Banana peel twice over moment for the Dems with their last-ditch attempt to defeat Bernie coming home to roost. Sad sorry-ass operation leaving us with Trump redux, which feels surreal. But that’s the absurd reality now—what could’ve been a reckoning for a failed system turned into the political equivalent of a three-ring circus with a tinpot dictator at the center. The Dems—still drunk on their neoliberal fantasies—did everything they could to kneecap the one guy who actually gave a damn about people, the guy who wasn’t afraid to throw punches at Wall Street, Big Pharma, and the whole rigged system. And here we are, left with a man who will give permission to corporations and banks to eat the world alive, all while grinning like a bulldog in a three-piece suit.

The Dems seem locked into this delusion, this desperate fantasy that they can just sit back and wait out the demands for real change, waiting for the next economic boom to somehow roll in and fix everything. They treat the issues Sanders raised—healthcare, living wages, housing—as if they’re optional add-ons to a system that maybe will take care of itself if we just leave it alone long enough. They’re convinced that another bubble will come, lift the economy, and make the demands for real reform vanish into thin air like a magic trick.

But here we are, still waiting for that “bounce back.” Still waiting for the economy to pull itself up by its bootstraps while the rest of us are watching the factory jobs disappear, our rents double, and our healthcare premiums rival the cost of a down payment on a house. It’s like they’re hoping for some economic miracle to save their asses, but all we’ve got is the same old tired song: “Just wait, just wait, the market will fix it all.” And yet, the market has never fixed anything. It’s only ever patched over the rot until the next crisis comes along.

Still waiting. Still waiting for that “bounce back.” But it’s obvious now: it’s not coming. And the longer the Dems stick to this fantasy, the deeper the hole they’re digging for themselves. Trump may be the symptom, but the disease is this profound refusal to face the future.

Look, the people—the disaffected, disenfranchised, and desperately ticked-off millions—were trying to send a message loud and clear. But the Democratic brain trust, the sanctimonious sages of the Party of Good Intentions, somehow misinterpreted it all. They thought they were putting a leash on fascism, but it turned out they were just muzzling themselves, eyes closed, hands over ears, la-la-la, while a political reality they refused to face bulldozed through their illusions.

Now here we are, as if in a cheap satire, where Trump and that square-jawed Vance kid—neither of whom have ever met a populist they didn’t want to keep at arm’s length—paid just enough lip service to anti-war sentiment and the working-class struggle that it landed. Turns out a hologram of populism, a cardboard cutout version, was still preferable to the Democrats’ corporate-speak. At least Trump dared to say, in his cowboy bluntness, that Americans should afford a house, a car, groceries. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was out there with the “Opportunity Economy” claptrap, a slogan so stripped of substance it may as well have been lifted from a focus group in a Wall Street conference room.

And all these Democratic “geniuses” who thought they could outwit, outspin, and out-tactic Trump have now driven the country off a cliff. Ezra Klein—smug on the pages of every think piece and podcast—played his high-stakes game of chicken with Biden’s future, only to watch the train tumble off a different cliff entirely. The “smart set” wanted to replace Biden, sure, but only with their own pet project—a “safe,” “nuanced” alternative who could keep those liberal sinecures intact. But the result? Chaos. The one thing no one had the guts to predict was that people might actually just want to buy groceries and pay rent without a second mortgage.

And yet, the resistance that formed? A media spectacle. The talking heads, the armchair warriors of Twitter, with their hashtags and their performative outrage, cosplaying like they’re the French Resistance in ’41, missing the point entirely. #Resistance, indeed—resistance to what? To Trump? To fascism? Hell, half of them couldn’t tell you what they’re really resisting; it’s all just performance, filling airtime with self-righteous indignation.

In 2016, when the ACA premiums shot up 40% the same week James Comey made his move on Clinton, you’d think it would have hit home. But no, the Acela corridor elite convinced themselves it was the emails, the FBI, the Russians, the damn solar eclipse—anything but the reality that people are sick of being handed scraps while billion-dollar policy ideas make big promises and deliver squat. They closed schools, then claimed they were helping the working class. They promised affordability and served up slogans that wouldn’t fly in an undergrad debate class. They treated the working class like they’d sign off on anything.

And now we’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion: the people didn’t buy it. They could sniff the hypocrisy, the hollow talk, and decided, hell, we’ll take our chances with the reality-TV businessman who’s at least entertaining.

Remember Obama, that beacon of hope, the man with the golden smile who was supposed to be different, who was supposed to transcend all the swampy sludge of Washington. He had the whole country lined up behind him, all the goodwill in the world, and what did he do? He bailed out the banks, handed out blank checks to Wall Street, and made his Ivy League cronies rich. All those high-flying Wall Street wizards, the ones who’d gambled recklessly and left Main Street bleeding, got rescued—while everyone else, everyone who actually put Obama in office, got left holding the bag. Home foreclosures, lost pensions, layoffs—none of it mattered as long as the banks could stay afloat.

Obama had this chance—hell, he had the perfect chance—to put Wall Street in check, to stand with the people. But instead, he threw the working class to the wolves while claiming he’d saved the economy. His friends in high places rode high on the wave of that bailout cash, and we’re supposed to act like he had no choice? Like his hands were tied by some invisible law of the universe? Please.

And then people sit around scratching their heads, baffled, wondering how on earth we ended up with Trump? Really? After Obama’s big giveaway to the finance overlords? Trump wasn’t some inexplicable phenomenon; he was the big, ugly, neon-lit reaction to all the Democrats’ double-dealing and betrayal. Voters were tired of candidates who mouthed pretty words about “change” but handed them a bill for someone else’s yacht. They didn’t want to hear about “the long game” or “slow and steady wins the race” from a party that didn’t seem to care if they were winning or losing—so long as the right consultants got paid.

It was inevitable, really. The whole thing. The voters who lined up for Obama in ’08 felt their hope ripped out of their guts by a man they thought was on their side.

Yeah, and that’s the real kicker, isn’t it? The worst thing isn’t just that Trump’s a disaster on every front—it’s that he’s the license for all of it. The big banks, the corporations, the ones who’ve been shoveling wealth up to the top since the 1980s—they’re looking at Trump and saying, “Oh, this is our guy. This is the green light.” With Trump in power, there’s no more pretense, no more worrying about looking like the villain. The man’s practically begging them to go ahead, exploit as much as you can, take it all, and don’t even bother with the dress rehearsal.

This isn’t just about more inequality; it’s about a systematic breakdown of any semblance of responsibility. It’s an epoch of exploitation where the ones doing the exploiting have no interest in maintaining even the illusion of fair play. The veneer of decency, of corporate social responsibility, that’s all gone out the window. We’re heading into an era where the public face of business is a gleaming smile on a boardroom shark, and the lives of regular people are just another cost of doing business. Only now, no one’s even pretending it’s anything but a blood-soaked money grab.

It’s exploitation without even the grace of manners. At least back in the day, there were some unspoken rules—“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” “Don’t be too obvious about how much you’re ripping people off”—but now? We’ve entered a world where there’s no shame left in it. The rich get richer, the poor get crushed, and the ones left in the middle are too distracted by shiny promises of “tax cuts” and “jobs” to realize they’ve been handed a one-way ticket to nowhere.

We’re living through the rise of corporate fascism with a smile, the glee of deregulation, and a free-market wet dream where the only thing that matters is making a buck, even if that buck’s stolen right out of your pocket. It’s like a bad sitcom where the punchlines are just more suffering for everyone who isn’t sitting on a pile of cash. And the worst part? Trump’s got a whole cult of people cheering it on, convinced that somehow, this time it’ll trickle down.