Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
I was walking on the paved path along the river, where most of my limited aerobic exercise now occurs, when I heard a shrill scream and looked up to witness a terrifying accident. A boy of five or six, no doubt learning to ride his first two-wheeler, was pedaling the bicycle down a steep incline to the river trail when he appeared to lose control. He was going faster and faster, headed toward a concrete sewer dome on the riverbank and screaming at the top of his lungs. His father, 50 yards behind him, was running as fast as he could and yelling “The brake, brake, brake, oh my god!”
I stopped and gasped “Oh my God!” myself, as the boy’s helpless ride ended in the worst possible way. He hit the dome head-on, never slowing or veering off before the impact, and was thrown over his handlebars headfirst into the concrete. I stood there stunned by the collision that looked as if it might have killed him. His father, now also screaming, reached him and lifted him off the ground as blood poured from his face and his head. His mother, who had been bringing up the rear with a baby in a carriage, came down the hill to find her son laid out on the trail on his back while his father and another witness tried to stop his bleeding and call an ambulance.
A crowd was gathering, and the last image I recall was the boy lying there with his parents on their knees beside him. I have no way of learning how serious his injuries may have been. I never found an obituary for a first-grader in the local newspaper. Maybe I should feel guilty about borrowing this family’s disaster, possibly a life-altering tragedy, for a metaphor. But this was a terrible thing in a time of terrible things, and it left its mark on me. What I will never forget was the look on the father’s blood-drained, scared-white face when he realized that the worst was about to happen. He had been caught suddenly, through no fault of his own, in one of those point-of-no-return moments that few of us manage to avoid. Whatever security and stability his family may have been experiencing was threatened with immediate cancellation. It was beyond his control, and his face made it clear that he knew it.
The metaphor? The United States of America must be as dear to many American citizens as their own flesh and blood, and that country seems to be racing toward a concrete wall at a speed no boy or bicycle can survive. All the brakes — Congress, legislatures, the courts, the Constitution — appear to be failing. And the man holding the national handlebars, a huge scowling clown with a red hat and an orange face, is still peddling furiously. If you’re not scared, if you’re not getting a little pale in the face, you’re locked at some psychotic level of denial. In a letter to The New York Times, a Canadian in British Columbia summed it up: “America — I’ve lived next door to you all my 77 years. I’ve admired you, detested you, been jealous of you, ridiculed you and visited you many times, and I’ve also been unable to ignore you. Not until now have I been frightened by you. It’s been sobering watching what was the most successful, wealthiest, most accomplished and advanced nation in the history of the world tear itself asunder so thoughtlessly.”
This was written in the fifth month of the second reign of Trump, as missiles lit up the Middle East and our B-2s dropped monster bombs on Iranian nuclear sites, as sane humanity held its breath at the prospect of a nuclear World War Three. As an American president invaded California as if it was a hostile foreign country; as Europeans groaned and rolled their eyes at a MAGA regime staffed with flunkies, fools and fanatics. This government has given a whole new dimension to the word “kakistocracy.” Look it up if it’s unfamiliar. The USA, until recently a prestigious address, is now viewed from abroad as a lawless wilderness where civilians carry assault rifles, masked federal agents kidnap legal immigrants, and armed maniacs massacre schoolchildren.
I’m even older than that frightened Canadian, and I can’t recall a moment that felt as ominous, for this country and for everything I recognize as civilization. I’m petrified, pumping desperately on a brake pedal that isn’t there. Bombing a foreign country without congressional authorization is a wild transgression, but it’s only a sideshow. We keep hearing about threats to democracy, yet it was democracy that betrayed us. Did people who voted for Donald Trump actually understand what they were voting for? Even beyond the chilling Gestapo antics of ICE agents, like images from a bad dystopian movie, Trump Two has introduced or reintroduced us to a lavish menu of horrors.
Washington has been occupied by a reckless right-wing coven that denies climate change, embraces fossil fuels, demonizes environmentalists, dismisses gun control, defunds foreign aid and critical health research, ignores judges and governors, insults every ally from Kiev to Ottawa and launches attacks on universities, museums, libraries and everything we associate with culture and the life of the mind. What more could go wrong? And that was only in the first five months of King Donald. We have at least 43 more to survive.
