I have not been able to find a way in. The storms of daily abuse have been too great. It sweeps away my ability to focus on one outrage before another comes hurtling along right behind it. Trump and his fellow travelers have unleashed a noise that began to climb on Inauguration Day, decibel by decibel and just when you think it cannot become sharper, more penetrating, it goes beyond. Not a whine, but a feral screeching that has gotten louder every day.
Trump cuts foreign aid to children. It is not an exaggeration to say that vast numbers of children will die because of this. Musk, through DOGE, fires thousands of federal workers for no discernable reason and to no discernable benefit. The Administration cancels pediatric cancer research. It has made adversaries of Canada and Europe. It bans books at the Naval Academy but keeps Mein Kampf. It trashes the stability of the world’s economic order. Its ICE masked goons arrest innocent people on the street, smash car windows to get to a mother with her child, send their captives to a slave and torture prison in El Salvador and then Trump and Bukele laugh about their defiance of a court’s order to bring an innocent man home.
Every day brings instances of their delight in malice, their preening arrogance, their annihilating stupidity, an hourly acid-bath of depraved talk and actions, and the implacable, soulless ugliness of Trump himself.
And we have not yet reached 100 days of this. Four years to go.
Several conclusions occur to me.
First, there is no coming back from this to a pre-Trump, pre-MAGA normalcy. Politicians who imply that this is possible or who wish cast this are either cowards or are lying. The rule of law is being destroyed. John Roberts and the Supreme Court have smoothed the way to this destruction. Feeling their impunity, Trump and his people are committing violations of the Constitution on a daily basis. Their financial corruption has been staggering. Their human rights violations equally so.
We can expect mass pardons for these crimes when he leaves office. If we get through these 4 years without all of this bringing about a version of Armageddon, there will be no justice. There will be zero accountability for the crimes. They will get away, in many cases, with having done irreversible harm to the country and to individuals.
Whoever expects to go back to a pre-Trump, rules-based distribution of power and governance or to a neo-liberal economic policy is crazy. As a nation we will be broke and most traditional institutions will have disgraced themselves through collaboration or they will have been demolished.
Second, can you ever imagine agreeing to being governed by these people again – by MAGA, by Republicans? By most Democrats in leadership positions – with the exception of Bernie and AOC and maybe one or two others. #
I have no idea what any of this means. The dissolution of the Union? It is the dissolution that gets to me, the sense that all the parts that make the country able to function are being chopped at with every new executive order, every DOGE bit of vandalism, every capitulation by Congress, by law firms, by so many Democrats who have yet to understand that evil cannot be tempered by weakness.
What about the institution of a “nightmare State of oppression?” * Mass death brought on by vaccine-refusing fools? Churches invaded by ICE and other agents of the State? A supercharged Depression? Grass growing in the streets?
A reversal in sentiment by most of the 77 million who voted for him? I’m not depending on them. “This is going to get worse, not better. Never underestimate the American public’s thirst for performative cruelty towards The Other: defendants, foreigners, anyone they’ve been conditioned to see as less than human. We’re the country that made lynchings into picnics.”
Finally, consider this, “It’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass – it’s the ones you don’t expect at all.” **
Even consciously limiting my doomscrolling (formerly called being informed), I have been overwhelmed by sadness and rage, conditions which cannot be sustained, conditions which do all kinds of spiritual and psychic damage over time.
Our hearts and moral identities are at stake — the danger of our own self-righteous blindness is real. The danger of being consumed by hatred is real. Nietzsche had it exactly right: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” I am writing those sentences to put before me in black and white what I must, must remember.
One may not give up or retreat. Children are at stake. That fact above all else takes away any excuse for despair or withdrawal.
All I have is this — find a way to serve others and to serve the ideals of democracy. Preserve your soul. Do not isolate yourself. Seek out groups who will oppose these people and their agendas.
Spring has arrived. Go outside. Walk. Love dogs. Love birds. Do not despair. There are millions like us.
#What a disappointment Democratic leadership has been, weak and uninspiring. As I write this, there is no opposition Party to Trump’s lawlessness.
*David Frum **Karen Thompson Walker
