It's getting familiar, now: jolting awake from a bad dream, a strong smell of gin-sopped sheets flooding the nostrils. But once your head stops spinning, you get your bearings. A crushing reality beckons.

Hit that snooze button; you could stand a little more sleep.

President Donald Trump is not the horror that haunts your living nightmare. We see his face everyday — bloated, decrepit, almost papier-mâché, decomposing from the strain of housing energies of unfathomable evil and corruption. America is used to it; we've seen presidents disintegrate in real time, aging two decades in less than 10 circuits around the sun.

But body horror has never been anywhere near as effective as cosmic horror, the horror of the unknown. This isn't just Film School 101 — real people are much more likely to crowd around a homeless person mauled by public transit than they are to explore the mysteries of why he was homeless in the first place.

We know Trump. We get the conservative animus directed toward the marginalized and the poor. We understand his anarcho-capitalism and neoreactionary fascism; concepts that in theory contradict each other, but once you shine a light on that motel bed stuffed with fellow travelers, God knows what other kind of critters will scurry out.

Over the weekend, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a monstrous tax bill, which can only be read as a massive windfall for the rich. Though the bridge salesmen at conservative think tanks and websites like Bootstraps2bootlegs.biz would have you believe otherwise, this latest GOP Ponzi scheme amounts to nothing more than a direct funneling of producer wealth to exploiter coffers.

Though I could go step-by-step, point-by-point, into the myriad ways in which this bill is bad — the slashing of the alternative minimum and inheritance taxes, just for one, ensures that not only do the ultrarich get ultraricher but can now bequeath that ballooning ungodly sum to their even more violently idle spawn — it would be a waste of time, effort and column inches.

In the end, it makes our descent back down into feudalism all the more obvious, and trying to convey the terror via a careful explainer simply does not do its evil justice. Suffice it to say that the Republican victory is a gigantic spider emerging from the birth canal of a sacrificed peasant.

But we're still not even into cosmic horror territory, yet. On the final day of November, as we approached zero hour of the tax bill vote, the Senate Democrats Twitter account thought it would be a good idea to tweet that “The GOP once believed in bipartisanship,” and included an “inspiring” quote from Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan … welcome to the resistance.

Reagan, you'll remember, was the original President Dementia, armed with an economic plan befitting synaptic degeneration. We mirthlessly mock the current bill for its hand-scribbled sections. Lest we forget, however, trickle-down architect Arthur Laffer first penned his plan on a cocktail napkin.

Of course, Reagan's introduction of trickle-down economics not only didn't work then and never, ever will, but it has irreparably damaged what should be an obvious understanding that the wealthy do not need anymore of our money. The Democrats, however, do not see an abomination which must never be repeated. Instead, it's an opportunity to elbow nudge their good friends across the aisle to score political points in a game no one's playing anymore.

The dread we feel upon waking up is no longer wondering how full of high crimes and misdemeanors President Dementia Two is going to fill his diaper with by day's end, but of the frightening unknown as to how much of a sclerotic capitulation we can expect from Trump's opposition.

True, the Senate Dems all (yes, even the ideologically bankrupt Joe Manchin!) voted against the tax bill. It ends up a moot point, however, given that the bill passed anyway. But, with a bill this disastrous, with no "high-minded" conceptions of compromise, what ends up being worth anything in the aftermath is the “why.”

In recent decades, the GOP has become more tribal than ever. That's not a criticism — whatever horrific ideas fuel that engine, it is powered without a hint of bipartisanship. And the results cannot be denied. Yet even as conservatism sinks further into a wretched cesspit, liberals are still as eager as ever to shove their arms into the filth in search of a hand to shake.

That's neither a winning strategy nor a moral one. And if we're to have any hope of opposing atrocities like the tax bill, to fight the increasingly grotesque horrors that are already pounding against our front doors, we cannot also be afraid that the calls are coming from within our own house.