This is not a conservative movement. It’s a wave of blind reaction so thoughtless and cruel that the Founding Fathers should be twisting in their graves. Its obvious homophobia is less surprising than its paleo-racism, the most shameless nod to white nationalism America has endured since the heyday of George Wallace and Jesse Helms. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, denounces Trump for “stripping away our rights, erasing our history and silencing our voices.” Black leaders were astonished and outraged when the new government set out to Whitewash American history, a campaign that included removing Black literature from the service academy libraries. But columnists were quick to point out that sterilizing national history is standard practice for dictators and fascist regimes. Where force and falsehood reign, all unflattering truths are unpatriotic.
Minorities and underdogs won’t get much of a hearing from the Mar-a-Lago gang. More curious, considering that Trump’s voter demographics run so heavily toward poorer, less educated White people, are the funding cuts in his “Big Beautiful Bill” that will harm these people the most-—Medicaid, food stamps, even Meals on Wheels. The tax cuts in this same deficit-ballooning bill are, of course, all intended to further enrich the rich. This is a “populist” president who invited at least 13 billionaires to serve in his administration.
Much has been written about the MAGA movement’s mysterious, almost hypnotic appeal to citizens who can only suffer from its policies. The fragmentation of the media and the powerful reach of right-wing podcasters and influencers are obvious factors. I also read about the “bro” culture, a potent strain of online machismo with a mass appeal to American males. It celebrates an image of Donald Trump that must mirror the way these men see themselves—crude, ignorant, amoral and belligerent? If the “bros” are America’s future, sculpt a mustache on the Stature of Liberty and paint her face orange. As for Republican women in the age of MAGA, who vote for a sexual predator and accused (and never exonerated) rapist, they’re a breed I’ve never been able to comprehend.
But the bottom line is that MAGA is a cult of personality. “Donald Trump is the Republican Party,” I read in my paper. The strange appeal of this dismal human has triggered volumes of media psychoanalysis, journalists with 140 IQs struggling to explain a man whose IQ never reached three digits. It’s entertaining but unconvincing. A headline in The New York Times offers, “A Picture Window Into His Psyche,” and under Tyler Pager’s byline you’ll read about the president “speaking his mind” and “changing his mind.” But first there has to be a mind, and Trump has never revealed one, not even before dementia and malignant narcissism took their toll.
This is a man who gets up early in the morning, sometimes before 6 a.m., and goes on social media to repost messages that boost him for the Nobel Peace Prize, along with posts mocking Democrats and assigning them silly nicknames. This is your president, as the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. A friend of mine, a liberal Democrat, circulated a thoughtful essay that intended to give Trump his due. The writer, a former CIA analyst named Martin Gurri, described the almost sexual pleasure the president gets from cheering crowds. “He loves the crowd itself,” Gurri wrote, and credited him with expressing “a visceral affection for voters” that no other politician can match.
I read the piece carefully, and was not convinced. The writer should have done more research on narcissism. There’s no doubt that Trump experiences “a moment of transcendence” in front of a cheering crowd — BUT IT’S ALL ONE WAY. He lives, he feeds on approval and attention, he’s addicted to them. But he has no intention of rewarding those cheering crowds or those docile voters for their affection. He feels no empathy or sympathy for them, he has no plans for their benefit. That’s the way of egomania. All take and no give. He lives in a zero-sum world where cooperation and compromise are unthinkable, where life is a battle with no ceasefires that Big Donald must win. Our destiny as a nation has been linked to this weird psychodrama, the most extreme case of megalomania and misplaced power in our history. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, Democrat from the 1st District of Maine, describes Trump accurately as “out of touch, out of his depth, and completely out of control.”
Please pay attention. The clock says this is just the beginning, but in every way the hour is late. People who ignore the pain and chaos and rationalize away their fears will be just as guilty of our self-destruction as the ones who cheer it on. The “No Kings” demonstrations should be just the beginning of mass national Resistance. Look at those ICE thugs in their masks, remember Kristallnacht, and mobilize to stop Trump and his henchmen. If that’s possible. The concrete wall is approaching, legal brakes have failed and Trump is incapable of slowing down. We the people, in peril, don’t even have a loving father rushing to save us if he can.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” to be published in November.
Email delennis1@gmail.com.
