(Edited--PS added) Your mistake,

and the mistake of so many on this board, it your fixation on Trump as the author of our travail. The disintegration, the slouching, began long before the advent of Trump. Remember that Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 in the aftermath of the Great War. Ireland’s struggle for independence was just getting underway, and his wife had become a victim of the flu pandemic (she survived).

Since then, no few writers, film-makers, and others have borrowed Yeats’ images and phraseology—Joan Didion, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell—to describe the end of the gyre. Remember Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? “So the falcon's heard the falconer, huh?” Robert Bork wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah in 1996.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I guess we could debate how much time we have left until the next rough beast arrives. In the meantime, we should acknowledge that, If arson is the metaphor, Trump didn’t set the fire. He is merely an accelerant.

I’m sure Liz would be flattered, but she ain’t Churchill.

PS: You can't bet serious about "shake free of MAGA's grasp". Are you powerless? Instead of standing there sucking your teeth and wringing your hands, go about replacing Biden with a candidate who will win convincingly. I want to puke every time I hear the stuff about what a good job he's doing, slow and steady, blah blah.