Fascism is an easy enough tag to apply to current political trends; but it is not a fully appropriate label.

America has been slowly morphing into something else over the past fifty-plus years. The super-rich now own the vast majority of wealth, income, and most of the shares in publicly traded companies, including the 6 media corporations which control 90% of the US media, disseminating infotainment and disinformation. They exercise massive influence over state legislatures, governor’s offices and Congress.

There is a covert, “Deep State” embedded within the overt political establishment in America; loosely defined as a federation of plutocrats, corporate interests, militarists and influential politicians. This is a description of Trump’s Cabinet appointments so far – billionaires, corporatists, militarists, bankers and right wing extremists.

What has been dictating our lives from the shadows is right out in the open now.

The takeover, ushered in with the coup d’etat in 1963, is now complete. Trump’s Cabinet picks are all representatives of this incredibly powerful – and fundamentally evil – Deep State.

There is no going back to “democracy” now. Elections, the last vestige of democracy – where the people have a say in their government – thanks to gerrymandering, have become rigged and utterly meaningless.

The emerging political reality is best described as a Kakistocracy: a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

The term was coined by English author Thomas Love Peacock in 1829, but it has been rarely used until recently. It comes from the combination of two Greek words: kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), literally meaning a government controlled by the worst elements of society.

The United States doesn’t have an outright fascist party, so the GOP serves that function quite well; just as the Democrats serve as a paler version of a social-democratic party, which we also lack.

What Trump brings is virtually the identical vision of what America would have been with Clinton or Biden or Harris, because they all work for the kakistocracy.

The people who voted for Trump didn’t do it to make an anti-establishment statement. They are by and large liars and deceivers, and this point can’t be over-stated: they are total dimwits. They are mean, dumb, racist white folks who simply hate everyone else. That is the reality.

1980 was the beginning of the end with the erosion of social welfare programs, major tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of all commerce, a huge military build-up and illegal, covert Central American wars. These crimes included the training of brutal death squads, trading arms for hostages and massive drug-running operations in support of illegal wars.

This was followed up by Bill Clinton in 1994; Newt Gingrich and the end of the Glass-Steagall Act; the signing of the Telecommunications Act, getting “tough on crime” and the birth of the private prison industry. In 2000, George W. Bush was unconstitutionally installed as President – hailing more tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation, more cutbacks on social programs and a vague new policy of endless, global war.

Since 1980 there has been a growing mass movement of neo-conservativism in this country. The Obama years were simply an interlude. The far uglier underbelly of racist, puritanical America has returned with the election of Donald Trump. Twice!

The term Kakistocracy fits the bill well enough, but it’s not as if some alien army from another planet just fell to Earth and took over the country. We remain on a course which was set by the Reagan Revolution. The public has slowly, over time been re-educated. The US has been implementing fascism – by definition – for many years now, from the bottom up. They’ve already managed to strip the working poor of a catalogue of fundamental civil and human rights without so much as a ruffling of feathers by the so-called liberals.

Trump is the ultimate realization of the Reagan Revolution. The theft of what’s left of our nation’s wealth has just been slammed into high gear.

The re-education of the public has ensured that this time, there will be no push-back. The proverbial unwashed masses – those who had united to protest during similar eras in the past – have been utterly divided and conquered, split apart and pitted against each other by class and race.

Average citizens will adjust because we have no other choice. It all comes down to the fact that tomorrow is another working day and we can’t risk losing our jobs. For most people there’s literally nothing to fall back on.

I expect to be financially crippled by increased health care costs and diminished retirement income as I grow older. Things the “free market” was supposed to provide will become more expensive, and my tax burden will likely increase to compensate for still more tax breaks for the unworthy.

Our currency could even be devalued at some point. Trump openly talked about America defaulting on its sovereign debt last summer which sent ripples through the world financial markets at that time.

Will this administration be the kick in the head it finally takes for GOP voters to realize the neocon narrative they have been sold is against their own interests? Highly doubtful. More likely they will simply blame the Democrats as they have always done in the past.

It’s not relevant that the Trumpanzies don’t understand the words “conflict of interest.” It’s just that they don’t give a shit. Like, who’s gonna stop them?

Donnie gets what Donnie wants. He has an entire Congress of sychophants looking out for him: a bunch of spineless, entitled old white guys who are only there to kiss his ass.

They pray that a show of abject loyalty – whether his actions are treasonous or not – will be seen in a favorable light, and that will enable Trump to pass some of their absurdly regressive bills to ban abortion, get rid of public education, privatize Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They want both privatized so they can reap the rewards of the inevitable kickbacks – because they also happen to be shareholders in the companies that will manage the takeover.

There has never been a case where privatizing of government benefits has resulted in better service at a lower cost. Never. Ask for one positive example and all one hears are crickets chirping. The media dutifully ignores this reality with rare exception since the “free market” has taken on a religious dimension in the US.

The non-delivery of healthcare insurance is a classic example. The rest of the free world concentrates on delivering actual health care to its citizens while in the US the debate is about how to force unaffordable health insurance onto the masses. This serves to deliver huge profits to the health insurance industry while enabling them to provide the worst possible care.

And that’s exactly what Americans do not understand. You can either have decent vital services paid for through taxation and delivered by low overhead government programs, or you can pay through the nose for poor services delivered by money-grubbing private conglomerates whose primary objective is profit. Economic stupidity has a huge price tag.

Make no mistake: the kakistocrats do not work for America or any other nation; they work for themselves and their vile corporate masters. And it did not take a village to build this edifice but 77 million brain-dead racists, bigots and misogynists.

Well played, America!