I can’t be the only Tri-Town person thinking: Is Trevor Currier—“MAGA Trevor” of whose eccentricities we’ve heard so much—the same Currier who’s currently running to represent our neighboring district in the State House?

JONES RESIGNS

In March Bradley Jones—the sitting Republican representative for the 20th Middlesex (parts of Middleton, Reading, North Reading, and Lynnfield)—decided to hang up his State House lapel pin and step down as House Minority Leader from his 32-years career at Beacon Hill. He is (or was) by most accounts a moderate and normal person, who had increasingly been the subject of some estrangement from the local MAGA base. (The humerous aside that he “may or may not have been a Republican” was met with much knowing snicker in North Andover in April. We touched on that in one of our April newsletters, “Margaret Mead Reenters MAGA Land.”)

Alas, moderation and normalcy are the bones on which the MAGA flesh-eating base sharpen their teeth. And they’re evidently under the impression that their next district candidate, Trevor Currier, will present them with rarer and juicier meat. After all, until recently, also by most accounts, it was hardly a secret that Mr. Currier was eagerly stoking coal on the Trump train and certainly seemed to do so when he ran for the Masconomet School Board last year.

STILL MAGA AFTER ALL THESE WEEKS?

Hearing about his candidacy recently, I decided to look up his platform. Surprisingly, he’s apparently for lowering Massachusetts taxes; for affordability and “taking a disciplined approach to spending,” for transparency and for accountability, for checks and balances, for lowering energy costs (we’re being “crushed by rising energy prices"), for protecting local control, and for academic excellence in education. You’d be forgiven for asking if he was running as a Democrat.

IF A CLOD BE WASHED AWAY BY THE SEA

Hang on, you say! Might there some dissociative operation at play that we Dumbocrats fail to grasp? Doesn’t Mr. Currier’s Massachusetts platform seem directly at odds with the mound of administrative and perceptive garbage flowing downstream from Washington?

We hardly need to go through the list at length: The opacity surrounding Sen. McConnell’s taking his long-awaited eternity leave; the Administration’s opaque, relentless grift and corruption; Hegseth’s weird, low-testosterone obsession and Hormuz Strait debacle, currently standing at $37 billion and counting; Trump’s reckless depletion of armed conflict-preparedness resources; the chaos in the energy markets caused by feckless and inept negotiations conducted by real-estate developers; federal agencies’ suspension of due process and civil rights; Todd Blanche’s lawfare waged against “Blue States”; the DOJ’s facilitation of the Epstein cover-up and the President’s obvious part in it; the halting of academic funding and abolition of the Department of Education; the stripping of healthcare insurance from millions of Americans; the blanket refusal among Republicans to call J6 an insurrection; and keeping and mistreating suspected illegal immigrants in Burlington and masked thugs grabbing innocent people off the streets. And these just scratch the surface.

All this abnormality doesn’t flow straight down to the state level? It doesn’t affect, profoundly and directly, the financial and legislative decisions that Mr. Currier will be asked to make as a state representative?

Of course it does, and the local MAGA movement should own their role as enablers: from bottom-ballot candidates—school boards and state reps—all the way up to the head of the rotting goldfish.