The last full solar eclipse in the United States was on August 21, 2017, and it provided a stage for a typical MAGA moment. President Donald J. Trump came out onto a balcony at the White House, accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump. If you watch the original broadcast, you will also see that to Melania’s right are a few denizens of the White House. I identified Trump aide Hope Hicks and former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who had been confirmed as attorney general only five weeks earlier. Both are wearing special eclipse glasses, and Sessions at least is looking delightfully goofy, which is part of the charm of an eclipse.

The president and the first lady, who are legendary for having no sense of humor and the social climber’s fragile sense of personal dignity, did not. 

---

We now understand why all these stupid things happened that day. We have learned that if we let it, MAGA can and will ruin everything. Most of us are focused on where we will see the eclipse, whether there will be clouds, and how to know whether the eclipse glasses we bought are real or fake. We have screened them out.

---

Of course, this was not a surprise, at least not initially. The 2016 campaign and first weeks in office created a large body of evidence that Trump did not intend to be bound by other people’s rules, or to be “presidential” in any conventional way. But he was still capable of shocking Americans, regardless of their partisan leanings. As the eclipse began, and photographers and journalists assembled down below yelled “don’t look at it!” Trump did the only thing he wasn’t supposed to do — look straight into the sun without anything to protect his eyes.

And smiling like an idiot as he did it.

Now, we are also talking about someone who has used a tanning bed for most of his life, despite the research demonstrating that it causes skin cancer. But in retrospect, this moment was also a metaphor for what was to follow, how extremist the Trump administration was, how it would destroy the Republican Party, and by doing so, warp our nation’s entire political life. 

In 2017, we all still believed that a Trump administration was something the nation had to endure, much like Warren Harding’s presidency, but that there was a phenomenon called “guardrails” in place, “adults in the room” who would limit the damage. Yes, we had already experienced Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which prevented anyone from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for any reason. Issued only days after he took office, and gleefully nicknamed “the Muslim Ban” by Trump’s allies on the right, it canceled visas for people who had already cleared immigration and were in flight. 

---

Leave a tip here ($10?). Thanks!

---

No president had ever done such a thing. And no president had ever offered a friendly hand to fascists, antisemites and white supremacists, as Trump had immediately following the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a little more than a week before the eclipse.

And then Trump stared into the sun, which kind of became the story of the day. Soon, of course, we would learn that Trump believes that he has such “good genes” that the ordinary rules of cellular biology do not apply to him. We would also become familiar with the First Lady’s “I do not want to participate in the bullshit” mode, which is on display in that photograph. Melania was wearing designer sunglasses, not the tacky paper things that actually protect your eyes: to give her some credit, she was also not looking into the sun.

Both Trumps had to be wrestled behind a pillar and persuaded to do the proper set up shot that would set an example to Americans about how to view an eclipse safely.

We now understand why all these stupid things happened that day. We have learned that if we let it, MAGA can and will ruin everything. Most of us are focused on where we will see the eclipse, whether there will be clouds, and how to know whether the eclipse glasses we bought are real or fake. We have screened them out.

---

---

But this is how Trump and his merry band of extremists have tried to ruin this eclipse.

On Friday, after a rare 4.8 magnitude earthquake centered in New Jersey rattled the Northeast, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene asked us all to reflect on our sins. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she wrote. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.” Now, if she had said New Jersey should repent, I might have been on board.

As of today, Greene is sticking to her guns, and she is not alone: other Christian extremists are predicting — in varying combinations — the Apocalypse, the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus. If you are concerned about any of these things, I would advise you to dress in white and sit in a tree, which will signal your willingness to be whisked up to heaven. People have been trying this for centuries, and it never works, but if at first you don’t succeed …

But back to Christian nationalism: Greene may, in fact, only be a stalking-horse for the idea that voters who reject Trump at the polls are rejecting God himself. Why do I think this? Because today, the Trump campaign dropped this ad, in which he seems to be returning to earth as Jesus himself during the eclipse.

This, friends, is what the political mainstream in the GOP is — that, and a sitting congresswoman explaining that the Devil is about to walk the earth. Our political life has been warped by these people since 2015, and we aren’t done yet, not by a long shot. We won’t be done even when Joe Biden wins the election in November.