There are People in This Country Who Live to Cause Pain. They Are in Charge Now.
We're finally convinced. It's a step.
There are people in this world like you and me who, up until recently, have refused to believe there are people in this world who live to hurt those who have done them no harm. It seems unnatural. Inhuman. Insane.
We are the reason people like Donald Trump and his sycophants have been allowed to build the power to destroy without any motive beyond their own greed and their own need for power. We want to believe everyone is redeemable.
We look to their early years to find out why they would be like this. If we find that they themselves have been abused, our first inclination is to sympathize. We look for reasons for their heartlessness, hoping there is a way we can fix them. Nobody can be that cruel without some explanation, without some way toward a cure. We sincerely want to believe that.
We rip ourselves to shreds trying to find a way to appeal to their better sides—because we so desperately want to believe there are better sides. We can’t find it in us to accept that they are doing this much damage to the country and to so many innocent people deliberately, on purpose, without shame or guilt.
We read what Trump writes on Truth Social, his own Twitter-like venue where he can say anything he wants without fear of castigation or erasure, and we shake our heads at the wanton cruelty, the bizarre lies, the comic word choices that would be out of place and abnormal coming from any living person, let alone the man who calls himself the President of the United States.
Donald Trump is not a president, even though he holds that office. He never wanted to be a president—that public servant whose priorities dictate a fealty, a loyalty, a responsibility to the country and its citizenry. He is an actor pretending to be a leader, pretending that all is well under his watch when all is not well and may never be again.
He doesn’t pretend for our sakes, though he needs us to believe it, too, but for his own. He can do no wrong. He can’t accept blame because to accept blame would mean he is fallible. And Donald Trump’s greatest flaw is that he cannot allow himself to be seen as fallible.
His needs are based on his own ego, his own greed, his own lust for revenge and retribution. He is a small man with a small mind, a man who lives for worshipful praise and absolute loyalty and will accept nothing less. He thrives on power and fear. He expects that he is and always will be above the law and so far, as hard as it is for us to believe, he is above the law.
His is a success story that wouldn’t fly in fiction—nor would it fly in any stage of American history. We have never seen anything like this. As we work to build the courage to fight, we still can’t get past the terrible truth—that “President” Trump, a man so devoid of human decency, of human dignity, of any sign of intelligence or intellect, is fulfilling the decades-long mission of a dark and dangerous political faction made up of oligarchs and pseudo-religious leaders and now the entire Republican Party—to undo and cause permanent damage to the government they’ve long abhorred and disrespected for the very tenets that insist on including and protecting the masses and not just the elite.
The country must wake up. We know this. We as a society must call a halt to all that has gone wrong since the day Donald Trump, fingers crossed, took the oath of office and threw it into a dark place where it may never be found and made whole again. Just hours after he left the inaugural stand and moved back into the Oval Office, he began dismantling our long-established government, signing documents that had been prepared—and promised—many months before the election in November 2024.
The mission, as announced beforehand by way of a document called Project 2025, was always to destroy any roadblocks that might hobble their efforts to enrich themselves on the backs of everyday Americans trying to make their own lives easier. Public lands and environmental protections are anathema to this regime. Any hint of public health has to be squashed. If education can’t be profitable, what good is it? Taking care of brown-skinned strangers seeking asylum is the stuff of nightmares for them.
If it can’t be bought and sold, it isn’t worth saving.
This is what we’re up against, but now we know it, at long last, because they’ve formed a powerful, power-hungry regime and they’re no longer in hiding. We can forget about bargaining or cajoling or convincing or shaming. Those on the destructive side are dead set on rebuilding our country to suit their private needs and they’re working at doing it without the protections of our constitution or our courts of law.
If they get their way, they will tell us how we will have to live. They will make the rules. They will cause us more pain than we can imagine. They’re already well on their way to doing it, and without roadblocks it will only get worse. We haven’t been able to get through to any of them—the administration, the Republicans in Congress, the toadies in the courts—all of whom must be benefiting in some major way, given this level of utter destruction.
I propose we stop trying to work on them and look to ourselves instead. We are the ones worth saving. I see us enlisting, celebrating, joining every protest, every peaceful method of resistance. I see us waving our flags and our copies of the constitution. I see us writing to and calling public officials to try and get their attention. I see us sharing podcasts and reports and essays and directions on how to save ourselves and others. I see us giving each other permission to find our joy and sing our songs in those few moments when we aren’t resisting.
I see us living as true citizens in a country saddened and terrified and besieged but not yet broken—a country that hasn’t always deserved our loyalty and our affection but glimmers with beauty and majesty, not because of who our leaders are but because of who we are.
To say we’re the good people is not bragging, it’s fact. Only the goodness in us will spur us on and give us the courage to end this tragedy. While we may still hope the millions of others will see the light and join us, we can’t count on them.
No, it’s us. Together. A solid bloc of millions of good people grieving over the damage done, lamenting over the weak or the wicked in our government, suffering the pains that go along with our own fervent but unfulfilled wants and needs, but still holding on, still strong, still committed, still believing we’re worth saving. Still believing we can do it.
We can overcome.
It takes more than a village to save a nation when things get this dire, it takes the multitudes. No regime ever won over a country that believed in itself enough to set the citizenry against them, no matter the odds.
This is on us now, and we’re up for it, all of us who care enough. And when this is over, we’ll be free to call on our collective decency and wisdom and love and create a new and better foundation—one that builds on real equality, real equity, real community, with real liberty and real justice for all.
(Join the Good Trouble Marches in Peace tomorrow, Thursday, July 17, in honor of the great John Lewis. Here are the details.
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Thank you for this clear-eyed assessment, Ramona. I think it’s going to take shutting down the economy with a nationwide work stoppage and buying boycott to gain any ground back now, or stop the kleptocratic white “Christian” nationalist takeover. We need to not just demonstrate in the streets in peaceful protest but also withhold our purchasing power and labor from the corporate bullies funding the witless, immoral cabal that is causing so much suffering. What do you think about a general strike?
https://generalstrikeus.com/
Great piece, Ramona. You modeled how to discard some of our “niceness and politeness” and instead stand up and speak the truth. We cannot cower to bullies anymore.