Alan Zendell, December, 16, 2025,

It’s been easy, these last eleven months, to blame Donald Trump for all the hate and divisiveness that has torn our country apart, but we also need to open our eyes and look clearly at how Americans have changed. Trump couldn’t have gotten where he is unless average Americans supported him. Most fair-minded people decry gerrymandering, but as awful as that practice is, it only affects legislative elections stratified by local districts. It has little or no effect on presidential elections. The two elections Trump won weren’t rigged. He was elected president, twice, simply because more Americans voted for him than either of the two women he defeated.

As even most of Trump’s supporters acknowledge that he’s not a very nice guy, and they cringe at the things that come out of his mouth and his social media postings, we keep asking, how could a narcissistic sociopath who is driven solely by greed and lust for power have become president twice? How could such a basically hateful, dishonest person be chosen to govern the most powerful country on the planet? How could the most powerful person in the world be someone who has no regard for truth, morality, or the people he claims to care so much about?

One conclusion is that the apparent enlightenment we attributed to American voters who elected a black president in 2008 was an illusion, a complete misreading of voters reacting to the serious blunders of the George W. Bush administration that dragged us into an unwinnable twenty-year war against radical Islam. It turned out that America hadn’t grown up, after all. The hatemongers, white supremacists, and greed-driven billionaire elitists simply went silent. Barack Obama’s election was a wake-up call for those who hated everything about FDR’s New Deal, who feared that their wealth might be used to fund a national health care system, and who believed only white males who masquerade as Christians are qualified to lead.

A combination of immigration and racially uneven birth rates would soon turn America into a majority non-white nation. To the closet bigots and ignorant Americans who soaked up MAGA’s venomous rhetoric, to intellectually lazy Americans who defaulted to right-wing influencers and bots in their social media rather that pursue facts, to everyone who were terrified by the notion that America was readily to governed by a progressive woman, regardless of her color, this was a catastrophe that had to be nipped in the bud. It took Trump’s cobra-like charisma to bring home the truth about how decadent we’d become.

That decadence now threatens to become the undoing of our republic, and time is running out for our currently leaderless opposition to right the ship. With growing evidence that we cannot rely on the Supreme Court to preserve the fundamental principles of our Constitution, and Trump’s power grabs expanding every day, the salvation of our democracy is once again in the hands of “we, the people.” With a Cabinet filled with sycophants, and a Congress populated by individuals who care more about Trump’s power to unseat them than the oath they took to protect the Constitution, the only thing that can stop this juggernaut of hate and self-destruction is the voice of the people.

That voice is obviously turning against Trump. The polls suggest that he has completely lost touch with non-aligned voters, and even among those who voted for him twice, his approval ratings are seriously underwater. Most Americans are horrified watching ICE evolve into a Gestapo-like secret police force, by an incompetent Secretary of Defense ordering attacks on civilian boats in international waters without consideration for the rule of law. We cringe at the way immigrant families are being destroyed and look the other way as federal troops marching through our cities begins to seem normal.

Trump is desperate approaching next year’s midterm elections. He has openly made it known that if he can’t guarantee maintaining a majority in Congress by gerrymandering and intimidation, he will find a way to nullify or cancel the 2026 election. If that is allowed to happen, the nation we thought we were growing up in is doomed.

Donald Trump is a very sick man and a very dangerous one, and it has fallen to us, the 350 million Americans who own this country to take him down before he destroys it. Lately, the winds of change have been getting stronger. Republicans in Congress are beginning to realize that every day, they look more like Putin’s Duma, a legislative body filled with invisible people who do nothing but rubber-stamp everything their autocratic leader demands.

They have a chance, this week, as Trump and his DOJ fight desperately to hide the president’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and pedophilia, to stand up for what’s right. Trump is not invincible. All it takes is courage to end this madness. If they lack what it takes, it will be up to us, democracy’s last line of defense, next November, to replace them with people who will.