Hey, didn’t Donald promise, over and over and over again, that he would NOT touch Social Security? Didn’t he promise, over and over and over again that he wouldn’t raise the eligibility age by ONE DAY? He did. I know he did. There’s video of him making that exact promise at rally after rally. He promised! AND…doesn’t Donny ALWAYS keep his promises? That’s the MAGA story, anyway. But wait. What do we have, here?

Suddenly Trump and his billionaire buddies think your Social Security is WAY too high and, wait, what’s this? Yes, it needs to be cut. Billionaires are SURE you’re taking too much. How very selfish of you, taking payment on the insurance you paid into your whole working life. And now the billionaires are here, planning to put a stop to that.

Now that he’s taking office, Trump has also admitted that he can’t really do anything to bring down the price of eggs. Huh, whaddaya know? “It’s hard,” he says. He’s the first to tell you he “won on groceries.” Now he’s confessing he can’t do all that much about groceries, which means, of course, that he “won on lying about groceries.”

We’ve all heard, by now, the (admittedly anecdotal) stories of factories revoking or limiting expected Christmas bonuses because they have to use the money, instead, to prepare for the economic damage resulting from Trump’s promised tariffs. It turns out, the end users DO pay the increases, just like people tried to warn.

These things are all traveling together under a banner called #FAFO. Fair warning: the first ‘F’ in that is a generally accepted “bad” word, though I confess, it’s one of my favorites. FAFO stands for ‘Fuck Around and Find Out!’ Until very recently, it was most commonly tossed out by young, often intoxicated men looking to engage in a rousing round of fisticuffs.

It translates, roughly, to, “Oh, my goodness, if you continue on this apparent intended course, you might well discover some unforeseen and certainly unfavorable consequences to your actions.” There’s nothing tough about that, though, so they shorten it to ‘Fuck around and find out!’ The phrase has been co-opted by the left since the “election.”

I’m not sure how I feel about it. I don’t THINK it’s taunting. I wouldn’t like it if it was. I continue to believe the right has, more than anything, been deceived. I don’t think there’s any honor in taunting someone about being deceived. Anybody can be deceived.

It’s certainly not Schadenfreude. The left can’t take pleasure in the suffering of the right since the left will suffer the exact same consequences at the exact same time. Hell, it’s not even “pleasure.” ‘Satisfaction’ is probably a better word. It’s been pretty well established that cons have to live a thing to understand it.

I THINK it’s vindication, that is, proof that someone or something (in this case, the left) was right, reasonable, or justified. It’s GREAT to be vindicated, even when the vindicated person is going down with the ship as well. “I KNEW it wasn’t ‘unsinkable!'” Sure, he’s going to drown, too, but there’s a very brief moment where he gets to enjoy the satisfaction of having been correct – before the panic and desperation set in.

I think the left is just trying to make sure the right doesn’t miss the details of what their votes have wrought. It’s a matter of ‘don’t tell them they were mistaken, show them they were mistaken.’ These days, the only positives the left can see in the future will be watching the deer-in-the-headlights look on MAGA faces as they realize they “fucked around” – voted for Trump – and now they get to “find out” that Trump was lying to them all along.

This is pretty simple. The left used it’s knowledge and experience to politically scheme it’s way right out of power. Completely. There are just enough Dems left in Congress that they might – might – be able to stop some of the more egregious things, but they can’t enact anything. In short, anything that happens in the next couple of years lies directly at the feet of the GOP. They have nobody else to blame.

Sure, conservative media will try. They have to try. But the GOP has all the power. Eventually, even MAGA should be able to figure out that the people doing them so much harm are, in fact, the very Republicans they’ve been supporting. I suspect the left is going to KEEP pointing it out.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want the left to get smug or taunt the right. It’s one thing to show someone the error of their ways. It’s another to “punish” them. Remember all those arguments with Uncle MAGA? Remember how he would not back down from his positions no matter what evidence you provided? We’re going to need that tenacity on our team once they realize the left isn’t their enemy, the One Percent is. So let’s leave a door open that allows them to save a little face as they come back to reality…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, bless their hearts. I mean, how sweet, like the innocence of a small child. According to CNN, Republicans in Congress are certain Trump has no plans to go around them in trying to reach his goals of cutting two TRILLION dollars from the budget. GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, who serves on the House Appropriations Committee said, “We worked very hard to stay in the majority and get the majority in Congress. I’m sure that the ‘thank you’ for that is not, ‘we don’t need no stinking Congress.’” (Uh-huh…)

GOP Rep. Max Miller of Ohio, who claimed that all stakeholders involved want the same thing echoed, “They have no choice but to work with us, they have to.” (Heh, Heh…)

And GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the incoming Senate Appropriations chairwoman for the next Congress – and ALWAYS an excellent judge of character and summarizer of situations -told CNN ahead of her one-on-one meeting with Musk, “To me, that violates the separation of powers.” (Ah—ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! )

Meanwhile, (you might want to sit down for this) Trump is laying the groundwork to see how much he can cut by going around Congress. He wants to use a process called ‘impoundment.’ It’s illegal, of course. See, Congress spends the money, not the President. When Congress allocates money for something, whether useful or stupid, that money goes where Congress allocated unless Congress acts again. That’s in the Constitution.

Trump has put a guy in place who thinks none of that matters. The guy is Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025. You remember. That’s the project Trump swore he had never heard of and didn’t know the people behind it, even though many or most of them had worked in his previous maladministration. Vought thinks the President can just, on a whim, redirect money or refuse to spend it where Congress said, so long as he calls the practice some official sounding name, like ‘impoundment.’

It’s one of the many, many…okay, many battle shaping up within the GOP itself. The Congress critters ARE going to protect their own jobs. WHEN Trump tries to bypass them, they will assert their official roles, quite probably aggressively.

You see, Trump doesn’t give two figs about whether or not you ever see your Social Security. He has plenty of (your) money and he’ll be just fine. It’s the same with Musk and Ramaswamy. These are billionaires with NO IDEA of what life is like for normal folk. Worse, they don’t care. But the Congress Critters DO care. Not because they actually care, mind you, but because they want to keep their phony baloney jobs and keep raking in all that beautiful lucre.

Now, one does have to take into account that Musk has directly threatened Congress Critters who don’t do exactly as they’re told by Trump. He swears he’s going to use his glorious pile of ill-gotten money to attack any GOP member who defies Trump in the next “elections.” That kind of puts the GOP in Congress in a tough position: If they cut Social Security, or Medicaid, or the VA budget, or even welfare they’ll likely be voted out, anyway. If they don’t, Musk works against them.

That’s a lose-lose proposal from the incoming Trump maladministration. Congress must be SO excited to be in THAT position. But at the very least, if a threatened congress critter could go back and tell his constituents that he is being “primaried” because he insisted on protecting Social Security, I’d bet he would overcome Musk’s money. Maybe they’ll #FAFO…