Summer 2025

I was suffocating under the outrage. Mornings I’d struggle my slow careful steps out to the kitchen, testing my legs.¹ Hit the coffee button, listened to the buzz churn give way to the drip. Exercised while I waited, arm stretches, neck rolls, leg stretches, shift to the sink to wash hands and face. Ten minutes. Then to my table in the living room. All the while telling myself, do not look at the news. But I was helpless.

Two summers previous, I’d’ve left my devices turned off from the night before. I’d’ve looked out over the lake, beautiful in every light. Noticed which trees had new leaves, paid attention to the differences in shades and shape. Perpetually astonished that green came in so many colors! Maybe I’d glimpse the great blue, gliding from dock to shore, sailing low just above the water. My spirit animal, it’d make me giddy. Opposite us lived a brown and white beagle, and he’d be dashing about, thrilled at another morning. I’d pick up the leather journal, a fountain pen different from the day before, and write aimlessly, artlessly, noting some of what I’d done, cheering myself up for what I hoped to do. It wouldn’t be until an hour later, after I’d gone up to my study and played with Sam, that I’d open the laptop, look at email and scan the news.

But then it was 2024 and MAGA gathered momentum and the Democrats self-destructed and I lost that discipline. I couldn’t confine my attention, couldn’t keep my wondering from looking to see the latest. And then the election and the inauguration and flooding the zone. I tried to write a few things that seemed timely but they came out weak and inadequate. By June I felt pummeled and underwater. There were few mornings I could stop myself from checking my mail as soon as I sat down, then digging into the news. Was the dog across the lake still gamboling with joy in the morning? I had no idea. Were the trees as boisterous and lush? Probably, but I paid no attention. I was trying to keep up.

DOGE had sucked up much of the outrage energy in the early spring, but by mid-summer it was rarely mentioned, although its infestation had spread to every corner of the Executive branch. The bromance between the President and the world’s richest man had cratered and the notion that the new administration was going to make any serious attempt to reduce the federal debt had long since faded. “Signalgate”, the attempt to get some traction out of the Secretary of Defense blabbing the details of a clandestine military operation just before it was underway, hadn’t lasted a week. There was another week when the outrage was the hideous call-up of the National Guard and the Army to save Los Angeles from being burned to the ground, but the protesters refused to take the bait, so the President declared victory and the outrage moved on. The military remained. I couldn’t keep track any more – who could? - how many people had been fired, put on leave, re-hired, fired again; how many grants had been cut, how many billions of funding withdrawn and then restored? Did USAID still exist, even as a remnant in the State Department? Noem was trying to throttle the Voice of America, but had to hurriedly call some Farsi speakers back when Trump sent the bunker busters into Iran. Were they fired again the next week when attention turned to Congress and the Big Beautiful Bill?

I wanted to turn away, but that felt irresponsible. I dipped into Bluesky, the social media platform to which many on the left had fled from X, but the rhetoric from the loudmouths on the left was every bit as toxic and dehumanizing as that from the right. Memes twisted to make the enemy look even worse than they already were. Exaggeration and caricature. Outrage fueling hatred. What did these people think they were achieving with their sputtering disdain? Or was the rage just a manifestation of their helplessness?

It was a summer of hatred. The President was explicit, celebrating the passage of his tax and policy bill by declaring his hatred for the Democrats in Congress who voted against it, “You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country, you want to know the truth...” Does he really mean that, I wondered? Hate? But the sentiment was common, whatever politics one clung to. The McCourtney Institute for Democracy released a study in which “[o]nly one in four Republican voters felt that most or almost all Democratic voters sincerely believed they were voting in the best interests of the country.” Democrats were slightly more generous, with four in ten agreeing “that most Republican voters had the country’s best interests at heart.” Few on either side could put themselves in the minds of the others, could articulate how those voters might believe they were acting from love of country. To most people it was blindingly obvious that the other side was intent on destroying America.

