JANUARY 21, 2025 – Now that yesterday’s nightmare is over, I can move on with my usual routines. Except . . . It turns out that I was merely dreaming that the nightmare was over. News of Trump’s first-day fiats hit like golf ball-sized hailstones. A blanket pardon of the J6 hooligans? We knew it was coming, but against the replayed videos of the fiercely violent storming of the Capitol five years ago, the blanket pardons were an affront to democracy. Furthermore, Trump’s cynical in-your-face edict turned the notion of “law and order” on its head and rubbed it into the mud of his own lawlessness.
This morning on Morning Joe, the weekday opinion show of the extreme, leftwing, radical, communist, socialist cable outlet, MSNBC, the hosts played a long series of statements made by Republican Senators in the aftermath of the January 6 assault on democracy. The utterances were unequivocal in their blistering condemnation of the attack. Without exception, the raw denunciations of J6 offenders were every bit as strident as statements coming from the most outraged Democrats.
Those same Republicans became Trump’s biggest enablers and now acquiesce in his mockery of the rule of law. If by doing so they protect their own personal power, they have forfeited any claim of loyalty to the ideals—actual or aspirational—of the “Grand American Experiment.” The price of their redemption is resistance henceforth to all things Trump—culminating, quite possibly, in death threats by the nastier members of the freed Capitol “hostages,” and most probably, in loss primary challenges and losses.
As the world re-arranges itself in defensive and reactive response to what we have brought upon ourselves, America will find itself squeezed, disrupted, and divided. Reflective of its isolationist origins[1], the MAGA mantra—“America First”—is tantamount to “America Alone.” In a world as interconnected as it is now, environmentally, economically, and technologically, neither construct of America, “First” or “Alone,” will work to America’s benefit or security—the Trump clan and its sycophantic billionaire oligarchs excepted.
The worst of it, I fear, is that none of this will be transformed into a persuasive “I told you so” scenario. Control of an array of social media platforms—the primary source of information for half the public—will control the messaging. We already live in an Orwellian information age in which “down” is “up” and “right” is “left.” (e.g. “fair and balanced”; “truth social”; “no-spin zone”; legitimate law enforcement by Democrats portrayed as “persecution” of Trump; personal political retribution ordered by Trump but pursued in the guise of “legitimate investigation of wrong-doing”; etc.). As Trump’s initiatives breed chaos, rancor, and overall decline, Republican spinmeisters, cued by the Chief of Kleptocurrency himself, will deflect all accountability.
The bleeding edge of “spin” will be littered with scapegoats. History is replete with them—the most effective tactic of autocrats. Throughout the past four years, Trump and his sycophants have pinned their power on multiple scapegoats, from “illegal criminal immigrants” to “leftwing, extremist [etc.] Democrats” to “devious election workers” to “persecutorial prosecutors” to “de-funders of the police” to “anti-Christians wanting to take your faith away” to “legions of LGBTQ rights advocates hellbent on kidnapping your kids and forcing them to undergo sex changes so they can play high school football and compete on the varsity swim team.” Couple the age-old scapegoat tactic with the steroidal purveyance of falsehoods, distortions, and other forms of disinformation, and “I told you so”—an already devalued phrase—will have absolutely no currency whatsoever beyond the lips of people who say it.
Monday’s inauguration encapsulated Trump’s blatant contempt for America. As the newly installed head of the executive branch of government (recently granted broad exemption from criminal prosecution, thanks to a not-so-Supreme Court), he blasted a retributive tirade inside the home of the legislative branch of government that his supporters had attacked four years before. The proceeding doubled as a slap across the face of America—mere multi-millionaires included—as the richest of the mega-rich smiled and winked at themselves. Behind the scenes, but not beyond opacity, the Trump clan enriched itself on cryptocurrency. How befitting such a classless, soulless set of pyrite addicts! How offensive to a democracy—a word derived from the Greek words “demos” (people) and “kratia” (rule or power)!
Stewing in bitter disappointment yesterday, I braved the -10F wind chill to ski—up and down the local ski hill, abandoned by staff and public alike on account of the extreme cold. I felt like the guy with a migraine who intentionally stubs his toe to distract himself from the main source of pain. Each day now I’ll venture out longer and farther to distract my mind from the national nightmare that has just begun.
But I can—and will—dream of better times ahead . . . eventually. The symbol of humanity—the Phoenix—gives me hope.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] See Woodrow Wilson in 1916; the America First Committee during the interwar period; the overtly antisemitic “America First Party” in 1943, in the midst of our fight against the Nazis.
