The actual slogan of the CPAC fantasists can be interpreted from this interview with Brian Berletic:

"I am a fiscal hawk and a defense hawk." Translation: I believe in destroying America from within by destroying that portion of the government which does anything for the 99% while enacting a "foreign policy" which pays off billionaires and destroys the US standing in the world.

Much of the above Danny Haiphong interview recites background facts. They want war, but they're out of missiles and ammunition because of Ukraine. They spend vastly more than the rest of the world, but they can't win a war: they certainly couldn't beat Afghanistan into submission, and they just gave up on beating Yemen into submission. "They are preparing for it," Berletic says. The problem is that the war has already begun in the sense Berletic himself mentioned, and the preparation is itself likely to culminate in defeat even before the shooting war has escalated to something we, survivors of two world wars, would recognize as a war.

While Trump foreign policy (as above) is more of the Biden neocon okey doke, no relation to on-the-ground reality, Trump domestic policy is fundamentally Project 1981. So Trump policy is a recycling of the old. Trump is a consolidation, and the people who want us to imagine that he's something new are covering for what Cornelius Castoriadis called the "complete atrophy of political imagination" at the end of the Eighties. What's new about Trump is that all of it falls under a single slogan. But MAGA is dishonest as a slogan; America will be nothing close to greatness when the Powers That Be dispose of Trump after having destroyed any sliver of dissent from "his" agenda. Rather, we are going to get MASA: Make America Small Again.

In pondering MASA, one thinks of Trump's invocation of William McKinley. Trump's purpose, of course, was to justify tariffs, but here one recalls that the America of William McKinley was a much less prosperous country than the one that exists today, with much deeper roots in racism, sexism, class exploitation, and general brutality than what we see today. What saved the America of William McKinley from violent revolution, however, was the existence of frontiers of resources, land, and technology which were once vast and panoramic but which are being worn out today. As for McKinley himself, however, well, he was assassinated. But, hey, the Trump administration has found a direction, something to do while they deal with the disarray of their inner lives, so full speed ahead!

In the end, America will be a much reduced country, and the reduction will apparently happen soon. The political class does not seem to care at all about, I don't know, the well-being of the bottom 80%, health care, the schools and universities, the cost of rent, the Constitution, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the price of groceries (or the ability of SNAP benefits to cover them), the quality of the roads, impending climate changes, the vast populations of disheveled and unhoused individuals living outside of their homes day and night, the mass shootings occurring most days in this country, or for that matter anything outside of which Zionist billionaires will be funding their next election efforts. But don't ask what you're getting for your tax dollars!

Our elites, the ones really pulling the strings from behind their gated communities, do not seem to care a lot if there's no substance to their empires as long as the numbers look good, and, as for the rest of us, we still don't seem to have asked the question Roger Waters asks:

Americans are well on their way to turning their backs upon the foundations of creative effort that got them to this point. Sure, the US was always subject to looting by what Matthew Josephson called "robber barons," and it was always the land of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" or of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, but it was never only that. It still has, for instance, a nice-looking west coast, and we should revel in the glories of that west coast before it burns to the ground while today's movie-makers read "Death of a Salesman" all the while thinking they can cash in on the rights to a sequel, this being the one remaining purpose of reading stuff anymore. See, we could write a great book describing the solution to our dilemma, but who would understand its vocabulary?