Guest Column - Joshua D. Clarke

As I write this, we’ve watched a video Donald Trump posted to Truth Social wherein the Obamas are depicted as apes. We’ve observed in weeks past, his administration insist that a VA ICU Nurse, Alex Pretti, who’d been executed on his hands and knees, was a ‘domestic terrorist’ and was intending to do ‘maximum damage’ to law enforcement. One week prior to this, we witnessed the administration insist Renee Good was also a ‘domestic terrorist’ who was amongst those who had been “trained and told how to use their vehicles to impede law enforcement operations, and then to run over anybody who gets in their way.” Trump himself claimed the officer who was bumped had been run over, while the administration said he was hospitalized with internal bleeding. He was released mere hours later, attesting to the banality of his injuries.

Once again, with recent events, it bears repeating …are we great yet?

In a recent livestream, I had the opportunity to ask our local Representative, Timmy Truett if he thought America was becoming great again.  The answer: “I’m sure that’s aimed at Donald Trump, and ‘Making America Great Again.’ … I told you earlier that I’ll be very honest with you, and sometimes I won’t give you the answer you want to hear. … Donald Trump is not a perfect man, as you all know. But Donald Trump has done a lot of good things for America, and I do think America is better with him as our president. … I do think that he has looked out for the best interest of America. … I look for someone who stands their ground, has a backbone, and is not afraid to tell someone what they don’t want to hear. You’ve got to look for someone who will do what they believe is right, even when times are tough.”

…and these qualifications seem to be shared by many, and have allowed for the grotesquery that's now punctuated, rather spectacularly, with overt racism. As I look around and observe the panoramic view that is the rise and emboldenment of Trump, Trumpism, and what has evolved into MAGA, we have to contrast the above remarks with exactly what that ambition has wrought, as its power has grown. 

It’s only culminated in outright indefensible racism recently in such a way that has made even those I know personally who voted for him remark that he’s ‘lost his mind’... that this has suddenly become unacceptable.

But, was it really …sudden?

Now that some of his most ardent supporters have noticed the dumpster fire blazing with such chaotic fury that even their horse blinders could not avert their attention …we should remember that this started over a decade ago, in 2011 when Trump insisted Obama had a fake birth certificate, and was from Kenya. We should recall last year when he posted yet another controversial video that, in part, called for a "unified Reich". Yet another video posted recently, of him in his ‘King Trump’ jet, carpet-bombing Americans with feces. We should observe our nearest neighbor, Canada, remarking at the World Economic Forum that proximity to the US is no longer a guarantee of comfort and safety. Trump himself said to the Dane’s, that he’s disinclined to think only of peace, with respect to Greenland, because he didn’t get his Nobel Peace Prize. The Department of Defense has been renamed to the Department of War, at the cost of millions of dollars.

Yet, these things seem far from the minds of people, even my own Representative. Who are irrevocably plied by pied piper and are being helplessly marched to the cliffs of moral and ethical decency.

There is some imagined revival of American greatness, a return to a more moral and religious America of yesteryear.  That it can arrive adorned in gold, hand in hand with door-to-door ICE raids, cities held hostage for voter rolls, children yanked from the streets, or used as bait, teachers yanked from preschool doors, decorated war veterans deported to countries they’ve never known, American citizens shot on their hands and knees, or in their faces …as we give the biggest tax breaks in history to the wealthy, and use tariffs to make things just a little harder for the poor, while removing healthcare, and safety nets from millions, and punctuating all that with absolutely overt hate, and racism, espoused by the President himself …makes indefensibly clear that the absolute worst Faustian bargain has been struck, and millions of my fellow Americans have purchased a gold card of their own.  All it cost them was their decency, and with horse blinders firmly affixed, they’ve paid it gladly.