Tonight, the GOP race officially begins in Iowa, but - as anyone can see - it’s already over. I’ve got MSNBC on in the background, and Steve “Khaki” Kornacki is engaging and informative in analyzing the patterns, probabilities, and potentialities of the final caucus tallies. Still, he - and all the talking heads - are superfluous. All you need to know about the current GOP can be understood from the metaphor of a biker gang.

First, we must accept that they are, at their heart, a tribal entity - one that exists in a constant state of war with the rest of civil society and that in-cult warrior mindset only builds when they feel threatened. Further, you can recognize them by their gang colors and way of signaling to the world that they’re a force apart, not beholden to the rules of society, empathy, and decency. Theirs is an internal morality that only protects the made members of the gang. Due to that identity as a threatened group apart, they live in a constantly agitated moral space of “I Must Win / You Must Lose.” That internal space encourages a strictly hierarchical and retaliative “justice” to keep order among the gang members. This means that if you dare to challenge the leader in any way, it’s a battle to the death. You either emerge as the new boss or are killed on the spot.

The pretenders to Donald Trump’s throne in Iowa all know this. Still, they tentatively and calculatingly stepped forward in hopes that one of the gang’s external enemies - the forces of the law and polite society - would take him out with an arrest or conviction. But that didn’t happen, and now they’re fucked. Now they are the last three twerps – Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswami – who put themselves forward as an option if Trump went to jail. That’s not a good place to be inside a gang.

But I want to make it more visceral. I want you to now think about this in the raw, profoundly unpleasant metaphor of primal, sexual love. Understand that the MAGA faithful live inside a space of constant fear, and they have one protector – one “daddy.”

Trump is that “daddy,” and the namby-pamby libruls are trying to take him down. They’re trying to send “daddy” to jail.

How the hell do you think the submissives who worship him will react to smarmy, gross pretenders coming up to them at the clubhouse, saying, “Hey, baby. If the big man goes to the big house, how about you hook up with me?”

If you perceive it inside the gang-like, cult-like mental space of the MAGA faithful, there is only one thing worse than coming at the boss directly, and that is trying to worm your way into his position if he falls. It is, to use their language, the ultimate “beta” move. It’s gross, and it engenders cellular disgust. All of them – ALL OF THEM – will be ejected from the gang in short order. There is no place for such “cucks” in a gang.

So, what happens today?

The most obvious result is that greasy, sleazy Ron DeSantis will emerge as little more than a smear of blood in the Iowa snow. After today, he’s finished. Trump will make sure he never, ever, ever again wins a race anywhere – and it serves him right.

Nikki Haley will pull the support of suburban, college-educated Republicans. She’ll win the vote of those who aren’t actually in the gang, those who - in November - by dint of their exclusion from the MAGA horde are most likely to stay home, break third party, or reluctantly pull the lever for Biden. Still, the media, ever needing a horse-race narrative, will ride her storyline until New Hampshire or South Carolina, when she will be reduced to ashes and dumped on the side of the road. In a normal party, either DeSantis or Haley would make great coalition-building choices for VEEP, but this is not a normal political party – it’s a biker gang. Haley’s career path forward will be looking for opportunities to be heard on CNN, while DeSantis wonders how he ended up managing a car wash with Madison Cawthorn.

With them out of the picture, and for the rest of 2024 at least, the biker gang will roll on, ever more convinced that the world is out to get them while living vicariously through the grotesque absurdities of their Creamsicle-colored avatar: Donald J. “Fuck All of Y’all” Trump.

To which I say joyfully, “Bring it on.”

Welcome to 2024, and love to you all.