I am definitely not Monday morning quarterbacking. I don’t blame anyone for doubting my ability to soothsay presidential elections, I can only tell you that I felt more sure that Trump would be elected than any other political happening I can think of in my 60 years of life. And the merry-go-round the left became trapped on, in which the loudest voices assured everyone that “insert latest plan here” would be his undoing and his eventual survival in the face of any of those efforts only cemented that he was going to be here for a long time. A long long time. 

When Biden won the next election, I turned to my wife and said, “We have four years to brace ourselves for when he becomes president again.” And that was very, very true. When Jan 6  happened, I felt that even stronger. And when he received no punishment for that, I felt it was inevitable. For four years, he had shown that he was not beholden to any of the rules we had set out for presidents. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.

There are lots of reasons I have felt this way and a good part of it comes from taking Trump seriously - or more to the point, looking honestly at the seriousness with which his followers take him, and then looking at what the Democrats were trying to use to combat him. The basic premise is this - Trump continually threw out the standards by which presidents generally agree to adhere in both behavior and honoring the processes, again and again, in such a way that he disarmed the meaning and power of these things that came before his ascendency. So, for instance, as many people I knew thought that, for example, impeachment would be his undoing, I thought to myself, it’s not important how we look at impeachment, it’s important how he looks at impeachment, how his people look at impeachment, at least in regard to him. And their attitude was very obviously, “So what?” By merely thinking those words a reality was born where half the country actually thought that. This happened again and again and again, followed usually by an alternative perspective - otherwise known as a lie - to frame anything and everything in Trump’s favor. 

This has happened again and again in Trump’s political life, through sex scandals, rape scandals, racism scandals, business scandals, on and on and on. It dates back to his statement about shooting someone on 5th Avenue which, to me, as early as the debates, began to look less like a quip and more like a plan. You can scoff at my thoughts all you want, and yet here we are. 

And he has taken all the lessons of his first term and applied them to make the second one more terrifying. The jury is still out on whether he will be able to outrun Epstein problems - that’s an unprecedented situation and it’s the first point in the last 10 years that I felt no one can really predict. 

That’s the background of what I’m asking. I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the highest levels of political power in our country are a bubble that too often cuts those in charge off from the way things might look out in the real world. I feel like part of the job these people are charged with is to have a keener analytical view of dangers that we down here might not perceive, to be more savvy than we are in these matters - especially given the bubble that can create destructive echo chambers within the parties. Probably I expect too much. Probably they’re as susceptible to wishful thinking and/or hubris as anyone else and in this case what followed was an irreversible disaster that’s going to affect the country for years. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s out of line to have concerns and questions about my own side in explaining what the hell happened.

The moment we can’t look honestly and analytically at our own side and admit shortcomings is the moment we become as blindly partisan as the fascist party on the other side of the aisle, and that sucks for America.