise

Ours is hardly the first era defined by a desire for suffering.

Not our suffering, of course. And not our family or friends’ suffering. The people who deserve to suffer, however, should suffer, and suffer a lot. It’s an idea that could only emerge in a society without any semblance of civic life or basic understanding of how successful societies operate: We will elect people who will watch out for Us materially, economically, militarily, and in all ways, while using their power to punish Them.

Who is Them? Well, it depends on the news cycle.

It was nearly a hundred years ago when fascist movements in Europe – before fascism was (temporarily) a bad word – appealed to disaffected people by promising to lavish them in socialist utopian policies while bringing pain and misery – and yes, death – to those they opposed, the migrants, the Jews, the queers, and anyone else poisoning the blood of the nation, as Donald Trump has said. The fascist appeal back then was two fold: We will work for you and against those you hate and fear. Nothing much has changed today.

Mussolini’s rise to power was an uneven one, finally getting off the political ground when he asked his lieutenants to figure out what Italians wanted. So they dispensed to the Italian countryside and into the cities and found a population of poor, angry young men who found great appeal in socialism, for it was socialism that promised some semblance of an economic floor for those who had never had any economic security. These young guys, Mussolini’s people reported, didn’t care so much about socialism’s goal of world peace and global cooperation between working people. They just wanted some security. They wanted the state to make sure they didn’t go hungry and had decent jobs to work. These men weren’t asking for much, Mussolini found.

Mussolini’s forces began an aggressive recruitment campaign in regions of Italy with the most vigorous socialist parties and organizations, entities that scared the living shit out of Italian conservative parties still reeling over the Russian Revolution and its lasting fallout. Mussolini for a time pitched himself as a socialist to win over the men in both rural areas and cities who had joined socialist organizations agitating for basic economic rights. Inherent in this deeply dishonest pitch was a pledge to bring pain to those they opposed. Who that might be, Mussolini didn’t really care as long as his ranks were growing and his forces were peeling off members of legitimate socialist parties in Italy – a phenomenon that very much pleased mainstream conservative parties who eventually came to see Mussolini as an ally.

Good-faith Italian socialists didn’t take long to realize they had been duped by a megalomaniacal future dictator. The more prominent socialists who had urged others to join Mussolini’s cause eventually made a bunch of noise about being deceived by a diabolical political operator, but by then it was far too late. A massive coalition had been formed under Mussolini’s pledge to shower everyday working folks with the glories of socialism while making life hellish for those who deserve it. The betrayal was swift. In the end, of course, Italy was plunged into economic hardship, upwards of 7,000 Italians – including many socialists – were murdered by the Mussolini regime, and a half million Italians perished in World War II. The pain that was promised for enemies had been delivered to everyone.

This is sounding familiar to you and you are not enjoying it. Because just six months ago, we had a presidential candidate pledging to protect his people – those who would empower him to undo democratic governance – while triggering a governmental spasm of sheer terror for those they hate: Transgender people just trying to live their lives; drag queens reading books to kids; migrants escaping extreme poverty and violence; women seeking reproductive healthcare; black and brown folks who dared occupy powerful spots in corporate and government life; federal bureaucrats doing their part in making life a little better for Americans in states red and blue.

This presidential candidate’s two-fold promise appealed to just enough voters for him to regain power, and he has since made a reality TV show out of delivering pain and suffering to the enemies of his fear-crazy base. While Trump never made clear how he would deliver for those who supported him, the implication was clear throughout 2024: You do not want to be on the Other Side if I win this thing. Perhaps this was interpreted as an implicit promise of government help for loyal MAGA soldiers. It’s never been easy to understand the thinking of a Trump backer, especially the reluctant kind.

'We Are Not A Fucking Line Item' And Other Regrets

I wrote back in December about a lady in a Pennsylvania swing district who had no choice but to vote for the brutal dismantling of American democracy in 2024 because grapes had become too expensive. I knew voters like this would come to regret – or at least question – their vote, though I thought that might take a year or two or even four. For many, it took thirty days to understand they had been duped by a professional conman who has learned to play POTUS for TV cameras well enough to be a two-term president.

Utility prices have risen steadily along with a host of other kitchen table expenses Trump promised to somehow lower via executive order (policy details are for feckless libs and don’t matter to the press unless you are a Democrat). Eggs are more expensive than ever, and in many places, unavailable. This comes after an election in which millions of people turned on the Democratic Party because eggs got temporarily pricey in 2022. Now there are no eggs. It’s driven me to plead with chickens to compensate for Trump’s economic failings. I have yet to get an answer.

