I haven’t checked in on the news for a while. There is too great a chance I’ll get accidental exposure to a Republican face, voice, or talking point, and I’ll have to pay for it with hours of insomnia. And I peek in on the Democrats the way you edge the door open to your kid’s room—you don’t want to wake them up, but you need to see if they’re still breathing.

And that is how I learned that, scraping the last frosting of hope out of the empty bowl, some talking heads are speculating that there might be some Republicans left with enough spine intact to put the brakes on some of the Trump team’s more heinous plans. You know—mass deportations of random brownish people, siccing the military on recalcitrant Americans, abolishing government departments we were still using, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t take many, they say. And then the names are reeled off. By the time we eliminate the Republicans who paid for their integrity with their jobs—your Cheneys, your Flakes—we’re left with the sometimes-reliable Romney, Collins, and Murkowski.

Senators Collins and Murkowski represent states where people wear scratchy woolens, shoot their own meat, and cut loose with the Woodsman’s Blow, and such folk seem to be able to maintain an ethical position without hiding in the closet. But Mitch McConnell gets a mention in there too, because he has openly expressed his contempt of Trump and associated psychopaths sycophants.

Oh, Dems. I love you so! So full of belief in the essential goodness of humanity, so hopeful that good will prevail over evil! What a bunch of lovable saps you are! I did it too. I remember trying to salvage some remnant of my sanity in the very early days of TrumpSwamp One. I watched him being welcomed to the White House by Obama and saw the overwhelmed, frightened look in his eyes, as sheer bluster met stark reality, and I suggested—right here in this space, in digital print—that maybe he would have a Nixon Goes To China moment. That maybe he would become privy to the horrifying implications of global warming and decide to achieve fame and glory by doing the politically wrenching job of tackling it. He’d be the one Republican willing to move into the future. He’d be a hero in his own mind, and, parenthetically, also in the minds of future generations.

Two minutes later, he left the White House with all his fear draining out of his porous, pitted soul, replaced by the intoxicating lust for power.

Honeys? Mitch McConnell hates the hell out of Trump. But he’s not going to lift a finger to stop him. Both Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett can tell you that. Because, however loathsome he finds the instrument, he realizes that somehow the Republicans have finally blundered onto the one tool that will get them everything they’ve been working for since Reagan. The systematic dismantling of the government. The wholesale shift of the public trust to the profiteers. No more will those pesky environmental or social concerns get in the way of someone’s money. By the time the little people discover what they’ve given up, they’ll be socked away, choking on bad meat and water and air, maybe in an internment camp; maybe a prison. Maybe they’ll be in what used to be called, in pre-New Deal times, the poor house, rebranded for the New World as the Losers Liberty Barracks, Inc. If that’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one.

The Republicans have already ordered the bathtub they’ll drown the government in, and now they can sit back and watch it all come down. Mitch McConnell is right in there with them, chins rumpling merrily. His whole crew is waiting with dampened drawers for all their dreams to come true.

And all it took was an ugly, empty-hearted old man—a human failure—along with a quashed immigration bill, a stout propaganda arm, and a few disposable transgender people. Poof. The Commons is for suckers.