Alan Zendell, June 11, 2024

Fifty years ago, I had a life-changing experience that still resonates with me. After visiting there myself in February of 1974, I returned to Seattle in April with my wife, who I hoped would be as charmed and excited by the idea of living there as I was. After two days of wandering around in puddles, mud, dense fog that hid the tops of downtown buildings, and temperatures that never left the low forties, I knew I’d failed. I had thought the piece de resistance would be the dinner I’d planned at the Shilshole Bay Marina on Puget Sound. Surely, the magnificence of the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains would convince her.

Alas, the fog did me in again. We sat by a plate glass window watching mist and drizzle where we should have been gazing at hundreds of boats, fifteen miles of wavelets on the Sound, and behind it, the greenery of the Olympic Peninsula rising to the snow-capped, 9,000 foot peaks. I’d thought of nothing else for two months, believing she would love this place as I did, but at that moment I felt only despair. And then, the most remarkable thing happened – a genuine, certified epiphany. Expecting her to berate me for dragging her to this dismal rain forest, I was shocked when she took my hand and said, “I see what you mean about this place. I love it here.”

Writing that brought the same tears to my eyes that hearing her words produced fifty years ago, but they only lasted a few seconds, as the fog suddenly dissipated. It seemed miraculous until I realized that a westerly wind had been blowing the fog  toward us, and what we’d seen was really only a few hundred feet of remaining mist obscuring the view. As the fog evaporated before our eyes, we both reacted to incredible sight of the sun appearing to rest atop Mount Olympus as it slowly sank behind it. Utter desolation to heart-bursting joy in a single minute. Six months later, we and our two sons moved into our new house in Bellevue, Washington, where we lived happily for eleven years, but that’s not the point.

We had been fooled by a mere chimera, an accidental combination of factors that created a totally false impression, and we didn’t have enough information to realize our error until after the fact. I believe we’re all caught in a similar trap today as the media would have us believe that despite the obvious threats to our democracy represented by Donald Trump, his re-election seems inevitable. They tout seriously flawed polls that imply Trump leads in critical swing states. They trumpet MAGA claims that the things most of us despise about Trump are actually increasing his popularity and convincing more voters that all the vile things he’s done are just slight-of-hand tricks by soulless liberals and communists.

Even the dimmest among us must sense that there’s something wrong with that picture, and today, in Letters From an American, historian Heather Richardson, spelled out the reality that the smoke and mirrors Trump loyalists constantly juggle to control the news cycle have no more substance than the fog that hid the beauty of the Pacific Northwest from us. Read the list Professor Richardson penned, and it’s difficult to imagine the Trump bubble not exploding in the MAGA crew’s faces.

Add it up. The lies, the incoherence, the sexual assaults on women, the obvious dog whistle nods to neo-Nazis, racists, xenophobes, and White Supremacists. Consider the implications of how his single-minded pandering to right-wing extremists has corrupted the Supreme Court. Re-read Trump’s comments lauding dictators and denigrating our allies, and examine the aftereffects of his disastrous trade war on supply chains and inflation. Look hard at the man who catalyzed the insurrection at the Capitol and attempted to undermine the results of the 2020 election.

The MAGA movement has lost every ballot box test and Trump has lost virtually every court challenge since the 2016 election,. One New York court found him guilty of sexual assault and fined him hundreds of millions of dollars. A second New York Court found that his family business was guilty of fraud for which his CFO, Allen Weisselberg is now imprisoned, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen was for doing his master’s bidding. And now, our former president has been convicted of thirty-four felonies by a third New York Court and is awaiting sentencing.

As Richardson points out, the noise from the MAGA movement about how all these things make Trump a more popular folk hero are belied by their desperate attempts to delay trials for more than fifty additional felonies until after the 2024 election, including conspiracy to commit insurrection and deliberate mishandling of sensitive national security information. Even some of those who’ve been drinking the Trump Kool-Aid should have enough functioning brain cells to see through the MAGA bullshit.

A Trump win in November would make a mockery of the American Dream and support what many cynics believe – that human nature is such that greed and venal self-interest will inevitably destroy every good thing we create. Walter M. Miller made that case convincingly in his award-winning 1961 novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz. I’ve always hoped Miller was wrong, but there’s a chance that Americans could prove him right, after all.