Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It took Republicans a solid decade to realize that George W. Bush wasn’t exactly Lincoln reborn—more like Lincoln if Lincoln had invaded the wrong country because someone misread a PowerPoint slide. For years, conservatives proudly displayed their Mission Accomplished bumper stickers, as if declaring victory in Iraq were the same as achieving it. Meanwhile, W strolled off into his painting phase, blissfully unaware that his legacy had aged like a wet sock under a Texas sun. Only much later, when the tea cooled and history textbooks caught up, did Republicans sheepishly admit: “Maybe ‘strategic ambiguity’ wasn’t a great foreign policy doctrine.”

Now enter Donald J. Trump, a man who managed to bankrupt casinos (a feat akin to drowning in a kiddie pool) and still convinced half the GOP that he was a genius sent by God, wrapped in gold lamé and clutching a Big Mac. From 2016 onward, he lied like it was cardio. Mexico would pay for the wall! COVID would vanish by Easter! He won the 2020 election—bigly! And through it all, Republicans nodded in unison, like bobbleheads in a Ford F-150.

So the question is: when will the spell break? When will they come out from under the ether, blinking at the sunlight of reality like Rip Van Winkle in a red MAGA hat? If Bush took ten years to be demoted from “misunderstood hero” to “well-meaning disaster,” how long before Trump is acknowledged not as the second coming of Reagan but the first coming of a Twitter-addicted cult leader?

Perhaps it’ll take his second term—served from

Ending with him in prison. Or maybe Republicans will one day realize that patriotism doesn’t require pledging allegiance to a man, but to truth. Until then, we await the awakening, popcorn in hand, fact-checkers weeping in the wings.