Donald Trump and MAGA 2024: black and white has never been so grey.

The year 2024 in America is a theatre where the actors are accused of rewriting the script with every act. Trump, in his repeated return to the political stage, has not so much bent the rules as made breaking them the rule. In the shadow of his rhetoric, the once bold contrasts of black and white—right and wrong, truth and falsehood—have blended into a confusing gradient, demanding new eyes to distinguish their contours.

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Through a Glass, Blindly

In moments when we find ourselves teetering on the edge of self-reflection, it is tempting to search for blame outside ourselves, to imagine that the chaos of the world is solely external, as though our minds are somehow exempt from it. There is a comfort in thinking we are merely victims of external circumstance, that our moral compass is always right, and that others—those unfamiliar faces in the crowd—are the ones who have strayed. But just as a mind that refuses to engage with reality warps it, so too does a life lived in ignorance of one’s own failings.

It becomes easy, then, to sit in judgment of others, not realizing that in doing so, we are actually revealing more about ourselves than we ever could about those we criticize. The mind, after all, has its own way of twisting reality, of presenting the world as an extension of our personal anxieties and limitations. This is not to say that we should absolve others of their missteps, but rather, in navigating the murky waters of morality and truth, we must first interrogate our own biases, lest we become a slave to the very illusions we seek to dismantle.

Thus, the truth we seek is not an immediate and tidy answer but the fruit of continuous questioning, an endless pushing against the jar of our own minds. In this, we begin to see the difference between recognizing the jar and pretending it doesn’t exist. The world, in all its complexity, is both the container and the content. It is not the breaking of boundaries that brings wisdom, but the acknowledgment of them, the understanding that real freedom is found within the glass, not beyond it. This is the challenge: to see clearly while knowing we are always looking through something.

MAGA, more than a slogan, is the parade of emotional allegiance rather than rational policy. Its movement, in reclaiming a nostalgic ideal, negates the complexity that gave rise to it, drawing its adherents into the illusion that the past was a clean, knowable time. Trumpism flips the script by making its followers believe that clarity means simplicity when in truth, simplicity only leads to an overexposed negative, a stark, reductive contrast that says more in what it erases than what it affirms.

In this climate, the fallacy of false balance reigns supreme: the mechanical insistence that every argument, no matter how groundless or dangerous, deserves equal weight on the scales of public discourse. We see this in the media’s attempt to “balance” Trump’s baseless claims with those grounded in fact. It becomes less about representing sides and more about selling controversy—every attempt at equilibrium only tilts further into imbalance. When both sides are heard equally despite one standing on the shifting sands of deceit, the very act of fairness becomes a farce. Equal time is an equation that negates the meaning of its terms.

Trump has not merely disrupted procedure; he has made disruption the procedure. His relentless challenges to election results, legal systems, and norms do not represent individual breaches but a systemic effort to make the process meaningless. Where rules once governed, now exceptions become the rule. Breaking the law becomes a gesture of power because it declares the law irrelevant. It’s a kind of reverse-engineering of governance, where the aim is not to improve but to undermine by misuse, where the Constitution itself becomes the instrument of its own dismantling.

This polarization, this binary opposition that MAGA amplifies, has become an ideological civil war. But here, black and white only gesture at clarity while smuggling in the messiness of the gray. The push for hard lines has obscured the fact that beneath the surface, these contrasts blur into shades of contradiction. For those caught in the middle, the grays are palpable; the rules broken, the truth spun, the loyalties questioned.

What we now perceive as clarity, the bright line between two sides, has only ever been a smokescreen, a filter obscuring the haze of moral and procedural erosion underneath. The clarity we crave is itself the fallacy—the dangerous illusion that something once broken can remain whole if we merely look at its fractured pieces long enough.

In 2024, America finds itself on this precipice: where black and white are claimed but never delivered. As the scale of justice sways, greyscale becomes the new truth, not for lack of color, but for lack of coherent contrast.