Still think Trump won’t be that bad?
Think again.
Issue #798 The Choice, Thursday, January 30, 2025
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Last week my wife and I were discussing Trump, as we do probably more often than is healthy for sane individuals. Pam was saying that as bad as we thought Trump was going to be, what we’re seeing now is so much worse than we could have imagined.
I disagreed. Married folk do that sometimes, and we have been married for 26 years. My disagreement, I said, is because I believe what we’re seeing happening in front of our eyes is exactly as bad as those of us who were paying attention said that this was going to be.
Trump made it clear during his first presidency just how bad he would have made things if it weren’t for those pesky law-abiding types he had mistakenly surrounded himself with. Still, he managed to come damned close to Armageddon with how he mishandled the pandemic. But as I said, there were those pesky guardrails and moderately sane goody two-shoes individuals surrounding him that managed to steer him away from going full-on nuclear.
But then Trump lost the election, which prompted January 6 where his followers stormed the Capitol and even threatened to murder Trump’s vice-president with Trump’s full complicity. And ever since then, for the next four years, as he managed to stall and then strangle what so many of us hoped would be inevitable justice, Trump and his mob kept forecasting exactly what they had in mind if they ever seized power again.
I remember telling a friend of mine when he asked me what I thought would happen if Trump were to be re-elected that it would be “the end.” But I felt foolishly confident that “the end” wouldn’t come because surely Trump couldn’t convince a majority of American voters to let him seize the controls a second time now that he was visibly more unstable, more insane, and chomping at the bit to hire every whimpering supplicant begging to do his will and wreak revenge on the entire nation. Surely we wouldn’t do that.
But we did. Or they did. It really doesn’t matter now because the effects are the same, and we are all going to pay a price. Some of us more than others,mostly depending on how much money we make, but the vast majority of us will pay a price that we can feel. There is no savior except ourselves.
As President Barack Obama once said, “We are the hope that we have been waiting for.” And as for those insisting that Michelle Obama must run for President, shut up and cut it out. The Obamas gave at the office for eight years and they continue to give in other ways. They have done enough.
Quit looking in the rearview mirror for the cavalry. We had a chance to avert what’s coming and we blew it, so now we face the consequences. And yes, those consequences are already as bad as Trump promised.
The point being that we’re all still in a bit of shell shock because what we thought could never come to pass is now coming to pass. It’s not that it’s worse than we could have imagined, it’s just that when the demons of your imagination are made flesh right in front of you it’s a hard thing to accept when you’re accustomed to a saner version of reality where demons, vampires and President Trumps don’t exist.
But this is real. ICE arrests and roundups of suspected illegal immigrants are real. The attempt to suspend Medicaid was real. Declaring a trade war on Colombia is real. Putting a hold on billions of dollars in Congressionally-approved federal grants so that they could be screened to weed out DEI and climate change initiatives was real.
And sure, Trump hasn’t exactly racked up the victories in his early attempts to dismantle the government due to significant pushback. He had to back off canceling Medicaid, and he had to back way off of canceling already-approved federal grants that were likely to benefit red states just as much, if not more, than blue. Matt Gaetz is fading fast in the rearview mirror.
But then Pete Hegseth got confirmed as Secretary of Defense, and there are others on the way who could be even worse. The Health Department has been prevented from giving us any news about health threats we may be facing. And it’s only January. So, as much as I’d like to celebrate the pushback, it’s only January.
And we should know by now that, competence be damned, Trump and his crew are at the wheel for at least another four years of this, at which point we may or may not get another presidential election. Meanwhile, although it is certainly laudable that pushback exists and perversely comforting that Trump is so incompetent, his sheer level of incompetence at that level as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth effectively means the best we can hope for is to hang on by our teeth as we try to keep the ship from sinking despite a thousand leaks.
In a way, his potential success as president is as threatening as his potential failure; either Project 2025 is put in place, or the Trump presidency flails and spins for the next four years. Either way, the level of damage will be close to irreparable. Except that we have to find a way to repair it.
So there’s one thing I said earlier that I’d like to change. I told my friend that it would be the end if Trump got back in. As in The End. But as fearful as I am of what’s coming, I have to make myself believe that Trump spells The End only if we allow that to happen. We don’t have to let him be the one to write how this story ends. That pen belongs to us.
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Great column. We can't lose hope. It's been as bad as I thought, too. I live in the DC area, and these cuts to the federal workforce will be devastating to the local economy. Many contractors in private businesses will be impacted. All businesses will suffer in a recession. Musk and Trump will turn the federal workforce into Twitter X.