It's Villains All the Time

We were warned by Washington, Lincoln and others. Now we must oppose this authoritarian regime, firmly voice our commitment to the Constitution and rule of law—and assert what it means to be American.

The malignant despot enters to applause. (Photo by Emily J. Higgins via The White House)

When you hear Trump talk, I hope you hear not just the voice of a weak and malignant man, a man so deranged, incoherent and full of vengeance that rational thought fails to grasp it.

I hope you also recognize that a man such as this is only in power because of a broken political system in which feckless Republicans have turned their backs on the Constitution and the rule of law; a corrupted Supreme Court supermajority has abused its power to abandon our democratic project and strengthen rule by oligarchy; over 77 million voters were convinced that a convicted felon, rapist and bigot who mimicked the hateful, demonizing language and ideas of Adolf Hitler would be a preferred path for America’s future; and over 89 million others cared so little about America’s fate that they failed to fulfill their most fundamental civic duty and vote.

Listen to him in recent days, and you hear why it’s necessary to escalate questions about his cognitive decline and fitness to stay in office. “I have the right to do anything I want—I’m the President of the United States,” he said. And: “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.” And, justifying his desire for a military occupation of Chicago by fantasizing that Black women were pleading for him to come, he said, “They are wearing red hats, just like this one. But they are wearing red hats. African American ladies, beautiful ladies are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’”

This is just a small snippet of the painful and exhausting soundtrack accompanying the demolition of our political institutions and the removal of layers of expertise provided by qualified public servants. This is the heavy metal screech numbing us to the wanton destruction of government by and for the people whose central responsibility is to serve the common good and make lives better. This is a reality TV show with sick and cruel content and the volume knob set to 11.

In this second season of a deadly show that never should have been renewed, the new supporting cast illustrates the producers’ belief that they don’t need any likable or redeeming characters to keep viewers engaged. This is all villains all the time: JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Vought—and of course the execrable Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is singularly devoted to killing science, destroying the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cancelling vaccines and risking the lives of millions of Americans in pursuit of his crackpot theories about public health.

This week’s cabinet meeting—overflowing with flattery, reminiscent of a North Korea-style display of total obedience—gave a glimpse into the circle of hypnotized sycophants who’ve been convinced that they are not part of a cult play-acting as leaders of actual institutions.

“Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told Trump, referring to a huge, newly erected portrait. “I was so honored to unveil that yesterday.”

“This is the greatest Cabinet working for the greatest president—and I just want to say thank you,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, contender for top suck-up and most desperate.

Or how about this whopper during the televised session from Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to Russia and the Middle East: “There’s only one thing I wish for: That the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award, was ever talked about.”

Scholars and concerned citizens, including many of us, will spend the rest of our lives wondering exactly how and why we’ve descended so low. How and why we allowed a profoundly and obviously unfit man to gain unfettered access to the levers of power. How and why he then used it to build a police state with the backing of a GOP majority in Congress. How and why so many Americans forgot their duty to country and their responsibility to those who came before—Americans who sacrificed everything to uphold our nation’s commitment to democracy, freedom and the ongoing pursuit of justice and basic human decency.

We will consider how our politics became so polarized, how trust in government broke down and why Republicans since Ronald Reagan pursued this ugly project. We will reflect on rising inflation and the increasing challenges to make ends meet and live a decent life in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. We will assess the massive widening of income inequality and the demonization of minority populations and immigrants, as well as how these phenomena have fueled grievance, fear and violence in America.

We also will look at how the rise of social media and the 24/7 availability of entertainment has emerged at the same time that public education has declined and public knowledge of civics and government has largely faded. We will evaluate how our culture of violence has exacerbated an out-of-control gun epidemic that has convinced troubled minds to solve their problems with bloodshed—and how and why the party in power has remained indifferent to the victims’ trauma. And we will study the malpractice of corporate legacy media that lost (or never possessed) the script, repeatedly failing to adequately voice the danger of authoritarian rule as vividly as possible.

