The oligarchs have a huge thumb on the scale, but it's not mind control. As Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Maybe we will indeed get it good and hard, and four years from now we'll reconsider. That won't do much good for the Ukrainians, who will almost certainly have suffered a genocide, but we decided that apparently we're good with that.

Or maybe we'll muddle through, like we did last time. The fact is that a President has only limited power to affect your life directly. Yeah, there's every reason to think that erecting a massive trade barrier will crash the economy, and trashing the federal government will cause tons of misery in the "get your government hands off my medicare" crowd. But we have the sour grapes that the new leadership is at least incompetent, and rarely accomplishes anything he sets out for.

I'm extraordinarily disappointed that Americans have chosen literal criminality. It's hard to imagine that we said "Yeah, nearly everybody around him was convicted, and the first thing he's going to do is pardon himself, but at least he's not..." and I'll let you finish that sentence.

But that's not the oligarchs, at least not immediately. We did this to ourselves, at least in aggregate. A lot of people are going to get hurt who didn't do this to themselves, and all I can do now is try to mitigate that as best I can.