The Trumpian Nightmare Must End Before It Gets Worse

We are nearly four months into the Trump administration, but sometimes it feels like the orange man has been president forever. This is because Donald Trump’s second term is a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse.

First, you have the chaos that Trump has unleashed around the world with his uninformed and simplistic views on international trade and trade policy and threats to Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico; then his all-out assault on civil society and the very fundamental principles of U.S. democracy; and then the daily and exhausting bullshit that comes out of his ignorant mouth, which he uses as a diversion to distract citizens and the media alike from his actions.

But it is the horrible combination of lawlessness and incompetence, fear and cruelty of Trump 2.0 that creates the feeling that time has stopped. Time flies when things are good and we are having fun. But if we are in distress and pain, time slows down.

Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.

Trump’s politics are repellant. They are straight out of the fascist playbook. They are dressed in fear and hate, cruelty and vengeance, with lies and corruption being both cause and effect of his leadership style.

Trump is using fear as a political tool with citizens, Congress, courts, business, universities, and the news industry. He uses denigrating and dehumanizing language to promote hate in order to create a divided United States.

Trump's anti-immigrant policies are rooted in racism and, sure enough, want to make eugenics great again. Offering special immigration status to white Afrikaners, on a refugee program that has essentially been suspended for all other groups, speaks volumes of who the orange man is and what he stands for.

But Trump’s signature is cruelty. Indeed, in Gaza, Trump did not see immense human suffering, let alone a genocide in the making, but “underdeveloped real estate,” as Robert Kutner so astutely observed. Trump is waging a war on the poor, seeks to destroy the environment, abuses power in order to target his enemies, and tears families apart with his mass deportation agenda precisely because he has a passion for cruelty.

Umberto Eco claimed that “there was only one Nazism.” But the great Italian scholar and best-selling author went on to add that “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”

To be sure, a fascist monster who demonizes migrants, exacts revenge on his perceived foes, actively destroys the rule of law, and whose real agenda is not “America First” but rather “Trump First” is in charge of today’s United States.

I have no idea how the Trumpian nightmare is going to end. But it will surely get worse as time goes by if Americans do not rise up against the orange man’s fascist regime.