Alan Zendell, August 3, 2025

There are many reasons Donald Trump has become as powerful as he is. Historians will go on and on about how American values have evolved since Vietnam, how the American Dream my generation and the next were sold somehow came to represent nothing but wokeness, whatever the hell that is. But the primary reason Donald Trump wins is that he has an uncanny knack for wielding his own brand of leadership based on lies, threats, chaos, the deliberate obfuscation of truth, and intimidation.

Leadership comes in many forms. Trump’s is the most despicable. By any definition, the lack of honesty, and the willingness to use any unscrupulous tactic to win is not a leadership style designed to improve our country or the lives of most of its citizens. Trump is the ultimate panderer – he’ll promise anything to anyone to get their money and vote, but in the end, there’s only thing we can predict about his actions: if something enriches him personally or increases his power, he’ll do it. If it doesn’t, everything becomes a transactional bargaining chip.

How does he get away with it? He possesses a dark, sinister form of charisma. Love him or hate him, it’s as effective as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. We live in a nation of gross financial inequalities, which means millions of people feel left out, angry, disenfranchised. Trump taps into their anger and frustration, and in more subtle ways, the bigotry and xenophobia that always lie just below the surface when people are hurting. He promises to punish those responsible, and the constant din of lies and nightmarish fantasies works, primarily, because there’s no one effectively fighting back.

If you ask why Trump keeps getting away with dismantling our government, our basic values, and the safety net nearly half of us depend on, the answer is simple. The roughly sixty percent of Americans who disapprove of Trump  have no leadership.

Currently, 72,500,000 Americans receive financial assistance, (welfare,) 67,300,000 Americans receive Medicare benefits, 69,000,0000 receive Social Security checks, 78,382,000 are on Medicaid, and 24,200,000 Americans get their health insurance through Obamacare. Every penny of that is at risk as long as Trump controls the Congress and the courts.

There’s considerable overlap in those numbers, but the overall picture is that if Trump’s crusade toward oligarchic autocracy succeeds, half our country will suffer direct harm, and if his efforts to apply extreme redistricting to ensure controlling Congress succeed, our right to vote will become meaningless. The one person who constantly charges that elections are rigged, is now the Rigger-in-Chief. Again, the question millions of people are asking is why no one is standing up to him.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has been the one prominent Democrat who has had the courage to consistently speak out and fight back. He warned, yesterday, that people and institutions that bend the knee to Trump will be remembered for their complicity in the undermining of America, like all the collaborators who enabled Germany’s occupation of Europe during World War 2.

Booker is right. The Democratic Party is failing us, badly, and the fact that they will surely be vilified by future historians does nothing to ease the pain of watching America sink into the sunset. Trump is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-enlightenment. He only understands a world in which the strongest, fittest, and most merciless survive, and he wants to lead the United States into a backward-looking combination of Fascism and Feudalism. He would bring back slavery if he could.

In the face of all this horror, where are the leaders among the Democrats? Booker has his own brand of charisma. He’s eloquent, smart, and consistent in arguing against the loss of our values. He’s one of four Democrats who have spoken out loudly, attempting to rally his party, but they all have similar flaws, politically. Booker is black, not very black, but black enough. J. B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro are Jewish, and Gavin Newsom is…well, Gavin Nesom. None of them command a national constituency.

Trump has created so much hate and fear, the reality is that non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like a white, male, Christian is unelectable, nationally. How twisted, but predictable is it that the man Pope Francis criticized in 2016 for possessing no Christian values now says he wants America to become a Christian nation run by right-wing zealots?

In 2008, a relatively unknown, charismatic black man espousing love and inclusion capitalized on the failures of George W. Bush’s administration and appeared to win over the hearts of America. Barack Obama came out of the blue, with a message that is the polar opposite of Trump’s, and he won, twice. Bill Clinton, also relatively unknown in 1992 did the same thing. The key to saving us is leadership based on positive charisma, commitment, and caring about people. Isn’t there anyone left in America who possesses those qualities?