Was it the cruelty or the incompetence that had me the most dismayed? I couldn’t tell. I thought about the film The Death of Stalin, Iannucci’s darkly disturbing satire of the machinations of the Soviet Union’s leaders as they jockey for power after the death of the dictator.² It was easier to imagine Trump’s blustering schemers and media stars as characters in a movie, cardboard villains and sycophants, fumbling their way through crises far beyond their capabilities to address, than as real people put into positions of awesome power. I developed a pet conspiracy theory of my own, where a cabal led by Russell Vought³ and abetted by the crafty Susie Wiles is carefully waiting until their Leader goes just enough off the rails for Vance to ruefully declare him no longer competent. The cabinet, several of whom are in on it, readily acquiesce, he’s quickly confined to Mar-A-Lago and Vance becomes President. At Wiles’s urging, he appoints Mike Johnson VP, unaware that there is a conspiracy within the conspiracy. Wiles maneuvers Vance’s impeachment and conviction which frees Johnson to install the Christian nationalist theocracy that so many have been working toward for so long.⁴ As I fantasized about the roles of the various players, who was in and who was out, it didn’t seem any more unlikely to me than what was actually happening every day.

After the President’s latest rambling oval office head-scratcher, VP Vance bursts into Wiles’s office.

“Now?” he says, breathlessly, all puppy dog eager. “Can we do it now?”

“Easy, JD,” Wiles chuckles. “Don’t be impatient. You’ll get your chance. I want to be closer to the midterms before we make a martyr out of him.” She and Vought have worked it all out. Bannon’s on board – he’s always said this is bigger than Trump. Once she gives the word, he’ll start teasing the doubts. Still flattering, of course; but concerned. Has the old man started missing a step? Is the weave starting to fray? Has age and the stress of the job finally started to catch up with him? Bannon doesn’t think it’ll take more than three or four weeks to soften MAGA up. When she says it’s time, Vance’ll invoke the 25^th. There’ll be shock, of course, but he’ll do it with deep sadness. “We’re not going to hide the President’s condition the way that Biden’s handlers did!” he’ll say. Oh no, they have too much respect for the American people to do that! Transparency is their watchword. Hegseth & Bondi will be blind-sided, but they’ll be easy to bring along. Miller’s been promised there’ll be no more waffling on deporting farm workers – as long as ICE continues to be given free rein, he’ll be happy to go along. Leavitt will always do whatever Wiles tells her to. It’s for his own good, they’ll say and they’ll be able to make people believe it. They’ll send him home to Florida, with a phalanx of secret service agents to keep him in line.

It was cheap entertainment, a way to fool myself into thinking what I was seeing wasn’t real.

I was going to Spain Rehab for physical therapy once a week. Lynn would go with me. Afterwards we sampled downtown restaurants, so many new ones having opened in the last five years in the revitalized areas around the theater district, along 2^nd Avenue North, near Railroad Park and the baseball stadium. The restaurants were crowded, lives going on as usual, people going to shows and games and shops, as if the mass deportations, the evisceration of the safety nets, the purging of every federal worker deemed insufficiently “aligned” with the President’s priorities really was all just fake news and the best thing to do was blot it out. Silence the voices proclaiming the end of the American experiment. Hold fast to the belief that things would continue very much as they always had.

And why not? People had been chicken-littling for years about the horrors that would consume democracy if Trump regained the White House. The voices had gotten louder since inauguration day, but how much had really changed? The deportations were getting some attention, but if you weren’t directly affected you could still convince yourself it was just the evil-doers who were being picked up. Senator Tuberville (my senior senator) acknowledged that there’d likely be some mistakes, some citizens or legal residents caught up, but they shouldn’t be hanging around where the illegals were in the first place.

They might get away with it, I thought. Some Republican Senators complained about the bills and the nominees, but voted for them anyway, and then whined about it to the press.⁵ Lower court judges ruled against the administration again and again, but always stopped short of imposing actual consequences. A compliant Supreme Court kept giving the President just enough room to keep dismantling the bureaucracy, without ever quite ruling on the underlying issues, deftly avoiding a head-on confrontation. The Big Beautiful Bill was craftily constructed so that the tax benefits flowed immediately, but the impacts of the cuts were deferred until after the midterms. After the initial shock and confusion, investors had figured out how to adjust to the tariff madness, so despite the swings on any given day, the stock market continued to rise. The elite institutions dominoed their way into irrelevance, universities and law firms and corporations cravenly purging any independent thought or outlet for criticism. It wouldn’t be long before there’d be no voices loud enough to compete with the President’s insistence on what was true and what was fake news.⁶ People wanted reassurance, and that’s what those in power would give them.

