Opinion

I have been alive long enough to see presidents shot dead in the street, civil rights leaders gunned down in their hotel rooms and horrible, horrible wars started on the wretched basis of disgusting lies. But of all the things I have seen in my long life, nothing compares to Wednesday, January 6th, 2021.

On that day ... a terrible, singular day that is burned into our hearts and minds, an evil, broken sociopath who had been voted out of power by the citizens of the United States of America did everything he could to hold onto that power and set the match that led to the most gruesome internal attack on this country since the Civil War.

I’m watching the first snow in Chicago, fighting an urge to withdraw from national news for a while. Any familiarity with world history makes clear the imperative of resistance before jackboots kick down the door, but watching Republicans’ abrogation of duty in service to a charlatan taxes one’s mental health. I don’t want to give Trump and his unqualified goons that much power.

For me, because the destruction won’t begin in earnest until January, the worst part about the election so far is my own internal dialogue: I don’t want to harbor ill will or feel contemptuous disgust for MAGA. I don’t want to anticipate their remorse, if they ever connect the dots between tariffs, mass deportations, and the price of apples come June. But nor do I want to sugarcoat the cruel catastrophe they have unleashed, not just on immigrants and minorities, but on themselves.

For now, I’m not getting involved in the debate over what Kamala Harris did wrong. For one thing, whatever conclusions are drawn now will almost certainly be forgotten by the time of the next election. For another, the debate takes vital attention away from the choice of the majority of American voters, which is to say, their terrible choice.

Why did they break for Donald Trump? Lots of worthy people are going to spend lots of time exploring that question. I won’t, though. What I know is that Trump campaigned on easily proven lies. What I also know is his supporters chose to believe them. What I care about now are the consequences of that choice, and those consequences are going to be bad for all of us, including everyone who voted for him.

Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.

This simply had to be put to paper, though, because I would be remiss if I didn’t urgently warn you that Trump’s takeover of our military is at the top of his dirty to-do list, and at the tip of his toxic spear in his quest to murder our Democracy.

It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.

So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.

I have an admission for you: I never took even a single second to consider the terrible residue of a Democratic loss in this month's elections, precisely because of the terrible things that happened last week.

When others brought it up, I would simply defer and say something that tasted like this: “I can’t allow myself to go there, because the consequences will be too grave to even imagine. My focus and energy need to be on ONE thing: WINNING. We must get Kamala Harris into the White House. Losing is just too devastating to contemplate.”

There’s an argument I want to discuss. It goes something like this: Donald Trump’s policies are going to alienate some of the people who voted for him. To be sure, many of them wanted something done about the economy. Prices were too damn high. But they didn’t sign up for tariffs, deportations and cuts to social services, like food stamps.

As a liberal pundit put it, Trump seems poised to follow through with that policy agenda, though going through with it is “political suicide.”

Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out.

He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.

Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.

There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr are , respectively, not qualified to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.

Say, remember all that happy talk about how younger voters were going to save us in the most important elections of our lives?

Good times …