Image by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
It rose from the murky depths of ignorance, hatred, and fear and has reigned supreme on the political landscape for eight years now, ravaging our democratic institutions, trampling voter rights, and terrifying all mainstream Republicans. It is an aggressive, ruthless, and voracious creature that consumes everything in its path. It spares no one who gets in its way. Raised from the dead like the dinosauars in Jurassic Park by the bombastic rhetoric and racist fearmongering of former president Donald Trump, the MAGASaurus lives, embodying prehistoric sensibilities and antiquated concepts like nineteenth-century reproductive laws, anti-immigration policy, white supremacy, unlimited firearm access, and draconian cultural restrictions.
The MAGASaurus consumes everything; it devours trans rights, voting rights, marginalized citizen rights, and first amendment rights—books in particular—and will eat nearly anything smelling of equity in its path. If this red-skinned and orange-haired Godzilla is not subdued, he will trample and destroy our country just as Godzilla demolished Tokyo. Disney World could very well be next. The MAGASaurus is a menace that tramples libraries, threatens physicians, and destroys school boards all across the country. At one point, during the ex-president’s fantasy concerning a stole election, it had thousands of terrified election workers barricaded inside their own homes.
But the time of the MAGASaurus could be passing. This creature that rose from the morass of extinct may be returning to its place in the depths of the American psyche. A recent poll by NBC News has shown that only 24% of those polled feel positively about the MAGA movement. Only a slight majority, 52%, of Republicans that way while 34% of all Americans have positive feelings about the Black Lives Matter movement. Strangely, 34% of voters still support Donald Trump; apparently, he lost ten percent of those fans from MAGA, his own movement.
The MAGASaurus does not care for women—especially independent women, and part of this recent aversion to MAGA’s pet beast might be due to the Hobbs decision which overturned Roe-v-Wade, making national protections for abortion null and void. It’s turned out that this has been a widely unpopular decision. According to a new Gallup Poll, 55% of all Americans consider themselves to be pro-choice, a rise of six percentage points from the previous year. Yet the dinosaurs in the U.S. Congress refused to recognize this before approving the appointments of Justices Cavanaugh, Coney Barrett, and Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
The MAGASaurus loves guns and gun culture, but he is now under attack about firearm laws, especially after a recent spate of unprovoked and insanely arbitrary gun attacks on law-abiding citizens. A young honor student was shot for knocking at the wrong door while trying to pick up his sibling. A young woman was shot after she pulled into the wrong driveway. An eight-year-old and her father were shot by a neighbor when the family’s basketball rolled into his yard.
These incidents are above and beyond the mass shootings that have become almost everyday occurrences in the U.S. Tragedies like Uvelde, The Convenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, and the Colorado Springs tragedy keep happening. The list goes on and on: Gun Violence Archive. People have had enough. They want the MAGASaurus and his regressive ideas and outdated values to go back where he came from. They don’t believe, like many in MAGALand, that guns are the solution to problems of violence in this country. Indiana, one of the MAGASaurus’s strongholds, recently passed a bill in the wake of The Covenant School shooting to provide funding to train teachers how to use weapons in school. Similar bills are being proposed and voted on in Ohio and Tennessee.
A recent poll by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of all respondents want stricter gun laws. A full 88% want background checks, 83% want to prohibit those convicted of domestic violence from buying guns, and 59% of all Americans want to prohibit the sale of AR-15s and similar weapons in this country. People are sick of guns, mass shooting, and our children being slaughtered in their schools and on the streets.
But strangely, while MAGA is becoming less and less popular, and the MAGASaurus seems to be on the run, ex-president Trump’s popularity is holding steady. While only a minority of Americans support him, that number has remained steady, even as Mr. Trump has been indicted for various felonies in New York City and is currently under investigation in Georgia, and in Washington D.C. for the January 6th and Classified Documents Inquiry investigations.
Despite all this (or maybe because of it) Mr. Trump is running as the 2024 Republican nominee for President of the United States. And he is leading every poll quite handily. His nearest competitor, Ron DeSantis, (another MAGASaurus enabler) is anywhere from forty-six to twenty points behind the former president. This is—at the very least—counterintuitive. Mr. Trump supported most of these MAGA policies. He originated the MAGA movement. One might even say he is the original MAGASaurus, that monster of the Capitol mall, yet while voters are rejecting MAGA ideologies and sensibilities (though not all of them), Mr. Trump stays as popular as ever.
Perhaps part of the reason is Mr. Trump’s constant assertion that he is the subject of “witch hunts” (his term) engineered by vengeful and vindictive Democratic opponents. Maybe the voters see the embattled and endangered MAGASaurus as a pitiful creature, like a kitten huddled in the rain, who needs their help—even though this voracious monster is obviously not the last of his kind.
When the MAGASaurus does go back into its hole, it will never quite be completely gone. Even after Donald Trump has faded from the political scene and—perhaps—our government will be fully wrested away from special interest groups and returned to the people, the forces that created and enabled the MAGASaurus will still exist.
White supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, political opportunists, greedy developers, shameless gun manufacturers, carpetbaggers, and inhumane and cruel gun manufacturers will—under the right circumstances—like the misguided entrepreneurs in Jurassic Park—bring the MAGASaurus back to life. He is a monster that destroys equality, fairness, democracy, opportunity, enlightenment, and hope. He has always been here among us, and he is only among us because he is us.
Sources
- https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/maga-movement-widelyunpopular-new-poll-finds-rcna81200#:~:text=A%20slight%20majority%20of%20Republicans,negative%20views%20of%20the%20movement.
- https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
- https://apnews.com/article/mass-shootings-list-us-53011c9a7f052adb4a7254f116e178d3
- https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
- The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research
- https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/02/15/senate-passes-state-funded-gun-training-bill-for-teachers/