Until Trump, I never imagined how fragile

[Hekate]

80. In 2016 I watched his campaign with horror, and with equal horror the GOP's response...

Anyone remember the old “smoke-filled room” stories of the ultimate power of political bosses in back rooms? Old guys with cigars and scotch deciding that some populist wasn’t going to be good for the Party (or them) ? Stories about how a National Convention could be derailed from behind the scenes?

Well, they don’t exist any more, if indeed they ever really did. The GOP sat silent. The GOP powers sat silent when trump tried to set a howling mob on a young female reporter — and silent when he instructed the mob to throw out a protestor into the winter weather without a coat — and all the other things we saw with our own eyes.

The RNC nominating convention was like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my lifetime. A normal nominee says thank you and gives a speech about how we’re the shining city on the hill or similar. Hope and change. Brings out the wife and kids. Not trump. He trots out his American Carnage vision.

It was so bad that two reporter/analysts from MSNBC sat in the darkened ballroom among the fallen balloons — both of them longtime Republican operatives, just stunned. I don’t remember what Nicolle Wallace said, but I remember Steve Schmidt talked about the US Constitution and was choked with tears. They were in at the death.

Listen guys. I still thought we could pull off getting Hillary elected, right until she wasn’t, and I was alone and sick at heart without DU to turn to for days and days.

Every day since then that trump has been in office has been like being in a car driving right off a cliff, wondering when we are going to hit bottom, only there is no bottom. Thelma and Louise without the hearty laughs.

During his first term I gave a lot of thought to what kind of history I was living through and witnessing. Looking around the planet at other countries I saw the same populist fascist politics at play. I thought: end of a cycle, maybe even a Kali Yuga.

For the first time in my entire life I began to understand why so many Germans kept quiet — they were keeping their heads down, they were trying to survive the madness.

Looking at voting patterns, and laws designed to keep all women firmly in “their place” and obeying men — laws designed to keep all POC in “their place” — laws that threaten expulsion and concentration camps to anyone that crosses the path of ICE — it has occurred to me that half this country sincerely wants slavery to exist. I don’t know what else you can call laws that forbid women to even travel if someone imagines they might be pregnant, or jails women for having a miscarriage, that kind of thing. They want an uneducated and impoverished permanent underclass, too.

Getting Joe Biden elected was a respite, a chance to correct our course — and we failed, because trump is back, this time with a plan in hand (Project 2025) and many people eager to fulfill it.

Democracy is not an illusion, but it requires attention and maintenance, and our failure was to become flabby and lazy in our thinking, and not know how to respond to evident danger. I don’t think all is lost forever, but at my age I doubt I shall live to see my country repair even a tenth of the damage already done.

I hope I haven’t rambled on too much. I started this many hours ago, had many interruptions, and wanted to finish the thought, for whatever that is worth.

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