GUEST ESSAY

A few days ago, I began writing this piece by saying that given the results, and because I voted early, the highlight of my Election Day 2024 was an unexpected trip to the Dairy Queen. Everything went dangerously downhill from there.

But given the cascading tsunami of events over the last couple of weeks, that opening remark seemed far too frivolous, even glib, for the awfulness that already has befallen us.

Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, filled with his usual lies, self-aggrandizement, posturing and then some, made his first inaugural speech in 2017 — the “American carnage” edition — sound like the Sermon on the Mount. And the speech he made immediately after, to the “overflow” crowd — rhymes with “overthrow” — was demonstrably worse.

No wonder he failed to place his left hand on the Bible when he took the oath of office. He may have thought that he, his friends and family would burst into hellfire. And justly so.

My personal favorite line was his assertion that, “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history, and I’ve learned a lot along the way.” More than any other president? This must have come as one hell of a shock to Abraham Lincoln and FDR, each of whom navigated cataclysmic wars. What’s more, Lincoln was struggling with a violently divided country, Roosevelt with a global financial collapse. Admittedly, Trump may come face to face with those as well, but mostly at his own hand. Of course, he’ll pretend it’s all someone else’s fault.

My second favorite inaugural line: Having survived assassination attempts, Trump asserted, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Like the aforementioned presidents, this must have come as one hell of a shock to the Almighty, who’s undoubtedly walking around, scratching His/Her/Their head and proclaiming. “Hey, don’t look at me!”

Yet Trump was right about one thing — he has learned a lot along the way and it’s terrifying. This time around, rather than paying attention to some of the traditional guardrails and having among his appointments a few who have a modicum of knowledge, reason and common sense, he has surrounded himself with buffoons and billionaires: a feckless vice president — intern-in-chief JD Vance — a cabinet of rich sycophants and such crackpots as RFK, Jr., Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard; and a Republican Congress filled with obeisant poodles more interested in keeping their jobs and privileges than public service. All hail Trump.

By actions and words, he epitomizes the warning of the 19^th century British historian Frederick York Powell, who wrote, “The greatest enemy of the democracy is the lie-maker, the flatterer, the person who tries to persuade the voter that dishonesty is not always the worst policy and that a bit of boodle for himself cannot hurt him or anyone else.” Trump nods enthusiastically; you said it, pal.

And then, of course, there’s Elon Musk, the man who would be king, the billionaire power under the throne, unelected and unvetted, running roughshod through government and the body politic like an especially noxious dose of salts.

Without congressional approval or any authority other than Trump’s cynical thumbs up, he and his gang of arrogant cyber punks, many of whom would bring a tear to the eyes of insurrectionists and brown shirts. Musk’s own increasingly transparent embrace of extreme right wing political parties in several countries, including Germany, his grandparents’ membership in the Canadian Nazi Party and their migration to apartheid South Africa where they could feel more at home all point to the cultivation of a son who would have fit in well with the Reich’s Sturmabteilung.

Musk and his acolytes are illegally breaking into government offices and computer systems, accessing confidential personal data, mucking about with health and welfare information. All this without a peep from the Republicans who control Congress—the same Congress that according to the Constitution is supposed to ride herd on such matters.

They’re trying to demolish everything from the US Agency for International Development and the National Labor Relations Board to the Department of Education and National Weather Service. This, even as other departments, such as ICE, are set loose with impunity to harass, threaten and arrest the nation’s immigrant populations, often even if they aren’t undocumented or guilty of criminal activities.

Meanwhile, they will keep Trump occupied pardoning January 6 participants and signing executive orders that must be described to him before he affixes that heart attack of a signature of his. They encourage his lazy diffidence and distractions, some trivial, some destructive: his attacks on the Department of Justice and the FBI, his witch hunting for “woke” Diversity, Equity and Inclusion infiltration, his suspension of security clearances and guard details for those who offend him.

While his pals do their worst, they flatter him by expressing support for his expansionist fever dreams of extending a revived (at least in his mind) American empire to Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and now the Gaza Strip, which he envisions as ”the Riviera of the Middle East,” occupied by American troops, ethnically cleansed of a million and a half Palestinians and ripe for beachfront real estate development (“Get me Jared on the phone!”).

It’s difficult to keep track. By the minute, news and nonsense gush forth like a burst water main. This is intentional, as much as the bullying and threats are.

Bottom line — and it may be our only hope: collectively, many of them haven’t the skills to think from Point A to B, much less Points C, D, E, or F. Witness the snafus over tariffs, water unthinkingly released to fight fires in California but completely wasted, or the public email disclosure of the names of recent CIA recruits, putting them in jeopardy. Stupid, plain and simple.

As The New York Times’ conservative David Brooks wrote recently, “I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?… Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you.”

But don’t think, as too many do, that Trump and his minions will make enough stupid mistakes that his administration will end in catastrophe and tears before bedtime. Not by a long shot.

We need to stand up and speak out. No matter how ludicrous their words and actions seem, these MAGAs and oligarchs are out to sabotage and destroy two and a half centuries of American democracy. Donald Trump is a madman, Musk a craven cynical manipulator whose self-interest cannot hide behind his purported campaign for government efficiency. These aren’t cuts he seeks, they’re mutilations steeped in ignorance, desires for revenge and the technocrat’s urge to move fast and break things, consequences be damned.

If you want to see what real hell looks and feels like, stand back and do nothing.

Michael Winship, former senior writer for Bill Moyers and immediate past president of the Writers Guild of America East (AFL-CIO) was a senior fellow at the progressive website Common Dreams and the think tank Demos. He has written for many publications and production companies, has received a national Emmy for television writing excellence, the Christopher Award and three Writers Guild of America Awards.