Alan Zendell, January 8, 2024,

This isn’t about politics. We’re way past the point where politics is the issue.

It’s fair to say that Donald Trump has profoundly changed America’s norms and values, or at least shined a light on changes that had brewing beneath the surface for decades. Change is natural, and normally I would try to embrace it and find a way to grow from it. But this feels different. This doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like decadence, dissolution, and decay, what it feels like when we’ve ignored all the slippery slope warnings and finally begun an irrevocable slide downhill.

MAGA  began as a cult consisting of a small number of ambitious people who believed they could benefit from other people’s gullibility and misfortune, and grew as millions of malcontents and poorly informed people were drawn in. The thing about cults is, they never last, but they can do terrible damage while they function. MAGA will ultimately fade into history, either because people suddenly wake up and realize how destructive it is to our society or because it will actually destroy us.

Look what it has brought us so far. The thing I most notice and fear is the corruption of truth. Kellianne Conway defended that as considering “alternate facts, but that is utter nonsense. A fact is a fact, and a lie is a lie. It’s really that simple. A democratic society cannot function that way for long before it dissembles into chaos. A Constitution cannot be disregarded and undermined without rendering it useless. An autocratic society, however, thrives on malleable facts, fear, lawlessness, and divisiveness.

In twelve days, we will have a president who was convicted of thirty-four felonies and indicted for very serious crimes, including an attempt to overturn a legal, fair election, incite an insurrection at the Capitol, and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. But his money and an army of MAGA lawyers demonstrated that no matter how serious the crime, it’s possible to avoid accountability if you’re sufficiently wealthy, venal, and immoral. We will have a president who promotes misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy.

Some MAGA supporters I know dismiss this as either purely hypothetical or simple showmanship. How many times during the 2024 election campaign did we hear a Trump supporter say, “He doesn’t really mean all that stuff he says?” That’s mind-boggling. If they see Trump as nothing more than a reality television show, what the hell were they voting for? My favorite post-election interview with a Trump voter had a reporter ask if Trump’s clear desire to govern like an autocrat troubled him. The voter’s answer was, “What’s an autocrat?”

Has our education system really declined that much? Have Americans become so intellectually lazy that they let influencers do their thinking for them? The mere fact that MAGA influencers have been able to establish the idea that influencing is a respectable profession is horrifying. It goes hand in hand with Kellianne Conway’s justification of corrupting truth. When VP-elect J. D. Vance was accused of lying about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, he said – of course I lied, but I made my point and people believed me.

An objective observer might easily look at the results of the election and conclude that Americans find sexual assault acceptable, they are racists, they have no respect for science, and they believe that crimes of business fraud and acts that smack of treason are not disqualifying for the highest office in the country. They might also conclude that we’re pretty damn stupid, and by extension, that America is not to be either respected or feared. They would surely conclude that the American dream is on life support.

Almost out of thin air, we will soon have a president who considers Canada our enemy and is willing to threaten a NATO ally, Denmark, because he decided we should control Greenland. He also has no problem ignoring Panama’s sovereignty and taking back the Panama Canal based on some unproven notion that such an action is vital for America’s economic security, regardless of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty which guaranteed that full control of the canal would revert to Panama at the end of 1999. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because it’s the same twisted logic Vladimir Putin uses to justify his war in Ukraine.

And now, the piece de resistance! We’re going to rename the Gulf of Mexico and call it the Gulf of America. That should solve all the world’s problems. But wait – do we have the right or authority to rename anything outside our borders? Next, Trump will want to build a hotel in Antarctica and rename the South Pole a tropical paradise. And this is the most powerful leader in the world!