Dear MAGA: This Is your Fault

Rick Wilson drinks MAGA tears — the tears of unfathomable sadness.

When you're standing in the checkout line at Target and the prices have exploded overnight, that’s your fault.

When you walk past empty shelves, searching for one thing you need that just isn’t there, it's your fault.

When the one doll your 6-year-old girl wants more than anything else in the world this Christmas is stuck in a shipping container in Xiamen because of the trade war, try explaining to her how this is building character, when you know it’s your fault.

When you simply can’t get the things you need, when your prescription drugs quadruple in price, when the ease of global markets is transformed into a costly artifice of chaotic supply and random, but ever-upward, pricing, it’s your fault.

When you can’t figure out why everything costs more, why the supply chains are broken, why your medication’s price has doubled, or why your retirement account is bleeding out in broad daylight — it’s your fault.

Not all of America’s pathologies can be laid at your feet. But this part? The part we’re in now? This one's on you.

We in the pro-democracy, anti-Trump world have spent years rightly blaming Donald Trump for a broad portfolio of corruption, lawlessness, incompetence, cruelty, and chaos. But now, the blame shifts. He’s still the architect.
But you, MAGA, are his voters, defenders, and unquestioning enablers. You are the reason this edifice of dysfunction still stands.

And no, you weren’t fooled. Not after 2016. You knew exactly who he was the second time around. The first con, maybe, was that you believed the sales pitch. You thought The Apprentice was real, perhaps.

But you saw the first term warts and all, and came back for more. You saw the grift, the failure, the blatant disregard for the Constitution, decency, and reality — and you begged for a second helping.

You clung to the myth that he was a strongman for the little guy, even as he picked your pocket and laughed about it on his way to cash in on the highest job in the land. You heard him lie. You watched him fail. You felt him fail — when your job didn’t come back, when your costs rose, when COVID ripped through your towns, and he told you it was fine. You still stuck by him.

You wanted the show. You wanted the cruelty. You wanted the endless war against immigrants, liberals, educated people, journalists, women, gays, Black people — anyone who made you feel uncomfortable. You wanted someone to hate so you didn’t have to hold up a cruel mirror to your own failings. You didn’t care if it cost you everything, as long as it cost someone else more.

Think about it. Try to remember one Trump speech, ever, where he called on you to work harder for America … where he told you to extend a hand of compassion or a spirit of generosity. Try to remember a time when he called upon your better angels, and not your baser cruelty.

You traded away your birthright as citizens for a sugar high of revenge politics. Trump didn’t empower you; he reduced you. He didn’t ask you to be better, stronger, wiser. He didn’t ask you to sacrifice, to grow, to believe in anything larger than your own grievances. He offered you no vision of the future — just a steady diet of culture war and conspiracy, of scapegoats and slogans.

You became not citizens of a democracy, but kneeling subjects in a kingdom of lies.

You believed Fox when they told you inflation was caused by trans athletes or George Soros or whatever else was in rotation that day. You believed Facebook memes like Gospel, but treated facts as heresy and lies. You believed that liberals secretly controlled everything, even as the Trump family openly pillaged the government, cashed checks from foreign powers, and sold you promises.

And now the pain is here.

The economic suffering, the instability, the social decay, the rising tide of fear — you let it in. You gave it permission. You didn’t just tolerate it. You cheered it on. You told yourself it was all worth it if it "owned the libs."

But nothing in your life has improved, nor will it. Not your wages. Not your schools. Not your towns. Not your future. You’re not freer. You’re not safer. You’re not more prosperous.

You’re poorer. Angrier. More isolated. More disillusioned. You’re quick to blame everyone else except the man who was the architect of your pain and poverty.

You’re about to find out just how bad it can get. Jobs will disappear. Savings will evaporate. Your retirement will shrink. And no meme will protect you from it.

Donald Trump is the executioner of this national tragedy. But you—his loyalists—you were the ones who handed him the axe.

Read this now, while you still can. Read it before your feed fills again with lies that feel good and truths that feel uncomfortable. Read it before you lose even the idea of what it meant to be part of something greater than yourself. Read it and try to recall an America that demands more of its citizens than servile obedience to a man who holds you, and this great, stricken nation, in the deepest contempt.

The reckoning is coming. It will hurt.

Remember, this is what you wanted.

And yes — it’s your fault.