I tried to write about it, about the sense of dread steadily dimming a vision of my country I’d believed too strong to be dissolved so easily. But I could only dip into it for a little bit at a time. Dwell there for too long and I’d feel the anxiety start to curdle, the fear of how bad it might get paralyzing me. Writing seemed pointless. What could I say that would have any value? The flood was too much...

Tik-Tok, the pardons, the cabinet of ghouls, birthright citizenship, DEI, fire the inspectors, Musk and the chainsaw, law firms groveling, Kennedy Center takeover, impoundment, two genders immutable, five things you did, the Gaza resort, Gulf of America, Signalgate, no paper straws, Greenland, Panama Canal, research funding slashed, Russia & Ukraine, mass firings, TESLA at the White House, $TRUMP, tariff wars, TACO, crush the media, retribution, $16 million from CBS, $16 million from ABC, masked men grabbing people off the streets, citizens deported, glamour shots at CECOT, "the list is on my desk", Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Kahlil, Librarian of Congress, book banning at the DoD, universities cowering, vaccine panel disbanded, Smithsonian scrubbed, science discredited, measles rising, military on the streets of Los Angeles, “obliteration” by bunker busters, the Big Beautiful Bill, feckless Senators, millions off Medicaid, billions to supercharge ICE, floods in Texas, FEMA gutted, cryptocurrency, Alligator Alcatraz, "there is no list", Epstein Epstein Epstein, Rosie O’Donnell, Washington Redskins, Obama’s “treasonous conspiracy”, the paranoid pettiness of it all...

It was the summer when the last flicker of the Enlightenment snuffed out. Or so it seemed on my worst days. The final collapse of any belief in the validity of evidence or expert opinion, a rot that had set in 30 years earlier when the internet enshrined the wisdom of the crowd. There’d been a time when people proclaimed “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts”. It turned out that facts were more malleable. People clung tightly to their opinions. It was easier to change the facts. Every day the administration showed how easy it could be.

Maybe the best I could do was bear witness. Record what it was like to watch as government websites were scrubbed of anything the administration deemed contrary to American glory, as the country's history was trimmed of its darkness and stitched up into a caricature of a 1950s 4th of July poster, as science was turned on its head, foregone conclusions determining what evidence was deemed worth recording. But I reminded myself that those in the memory professions -- librarians, archivists, journalists, historians -- would be keeping track, telling and preserving the stories of what was happening every day. Taking the long view, making it possible to see that while the swings of the pendulum could be cruel, and could almost make you believe that people were unalterably mean and petty and tribal, that the viciousness of the ghouls would always win out, the long arc of history argued otherwise. At every click of the wheel, society emerged a little more tolerant, a little more welcoming, a little more caring.

July ticked forward towards August. Support for the President's policies continued to decline, but the wreckage was vast and there was certainly more to come. There was a heat sink over much of the country, temperatures breaking the records set the summer before, adding to the feeling of oppression and gloom. But against the ugliness of so much selfishness and fear, the defensive angry lashing out that was so grotesquely personified in the "short fingered vulgarian", there were glimmers of resistance everywhere. Millions of people appalled at what was being done in their name. Standing against ICE, rejecting the administration’s blackmail, calling and writing their representatives, speaking up at town halls. Finding ways to laugh at the absurdities. Those millions would grow. I had no doubt. Lincoln declared that it was “up to us” to be “dedicated to the great task remaining”. He had no illusions about how far we had to go. Maybe all this is what was needed to reawaken us to doing the hard daily work of living up to the promise of America. I looked out again across the lake. I made myself pay attention to the trees. The dog. The heron. Took a deep breath.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests

I’ll dig with it.

- Seamus Heaney

1. By this point, I was relying on Ramón, the rollator, to get around the house. Every morning there was the moment of fear that this might be the day the legs would no longer hold me up.

2. It was funnier when it came out in 2017. When we watched it again recently, it was cutting much closer to reality.

3. Vought is a fascinating character. Now in charge of OMB (as he was in the first Trump administration), he’s a fervent Christian Nationalist and one of the chief architects of Project 2025. The wikipedia article on him gives a good summary of his views. His influence on Trump and the administration is vast.

4. Alito, Thomas (and his wife), McConnell… The list is long.

5. Murkowski was the worst, voting for the BBB and then declaring that she hoped the House would “fix” the things she’d just voted for. Of course they didn’t.

6. Which changed from day to day, depending on his mood and who he was most pissed off at.