Two looming contests will tell if America still lives or if Trump has doomed us all

When I was a young man, I never figured that well into my seventh decade on this green and fading earth, I’d need to reiterate that I was a proud anti-fascist, and a veteran who served his country to defend it from violent, lawless convicted felons.

Like the one who has somehow scraped his way back into our White House …

It would have been completly inconceivable — a thing of fiction. When I was discharged from the Navy in 1980, America was an imperfect place, but tied together with the imperfect notion that if we stood together we could work our way out of nearly any self-inflicted mess.

Today, I am typing to you that Republicans have declared war on America, and as grotesque as that is, it is nonetheless a terrible reality we must come to grips with.

Maybe they are finishing what they started with Nixon and Reagan, but I’m here to tell you they have never been this sinister.

Donald J. Trump is a homegrown terrorist who hates America. After violently attacking our country once, he again has his fat little foot on the gas pedal, and this time means to run us over for good.

Instead of spending my golden years writing another damn book, and squeezing out every ounce of good that might be due to me, I am furiously banging out these three chilling words:

Authoritarianism is here.

Look, Trump will stop at nothing to protect himself, and continue to endanger this country. There are no lines he won’t cross, or laws he won’t incinerate. He’s a wholy dishonest man, who is good at exactly one thing: breaking things.

Like our economy, for instance ...

Since he slithered his way into our White House and spray-painted it tacky-gold, prices are rising, inflation is rising, unemployment is rising, and jobs are on the decrease. And that peace he promised to deliver on Day One? Well, things are escalating quickly in the Mideast, and along the frontlines of democracy in Eastern Europe.

Trump has predictably been a complete and utter failure, because history tells us that is all he has ever been. He was a rotten kid, a rotten businessman, a rotten husband, a rotten father, and is a poor damn excuse of a man.

His approval ratings are tanking, and everywhere he goes, which lately was an appalling stop in Great Britain, he is met with hate and derision.

His health is failing, and he looks even more hideous than usual. All the spray tan, and stringy stuff he tapes to his head each day are doing nothing to hide the fact he is quickly approaching the point where he is almost as dead on the outside as he is on the inside.

Instead of doing what every other president has done before him, and reassessing what has taken us down, he is steadfastly dragging along his dead right leg, and limping forward without looking back. He is climbing over the dead bodies toward the higher ground in his bunker where he can blame somebody else for his deep and never-ending failures.

It’s what losers do, and what he has always done.

• If what’s left of our media is reporting on his ongoing failures, they are the problem, and need to be silenced.
• If comedians are making light of his never-ending moronic tendencies, they need to be squashed.
• If economic data comes out that doesn't put a shine to his dark failures, he needs to manufacture his own numbers that will.
• If proven science doesn't align with his hair-brain thinking on things like vaccines and clean air and water, scientists need to be silenced, and crushed by the morally bankrupt billionaires who keep him in office, so their profits will soar.
• If some inconvenient law is getting in the way of his march against the truth he can just ignore it, because he knows his bought-off, reprehensible conservative Supreme Court has already decided their lopsided, orange lout is fit to be king.
• If none of that works, it was Obama or Biden’s fault.

And while ALL of this was inconceivable even 15 years ago, none of it comes as any surprise to those of us who have been doing nothing but paying close attention since the initial blast on Nov. 8, 2016.

If only everybody cared even half as much, we might not be in this terrible mess. Sadly, most don’t.

I’ll be spending the next couple of months typing to you from the coast of the Battleground State of North Carolina, and inside the Tidewater, Virginia, media market, as that state girds for crucial elections Nov. 4, that will decide which party holds power there.

Those elections, and similar contests in my home state, New Jersey, will be the first signs of whether our slide deep into fascism continues, or if we are interested in climbing out of the abyss.

For now, I’ll exit at the same place I left my last couple of columns by reiterating WE must be the truth-tellers going forward. We can no longer rely on our corporate media to tell us what is going on, because too many have pathetically surrendered to authoritarianism. We must turn to independent journalists to provide the truth, and confirm what is right in front of our eyes.

You … we … must all light the way ahead.

I’ll be very honest with you: I don’t need this shit, and know many of you don’t either. I think I speak for many of my generation when I say this is not how our retirement was supposed to go. We were planning to toss our flashlights and keys to the younger folks to guide the way. It was finally our turn to get the hell out of our own way, collect our social security, lean carefully on our savings, and make the most of whatever remained of our short lives.

I figured I’d find time at the nearest beach, and write about soft, pretty things of absolutely no consequence. I’d ride bliss, until it tossed me off and into some grave.

That’s when war came, and I made the decision not to ignore it.

It has been left to us to be true patriots and rescue America from the bruised grip of a maniac and his morally busted political cheap-shots, and misogynystic racists who mean to end us.

We must speak up, and stand against the latest Republican attack against our Democracy. There are no magic potions, or thoughts and prayers that will get us out of this mess. There is nobody coming to rescue us.

Once our Democracy is gone, we won’t get it back. Not in this lifetime.

At one point, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I believe we are here to prove it still can be …

• (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)