Pleading with the chickens
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) 2025-02-28T16:35:13.428Z

Everywhere you look, people who voted for the Leopard Party are whining about the leopards eating their faces. And let me tell you: The leopards are getting fat on faces right now. So many faces are being eaten. You’ve never seen so many eaten faces. Eventually the leopards are going to have to look strongly into Ozempic, or some regular exercise between face-eating sessions.

There’s the lady interviewed by the New York Times who voted for Trump because he babbled incoherently last fall about making IVF free for all Americans. There's the Trump supporter whose "heart breaks just thinking my vote may have contributed" to the gutting of the Veterans Administration and welfare programs like SNAP and Medicaid, policy goals outlined in hideous detail in Project 2025.

There are the untold thousands of Trump backers who have taken to social media since the president’s reality TV dressing down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and bemoaned our new allyship with Russia and the international fascist movement. Click around on Bluesky or Threads of Elon Musk’s fascism machine known as X and watch video after video of Republican lawmakers in the reddest parts of the country running away from angry crowds of loyal Republican voters who have lost their jobs to Musk’s invading DOGE forces and their dismantling of the United States government. That includes veterans getting caught in the administration’s intentional weakening of the military and the elimination of soft power centers that have proven crucial to American strength overseas, both good and bad.

People have flocked to social media since later January to ask why planes keep crashing and long-dead diseases are now spreading and their tax refunds are weeks late and federal lending programs are being axed for no reason. This was not supposed to happen to them, for they voted correctly. That was meant for the Other.

Take Marilyn O’Brien, a three-time Trump voter and avatar-less person on the X platform who has complained to the president’s X account about her daughter being DOGE’d. “She worked for years to get what she had accomplished,” O’Brien told the president’s account. “She loves her job and bought a house nearby just a few months ago. Life was good. Until she lost her job from DOGE.”

The stories of regret are delicious and sad all at once.

Voters are embarrassed and even ashamed of their support for a guy seemingly determined to plunge the US into chaos, something Musk promised on the campaign trail last fall. Though the markets have not yet come to terms with the destruction Musk and Trump will bring to the international economy, people see what’s happening. The pain that Trump promised their enemies hasn’t just trickled into their lives; it has flooded into their neighborhoods and families and their homes. The largesse they were promised is nowhere to be found. Only calamity has been delivered.

There is an almost overwhelming temptation to take pleasure in the regret of those who voted for fascism in 2024, excitedly or otherwise. I get that. To turn to these folks and say I told you so, you idiot, you moron who has never in your life seen a migrant but base your entire identity on hating migrants, is therapeutic, even if the therapy wears off in a hurry. You might read about a Trump +35 district struggling with a Measles outbreak and say good, they deserve it. You wanted a health secretary who opposes all vaccines and you got him. Congratulations, you might say. Enjoy your Measles. You played yourself.

This feels good. It tickles the ancient part of your brain that craves vengeance at any cost, the part that might have made your caveman ancestors start a tribal conflict for no reason, one that killed a bunch of fellow cavemen and made your tribe weak and vulnerable. Smashing that dude’s skull with a rock sure did feel good though.

This is the willful adoption of the mindset that delivered this dystopia. Taking pleasure in the suffering of others will get us nowhere, even if you couch that pleasure with bullshit about some people needing to learn tough lessons (bullshit in which I have engaged). You are no better than those who you vehemently oppose if you favor certain people suffering, and not others. You will only root for the spread of Measles in the Trump +35 district until it reaches the Harris +10 district, and maybe one day reaches you in your bright blue state. Suffering spreads. It can’t be contained.

There is a lesson here, and one that could resonate with political normies in the coming years. A politics based on the empowerment of people who performatively boast of raining down nonstop suffering on the hated Other, it turns out, can’t be precise. The suffering quickly spirals out of control until everyone is suffering. There is no micro-targeting for suffering. This is brand new information for tens of millions of American voters.

What we’re seeing today, and what we’ll continue seeing for at least the next few years, is an online bit come to life: I don’t care about the functionality of the federal government as long as my favorite politicians and their billionaire funders punish the bureaucrat libs and purge the country of woke, whatever that means. This works on social media better than it does in real life, as we’re seeing today. It’s a fun little game to play on the internet, pretending elected leaders in charge of a nation of 350 million people can handpick who suffers and who does not. To pretend precision is possible is either childish or naive or evil. Maybe a little bit of all three.

There is no mechanism for the leviathan that is the federal government pinpointing which citizens get the pain, and which get the pleasure. It is undoubtedly a hard lesson: If you vote for suffering, you get suffering.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.