As horrifying and sad as it is watching the worst inhumanity of the past repeating itself in the place we call home, it does allow us to look back and get some idea as to where we’re likely headed.

For students of History, the last two years here in America have been one long experience of Déjà vu of the worst kind: a growing assemblage of governmental red flag overreach, incendiary rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire segment of the population, a steady failure of both systems and sanity, and the mass delusion of otherwise reasonable people who gladly enabled a fragile lunatic’s sickening rise.

For those of us fortunate enough not to have had our brains rotted and our souls devoured by the decade-long death cult of an orange imbecile here in America, we’ve endeavored to understand how people around us succumbed to a hollow ruse that either intelligence or empathy should have seen through.

We’ve repeatedly beaten our heads against the wall trying (and failing) to find new ways to reach into the stupor of their blind adoration and pull them into moral clarity, none of which proved successful.

And, we’ve attempted to predict just when (if ever) they would awaken from this ten-year racist fever-dream and come to terms with the multitude of horrors they’ve co-authored with their votes and their undying allegiance.

If recent history is any indication, we’d better not hold our breath.

Last night, I found myself tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole of archival footage of the end of World War II recorded by the US Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit for a series of films code-named Special Film Project 186. There were heartbreaking scenes of the unthinkable barbarism of the Nazis, vivid inventories of the human, cultural, and emotional toll of Hitler’s reign, and the stories of German leaders, soldiers, and citizens as they reckoned with the end of a twelve-year-long parade of abject brutality.

One particular video detailing the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau stopped me dead in my tracks, because suddenly, I could see what’s coming here.

Near the end of the clip, the narrator quoted German author Erich Kästner, who wrote in his diary on May 5th, 1945, about his country and its people:

Depression is turning into irritability. Everyone is making someone else responsible. And everyone is excluding just one person from this blame: themselves.

Erich Kästner continued: Why are people irritable? Did they actually believe the deception? Did they really confuse the outrageous rhetoric with facts? No one can be that stupid. Now, they are pretending to be surprised. In other words, they would rather be thought of as a complete idiot than as a scoundrel.

This is where MAGA Americans are headed in the (hopefully near) future when Trump has his bunker moment or reaches his political demise: not the admission of culpability for the suffering, or the grieving and repentance such ownership requires, but feigned ignorance.

They will pretend not to have heard the rest of us over the last decade as we labored relentlessly to rouse them awake with facts and data that they stridently rejected.

They will claim no recollection of the nearly infinite occasions we passionately appealed to a reason and decency that were nowhere to be found within them.

And they will plead innocence in the hopes that we will somehow believe that they were misled, duped, and swindled, instead of correctly concluding that they’d abandoned their humanity in the presence of a moral bottom feeder whose prejudices, phobias, and grievances matched their own.

When justice finally arrives (as it always does for tyrants and despots); when Trump’s legion of atrocities can no longer be contained within heavily redacted files, buried beneath Fox News fluff pieces, or explained away by their wildest mental gymnastics, then, they will fire off one last, desperate salvo: denial.

One day soon, just as the Germans Erich Kästner wrote about eighty years ago, MAGA Americans will hope to be thought of as gullible idiots rather than complicit enablers. They will seek exoneration in the name of having been fooled, attempting to rewrite the story one last time and hope the rest of us will let them.When that happens, we’ll need to preserve history and their participation accurately, so that if this terrible bit of History repeats itself in the future, the good people who bear witness in those days will make sure no one forgets—or let’s them off the hook.

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