Dwain Northey (Gen X)

After four years of the previous administration, one thrilling year of the current one, and a full four-year Broadway-length production of “THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN: A ONE-MAN WHINE-FEST,” the self-declared champions of freedom—the red-hatted ride-or-dies, the “I did my own research” scholars—are finally tiptoeing off the deck of the S.S. MAGA as it lists violently to port. Turns out, when your ship’s captain is the Idiot-in-Chief himself, screaming into the storm clouds about invisible Kraken and Wi-Fi-powered voting conspiracies, eventually even the most loyal deckhands start questioning their life choices… or at least their political fashion sense.

These are the very same folks who spent nearly a decade declaring him the Chosen One, the Golden God, the man who could “say it like it is”—which, in practice, meant he could say absolutely anything, no matter how deranged, contradictory, or autocorrect-challenged, and they would applaud like he’d just reinvented the wheel. Badly. Out of wet cardboard.

But now? Suddenly the chorus is shifting. Suddenly it’s, “We never REALLY believed all that.” Suddenly they’re blinking into the sunlight like cave creatures realizing that maybe, just maybe, following a man who treated policy like improv comedy and governing like a personal vendetta tour wasn’t the master plan they’d hoped for.

Of course, they won’t call it regret. Oh no. It’s “reevaluating priorities.” It’s “recognizing new information.” It’s “taking a principled stand.” Anything but the truth: the ship is sinking, the captain is gnawing through the hull, and nobody wants to go down with a man whose greatest strategic insight is “post through it.”

So here they are—abandoning the vessel, leaping into lifeboats, paddling desperately away while insisting they always knew things were a little… off. And maybe they did. But it took watching the Titanic hit its fourth iceberg before they finally admitted the water up to their ankles wasn’t just a “deep state illusion.”

Too little? Too late? Absolutely. But at least the spectacle is entertaining. After all, you don’t often get to watch an entire movement try to reverse-uno its own gullibility in real time while the Idiot-in-Chief stands on deck, shouting about how the iceberg was rigged.