It’s not like that danger wasn’t knowable. Allow me to share a portion of a warning I gave in February last year in a piece titled “A Life-and-Death Struggle” and subtitled: “The outcome of the 2024 election is not just about sustaining democracy. It's also a question of whether civilization as we know it will survive.” I wrote:

I continue to reflect on the best ways to articulate both the current danger of Donald Trump and the threat that he represents were he to be successful at retaking the levers of power. He and many of his enablers have made clear their desire to implement a dictatorship in which he can count on immunity from the law, pursue retribution against enemies, end an independent judiciary, install only loyalists to do whatever he wants, round up and deport millions of migrants without due process—and so much more.

Institutional changes like these—along with the probability that this bunch is unlikely to give up power after four years—already express a dark fate for our democratic republic. But I think there’s a darker and deeper potential outcome that demands our attention.

We already know that Trump has tried his damnedest to incite his cult to take violent collective action. In the post-Jan. 6 world where over 1,000 people have been charged for their involvement in the Capitol attack and more than half have pleaded guilty, we haven’t seen any mass acts approximating that scale, no matter how much the cult leader was counting on them to disrupt his civil or criminal proceedings.

But the ferment is real, as are the random acts of violence, stirred in the rancid cauldron of hate that has defined the Trumpist hunger for carnage. Were he to regain the levers of power and pursue a fascist future, we can expect over time an increasingly demoralized majority and an unleashed minority that feels liberated to act on their destructive instincts without fear of consequence. It’s not hard to imagine the scapegoats among myriad vulnerable communities.

In this future, destruction and violence would expand with the wink and the nod of the state apparatus. At an individual level, stigmas that previously limited dangerous behavior would be superseded by a growing hunger to see the violence played out.

I do not claim prescience. Anyone who was paying attention could see it coming. And we can go back long before our current dark moment to 1796 when President George Washington prophetically warned us in his farewell address about the consequences of a despot taking our nation hostage.

In an address written with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Washington described the dangers of factionalism and the rise of “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men [who] will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” This becomes possible when a despot exploits the needs of people “to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” and exploits the nation’s “disorders and miseries” for “the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” Sound familiar?

And our first president, who described his warning as the counsel “of an old and affectionate friend,” had a solution to ensure our beloved country did not reach such a tragic predicament. He urged that any “sincere friend” of free government would promote “as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.” He offered an equation: “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” In other words, education and particularly civic education would provide the necessary antidote: An informed citizenry.

Four decades later, in 1838, a 28-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln offered up his own thoughts on the “perpetuation of political institutions.” Nearly two centuries later, and especially at time like the one that besets us now, this wise young man offers us both insight and inspiration to understand and confront our current reality. Here’s what he had to say in his “Lyceum Address,” just 52 years after America declared its independence from monarchical rule:

I know the American People are much attached to their Government. I know they would suffer much for its sake. I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another. Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.

Here then, is one point at which danger may be expected.

The question recurs, ‘How shall we fortify against it?’ The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of ‘76 did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges. Let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation—and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

While ever a state of feeling, such as this, shall universally, or even, very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom.

Yes, 25 years later on the battlefield of Gettysburg, President Lincoln reasserted the importance of committing ourselves—in the memory of those who consecrated those grounds with their blood—to their “unfinished work” and to a government “of, by and for the people.” It’s a message that should continue to remind us now of our responsibilities, even as we fairly bemoan a deranged and depraved White House occupant and his lawless accomplices.

Yet beyond the way in which our greatest president girded us for the battles to come in that address, his younger self wisely advised us to educate our citizenry, ensuring their commitment to our Constitution and laws. Back then this needed to happen in our schools and essentially in every walk of life, inside and outside the home.

But that also needs to happen now: By speaking out about our commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law, we will keep focus on the stakes of this fight, refuse to merely stand by while this regime degrades our nation and lay the foundation for eventually restoring a functioning democratic society.

We could hear a strong example in Gov. JB Pritzker’s resistance to Trump deploying armed military troops in Chicago this week. “This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances,” he defiantly asserted. “What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

This is our moment to reassert what it means to be American by speaking out and pushing back. The victory of the weak, malignant and unprincipled man is not inevitable.

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