Donald Trump is a disgrace to America and a verified liar in the specific; and yet, I cannot get over this obligation of wonder that he has never left the consciousness of America. He is resurrected. He will return. Vengeance against us will be his. Trump still rules us from afar. He decides us. His hold over the feeble-minded, and the uneducated, is as strong as ever after his election loss and yet, for some reason, he is immaculately venerated by those he reviles. Does any reasonable person paying attention to abortion rights, the evisceration of voting rights, and the incongruous dismantling of OSHA worker protections not believe the game is already set and staged for a victorious Trump return in 2024? It appears to be all but inevitable now. The one chance we had to stop him — by standing up to the GOP in the Senate — failed miserably and miraculously. The Democrats are a proud, but unwily, gang of magnificent losers.

Are we able to escape this man? May we unwind the inevitable? He packed the Supreme Court, and they’re slowing making their way back to him first with an OSHA dismantling and access to abortion rights next on the Far Right agenda.

Here’s how Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and Georgetown University Law Center, places his thumb on the pulse of what’s in store for the rest of us with the recent SCOTUS denial of Biden’s vaccine mandate this week:

The Supreme Court’s decision on the OSHA mandate is a major setback to President Biden’s COVID strategy and will prolong the pandemic in the United States. The OSHA employer mandate was the single most effective policy for getting people vaccinated. Without a wide-reaching federal mandate, it’s unlikely the national vaccination rate of just over 60% will improve. We are way behind our peer nations. This Supreme Court’s decision makes it hard to see how we will effectively combat Omicron, and future COVID variants.

Even more concerning is that the Court is eviscerating the very ability of the federal government to protect Americans. The justices are overturning decades of precedent upholding federal public health powers. But the Court’s decision is hardly a surprise. This Supreme Court is on a mission to remake the regulatory state. The conservative majority is willfully trying to make it hard, if not impossible, for the federal government to safeguard the public’s health and safety, including worker safety, safe food and drugs, and environmental protection. COVID has taught us that the major risks Americans face, from infectious diseases to pollution, know no state boundaries. They are national problems requiring federal solutions. Especially in a crisis, states and citizens all turn to the federal government for solutions and resources. Those federal solutions have just been severely curtailed — not just for the current pandemic, but for future public health crises.

Joe Biden has all but given up on securing the right to vote. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have strangely, and cryptically, refused to guarantee the free right to vote. Somebody got to them. Follow the transfer of money into power. Within their hidden till revolves the answer.

In the meantime, the GOP guffaws, and red States impose brutal restrictions on the easy right to vote, and the rest of the world realizes the end of democracy is nigh for the USA, while the Democrats, who might have tried to do something, anything, to stop this neverending sedition, do nothing while the country burns around them.

And Donald Trump smirks. And he knows how to find a mark and pock it. And Putin licks his chops. And China encircles us. And the dollar slowly dies on the yawn. The uneducated take to the streets to take what they wish by force, and the rest of the nation tries to wake up from a nightmare that was not of their own making, but is certainly one of their own choosing.

Perhaps Dr. Timothy Snyder: writes the best nightmare scenario concerning our imminent demise:

So Mr. Trump just might get to give a victory speech from some safe quarter. But if he installed rather than elected, it seems unlikely that he will be generally regarded as president. Although the procedures of electing an American president are complex, antiquated, and somewhat unfair, the legitimacy of the office rests not on them so much as on the popular sense that someone has actually won. A president who is brazenly borne to power by perverse legalism cannot enjoy the legitimacy of his predecessors. He will not enjoy the element of surprise. The scenario by which he reaches the White House will be quite familiar. Even if it cannot be stopped, it will be scorned. It will be rightly regarded as the sort of tyrannical pettifogging on display in regimes such as Russia and Hungary.

In a situation where he is installed as president after losing an election, Mr. Trump would vainly try to control what will quickly cease to be the United States. His allies who wish to destroy the state will be the only winners. The precise scenario of the collapse of the United States is impossible to predict, but some of the following is likely to happen, and quickly.

Tens of millions of people protest. Paramilitaries on both sides emerge. Violence leads to fake and real stories of deaths, and to revenge. Police and armed forces will know neither whom they should obey nor whom they should arrest. With traditional authority broken, those wearing uniforms and bearing arms will become partisans, take sides, and start shooting one another. Governors will look for exit strategies for their states. Americans will rush to parts of the disintegrating country they find safer, in a process that looks increasingly like ethnic cleansing. The stock market and then the economy will crash. The dollar will cease to be the world currency.

The nation is still ours, for now, for now the USA still belongs to the people; but there are bad actors out there, working for decades to regain power, and keep it, and never give it back, and we need to be aware of this threat to the nation and stop it — not by accusation or inaction — but by fighting for the right to keep our freedoms. The uneducated, and the paranoid, will always seek the lowest ground to invade and to infect, and it is up to the rest of us, the good and righteous middle, to steady the stream, to keep alive the flow of knowing, and to refuse to go along with the elected authoritarians who wish to rule us, not with humility and respect, but with vengeance in their intent, and cruelty in their hearts.