Alan Zendell, October 21, 2026
People who have followed Donald Trump’s career have always known that he is an unsavory character who completely lacks compassion for others. He has spent his life lying and cheating his way through cycles of wealth and bankruptcy, demonstrating a total lack of moral character. We who have watched his antics over half a century recognize that he is fundamentally a gangster at heart. His absolute shamelessness and showmanship, and his ability to sense vulnerability and need in people, backed by billions of dollars from wannabe oligarchs in the Russian style, are what enabled him to reach the position of power he now holds.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that every modern society including that of the post-World War 2 United States always contains a minority of people who feel left behind or ignored. Sometimes it’s bad luck, sometimes it’s their own laziness or lack of ambition, and sometimes it’s simply the side effects of classism, racism, bigotry, and misogyny. Sometimes hardworking decent people simply run into the buzz saw of change that overwhelms them. They’re angry and they need someone to blame, which makes them easy fodder for someone like Donald Trump whose most impressive skill is straight-facedly promising them things he has no intention of delivering and promulgating lies and conspiracy theories that almost defy the imagination.
That he has been elected president twice shows more than anything how imperfect we are, how susceptible to falling prey to the hatred, divisiveness, and chaos he creates. Usually, people like Trump burn out before they can do serious damage, but not always. The obvious comparison, which historians and scholars make, is with Adolf Hitler. But as close as Hitler came to wrecking western civilization, aided and abetted by the complacency and cowardice of his adversaries, even he was defeated at a cost of nearly 100 million lives and the disruption of the lives of millions more.
The all-out push for Fascism might have succeeded here but for the doggedness of the free press and a legal system that, while often corrupt and biased toward wealth and power, still retains enough integrity, even among judges appointed by Trump, to uphold the Constitution they swore to defend. Trump tried everything in his Project 2025 playbook to silence his opponents: threatening our great universities who attempt to teach truth, attacking media outlets in violation of the first amendment, packing appellate courts and the Supreme Court with people he thinks are loyal to his cause, and leading the insurrection at the Capitol, which history will surely view as a profound act of treason after the dust settles.
All of the above was not enough to undermine our republic, because as Abraham Lincoln told us, you can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but in the end, the chickens will come home to roost. The last few months have seen a remarkable turnaround in Americans’ awareness of how despicable and uncaring Trump really is. They see that his primary reason for running for president was to enrich himself and satisfy his insane lust for power, which is manifest in his complete buy-in to the notion that powerful autocrats and oligarchs should split the world into spheres of influence that they control, eschewing alliances designed to preserve peace and economic cooperation designed to allow all of us to prosper.
We’ve now in the era of clichés. It’s always darkest before the dawn. There’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Rats always abandon a sinking ship. Those and more are coming into play as the inevitability of a midterm drubbing of MAGA becomes clear. Trump tried to rig the election through gerrymandering, which I believe will backfire. He tried to suppress voting by attempting to force states to allow a corrupted Department of Justice to edit their voter rolls in clear violation of the Constitution. And finally, as the election is only days away, with his own popularity at an all-time low not seen since voters rebelled against George W. Bush’s policies in 2006, Trump is trying to buy votes.
Trump and allies like Elon Musk are spending several billion dollars on this election, an appalling thought in itself that exposes how craven and corrupt the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was. But Americans aren’t buying it. We may be slow to learn, but when corruption and incompetence are as blatant as they are in the Trump administration and average citizens feel the pain at home, we eventually see through the smoke and mirrors.
Trump has reduced himself to a cliché. His rallies attract only a small fraction of the people they used to, and most people see through his constant lies and recognize him for what he is, a sad, pathetic old man who is not remotely fit for the office he holds and the power he wields. He claims he’s about to pour $400 million in the twelve days that remain before the election, all aimed at perhaps 2% of voters in states that were safely Republican six months ago, but voters are calculating how much food and health care that money could purchase.
Trump is about to receive the humiliating defeat he deserves, and what remains of the western alliance will breathe a collective sigh of relief.
