Alan Zendell, February 12, 2025

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in someone else’s dream or that we’re puppets in a game being played by superior beings. Once computers were in general use, writers began drafting stories about loss of free will and people living like sentient props trapped in a simulation. Those notions arise when we feel the world we live in changing faster than we’re prepared to deal with, when events seem to be swirling out of control, or when we’re trapped in a sequence of events we feel helpless to influence.

That’s how the first month of Trump Administration 2 feels. The script for all of 2025 was written long before Trump was re-elected and described in more than 900 pages of detail in Project 2025. Taken together, the policies and actions laid out in that manifesto amount to a coup. We normally associate coups with secret plots, conspiracies, and violence, but this one is happening in plain sight and moving with the inexorable predictability of a slow-motion avalanche.

The surprise to me is that so many people are surprised that it’s actually happening. What we’re witnessing is like an epic war movie with thousands of people on each side lined up and ready to create mayhem with their spears and swords, except that this fight will be bloodless. Instead of killing and maiming their opponents, the new Trump team will attempt to destroy careers, threaten civil and criminal actions, ban books, lie, and slander. It’s an all-out unabashed attempt to re-write our Constitution and turn the clock back to a time when women were subservient, minorities knew their place, and our government was driven by an unholy alliance between demagogues, corrupt churches, and wealthy industrialists.

What’s occurring is a clash between two subcultures, two versions of America that have existed side by side for decades without acknowledging each other. After World War 2, America became schizophrenic. On one hand, the forces of progressivism, equality, and human rights were changing our nation into one that looked more like what Thomas Jefferson projected in the Declaration of Independence and what Abraham Lincoln, who turns 216 today, enacted into law. Simultaneously, we became embroiled in both the Cold War and several ill-advised hot wars in a worsening existential standoff between nuclear powers that shaped a whole generation of Americans.

Everything might have changed when the Soviet Union collapsed just after Christmas in 1991. But on both sides, the forces of reaction were working to re-establish the old pre-war order, and China was quietly becoming a major economic power. America had a choice: continue to build trade and military alliances to avert war, while defending future generations against the real threat to humanity – climate change – or revert to greed, isolationism and a massive power grab by wealthy individuals and corporations.

That’s where we are today. The battle lines have been drawn, left versus right, progressive versus reactionary, with the vast majority of Americans watching like Romans at a gladiator match. This is a full-frontal assault on the twentieth century interpretation of our Constitution and our democracy. Both sides have been preparing for this since the Reagan administration, and we’re about to witness an epic battle of ideologies. The scripts have been written, and the actors are already playing their roles. The war will occur on dozens of fronts, because the side trying to overthrow the established order understands that chaos is their greatest weapon.

That this war will be fought will Executive Actions, lawsuits, and court injunctions makes it no less deadly than an armed revolution. We all have front row seats, but unlike a movie, we won’t all see the same version. Our broadcast and social media, constantly being hacked and influenced by bad actors, will continue to spin their versions of the truth, and the battles will progress through the courts.

We all have a choice between now and the 2026 midterm elections. We can choose to treat the future of our nation as a stage play and sit quietly in the audience watching it unfold. Or we can recognize that this is really serious, and the outcome will determine how our grandchildren live, and whether the America they mature in will look anything like the one we grew up in.

Instead of allowing these events to determine our futures, we can each take a stand and defend what we believe in. The dissolution of our government will not only affect those vying for power. It is already affecting millions of Americans in jeopardy of losing their livelihoods, and the attempt to obliterate institutions that don’t mesh with MAGA values is already underway.

We can be spectators, or we can choose sides. It’s up to us to defend what we believe in, or one day in the very near future we won’t have a choice.