A few helpful cheat codes for when your phone seems possessed
MAGA games like Grand Theft Don-o and Grow a Gorgon are no fun at all
Is this you?
You wake up in the morning, roll over and grab your smartphone.
You want to look at the weather, or Instagram, or the stock futures, or last night's scores.
But your phone seems possessed.
Your screen is locked onto a nightmarish video game that seems like an emanation from Hades, a visitation from Bizarro World. You can't get your phone to show you what you want until you first trudge through yet another painful round of the unpleasant game. Grimly, you must fight your way to the game's next level before you can break through to the Times' cooking app or your Spotify morning play list or Cartoons Hate Her, your favorite funny Substack.
These horror games come in multiple versions, but all are made by the same company: MAGA 2.0.
Today's game, Grand Theft Don-O, asks you to stop an evil character known as Dear Leader from auctioning off national parks on the dark web for gazillions in crypto. In this game, you're told you may have a powerful ally - a mysterious posse of people in black robes - but you suspect that, when you get to the next level, it'll turn out they're on the other side. It so often does.
Yesterday, the game was Grow a Gorgon, in which you were forced to play the role of a frustrated senator at a Capitol Hill hearing, questioning a parade of intricately coiffed women, each with fake lashes long enough to hook a tarpon and makeup with more layers than your Aunt Marge's taco salad.
Each gorgon smugly repeated lie after lie after lie as she refused to answer any of your questions, instead lecturing you on what questions you should have asked. They had names like Kristi and Tulsi and Pam and Karoline. Their clothes were all carefully MAGA-coded, and their main skill was to cover their incompetence with a hard veneer of contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the role of a free press.
The day before that, your phone was stuck on ICEKraft. There, your challenge was to stop masked men in black, who clearly should have stopped taking steroids many moons ago, from snatching innocent students, gardeners, cleaning ladies, waitresses and auto mechanics off the street and whisking them onto planes. The planes flew them to prisons in countries that most Americans couldn't spot on a map even if you spotted them the latitude and longitude. In your quest to defend these innocents, you were armed only with the camera in your phone and a copy of the Constitution.
It was not a fun game.
The next day, who knows what fresh agonies your phone will inflict? It could be Monster Hunter: Where's Epstein? Or: Assassin’s Creed: Antivaxers Amok. Or: Counterstrike: Kash Goes Down His List.
It gets exhausting. It gets depressing. It leads you to page longingly but despairingly through real estate listings for Malta and the Azores.
I'm here with some good news, though.
Cheat codes exist to help you play these games with more than a scintilla of hope. I'll share a few of the simpler ones with you before revealing the ultimate, superpower code.
The key to winning any game is to understand your opponent. And the key to these MAGA 2.0 games is to avoid investing your foes with more tactical genius, more deviousness, more Teflon than they really possess. They really are simple, brutish creatures whose behaviors are utterly predictable, if appalling.
Cheat Code 1: If Dear Leader dismisses an allegation against him or one of his sycophantic cronies as a "hoax," this means it is absolutely true. Do not let the "hoax" dodge lead you to waste time on doubt or alternative theories. Proceed as though he's guilty - and you have the receipts.
Cheat Code 2: Advance knowledge of your foe's next move always helps. So, know this: If Dear Leader accuses a political enemy or critic of some misdeed, this absolutely, 100 percent, lead-pipe cinch means he has done or is fixing to do the same thing.
If he accuses, say, a senator or a member of the Federal Reserve Board of submitting a fraudulent mortgage application, recall- and remind everyone you know - that a New York civil jury in 2024 found his very own company guilty of committing exactly the same offense, but with a frequency and at a scale that dwarfs what his targets are alleged (dubiously) to have done.
If Dear Leader accuses a former president of hob-nobbing with a notorious sexual abuser, you may trust that Dear Leader has himself downed vats worth of double-malt Scotch by the abuser's side, while creepily ogling young woman. If he whines without evidence that the FBI and Justice Department have "weaponized" the legal system against him, realize that he's fixing to do that very thing for real, at magnum force, to anyone who's ever looked at him cross-eyed.
Cheat Code 3: Dear Leader is a classic bully. Stand up to him and he'll stand down (and eat a taco). Bending a knee to him, offering tribute while hoping he'll then leave you alone, well, that's a mug's game. He'll just be back for more next week. He smells fear but flees courage. Defy him, mock him and, oh sure, he'll fire some ungrammatical, misspelled insults at you from the shelter of his pathetic social media platform. You'll survive. Give in to what he wants, though,,and the extortion will never end.
And here's the final, cheat code that eventually can get you to the game level where sanity returns, democracy recovers and the ICE machine gets shoved into a closet.
Some people will tell you this code doesn't work anymore, that it's a relic of Mario Brothers/NES days.
They're wrong.
It's still the superpower Dear Leader fears the most, spends his nights fretting about.
It's called the vote.
You have one. Use it this fall, next spring, next fall and every election until the games of MAGA 2.0 get removed from all the shelves.
Use yours. And bring a friend. Bring 10 friends. A hundred.
Because Fortnite isn't the most enduring franchise in America.
Voting is.