Will even a raging national bonfire be enough to set us back on a path to decency and sanity?
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“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”
The fear of power, the power of fear. Donald Trump has mastered both, combined them, and made them his superpower.
Fear of the ruthless, retributive wielding of Trump’s ever-expanding official and unofficial powers can be seen in the withering and capitulation of his critics and opponents — from Mitch McConnell and the Senate that would not convict; to Jeff Bezos and the papers that would not endorse; to Jack Smith, who voluntarily shut down the two MAGA-court-crippled federal criminal cases; to Morning Joe and the throng of terrified supplicants who make the pilgrimage and bend the knee.
A host of such one-time sources of resistance — call them the “human guardrails” — have been bent, broken, brought to heel, often obeying in advance.
Unlike the Big Bad Wolf, Trump can save his breath as one sticks and straw house after another blows itself down, and bricks are suddenly in short supply.
The power of fear — and its first cousin, rage — is more diffuse and “democratic.” It is what won Trump and his MAGA juggernaut reelection without even a semblance of a positive vision to offer. And it was all based on falsehoods — the power of fear and fury harnessed to the power of lies.
Beginning with “American carnage” and running through the secret sex-change surgeries that schools were performing on your children, this conjuring of a deadly world — a bewildering world of disorganization, displacement, loss, and danger — drove the shelter-seeking and rage-filled straight into Daddy Trump’s arms. And drove them, one might say, crazy.
Trump’s election — which, though hardly a shocker for poll-watchers, was precisely that for all the gestaltists who couldn’t and still can’t fathom the how and why of it — set off both a torrential post-mortem and a pitched battle of predictions of what we’re all in for.
Hand-Wringing, Fault-Finding, and Self-Soothing
The pathologists’ group has come up with a Merck Manual worth of stuff Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party did wrong, while the ball-gazers are split between the apocalyptic and silver-lining gangs, with guarded optimism seemingly trending. (Pretty much ignored in a lightless corner is the tiny cadre of election forensics analysts who are still crunching numbers and assessing organic versus synthetic explanations for the mystifying dropoff of Democratic voters in an election advertised as authentically existential. Full disclosure: I’m among them.)
Some among the optimists have pointed to the ideological “diversity” of top Trump administration picks — counting such apostates as erstwhile Democrats Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Scott Bessent (openly gay and “higher” at Treasury than Pete Buttegieg at Transportation, a bonus), and Elon Musk as somehow checking the “balance” box. Axios, with a more or less straight face, went so far as to headline “Trump’s liberal cabinet.” Please.
A very different group of optimists have suggested that Trump will take it all too far, get caught up in revenge, govern abysmally, cause all kinds of hardships, piss everyone (including his own voters) off, and face the consequences at the next election (presumably 2026, though it wouldn’t completely surprise me if I found there was already some Kalshi money on Trump 2028).
But really, didn’t he already do that? Didn’t he already expose himself as a hateful thug, a sexual predator, a criminal, a monster, and utterly incompetent, at least at doing lawful things? Didn’t he, in pursuit of political advantage, consign hundreds of thousands to preventable COVID-19 deaths? Didn’t he, like some two-bit thimble-rigger, hawk those gilded sneakers, bibles, trading cards, and watches? Didn’t he earn vehement and public condemnation from a host of former high-level staffers and associates? Didn’t he, politically speaking, shoot someone — make that everyone — on Fifth Avenue?
How, one might ask, can he make himself more repulsive, whatever he does?
And yet he won — if he won — by shamelessly and relentlessly telling the lies that consumed otherwise reasonable people with fear of the shadows of things that did not exist, did not in any significant way touch their lives.
And now, as our nation enters the maw of Musk’s efficiency-and-eugenics fever dreams; the idiocy of Kennedy’s war on public health and science; the incompetence, if not treason, of Putin propagandist Gabbard; and the cruelty of Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan, Russell Vought, and a roided-up Project 2025, what will happen next?
When democracy itself and our 250-year experiment in meeting the monumental challenge of self-government are looted and pillaged right in front of our eyes, how will America respond?
Will even a raging national bonfire be enough to set us back on the path to decency and sanity?
I suspect not. Because I suspect there will then be yet more lies to stoke yet more fear, more blame for more outgroups and scapegoats, more rage. So how will the next election — free and fair or otherwise — be any different?
We’re On Our Own
The gearbox of Trump’s mind is made of see-through plexiglass: That worked, so what can I do next? What weakness can I exploit? Where is the next chink in the armor?
The Nazis surely overstepped, and god knows they were at each other’s throats — Himmler and Goering and Bormann and the rest. But it took the armies of two global powers in concert to bring down the Third Reich. It is hard to imagine any such alliance coming to save us, the one-time saviors of the world, from the Fourth.
We should avoid kidding ourselves about the forces at play; the tilt of the captured terrain on which we fight; the tenacity of evil, especially when embodied in a generational talent like Trump; the price of mass ignorance and delusion; and the synergistic power of fear and lies wielded against us.
So count me squarely among the pessimists. I’ve been among them — in the van, in fact — for pretty much all of my adult life, especially the last decade. I’ve not been shy about writing and speaking about what I saw coming. And, I must say, aside from the occasional speed bump, the road to here has been a well-paved, easy drive. Inexorable, almost as if following a set of GPS directions.
Looking Our Reality Squarely in the Eye
Pessimism is easy to condemn, and easy to equate with defeatism, with which I’ll confess there is some overlap.
But I am not suggesting giving up. I just think we should avoid kidding ourselves about the forces at play; the tilt of the captured terrain on which we fight; the tenacity of evil, especially when embodied in a generational talent like Trump; the price of mass ignorance and delusion; and the synergistic power of fear and lies wielded against us.
Young or old, we’ve grown up taking certain things — too many things — for granted, holding certain truths to be self-evident and permanent. We have been slow — too slow — to grasp the error of our assumptions. And we’ve grossly underestimated the awesome power of fear-mongering, lying, cheating.
In chess, and often in war, a bad position — down material, outflanked — reveals itself with gut-punching clarity. In politics, things tend to be fuzzier — indeed, absent the reviled but addictive polls, it would be a full-on Rorschach. Even with polls, it’s easy to misread the room.
Right now there’s not much question that the room is dark — for democracy at least — and the future menacing. The script, such as it is, has taken a hard turn — one that reveals, retrospectively, a long, slow veer.
We’re going to “go through some things.” We stand the best chance of coming through them alive and well if we are prepared, going in, for what having been so slow on the draw is likely to cost us.
