We Are Living in a Nightmare From Which We Cannot Awaken
We are living in a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. America crumbles and the world along with it. Despair envelopes us. The unimaginable is suddenly routine. A close friend told me that, seeking the closest historical analogy, he recently re-watched Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremburg, the 1961 film about the international trials of Nazi war criminals, and lamented at the moral lassitude and leniency with which most of the defendants were treated, but then, he added, at least they were judged and were meted out some punishment. Here, he said, the offenders, our very own Nazis, who ransacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of our representatives and of the vice president, and attempted to overthrow the government, not only escaped justice; they have been commended, even celebrated by the man who set them on their depredations. Moreover, their effort finally succeeded. Democracy ended. And my friend said he was glad he was aged, close to his own finish line, likely too old to see the inevitable worse things to come. One of my daughters wondered to me whether she should have had children, foreseeing after the 2016 election the horrors they would face in a country that had smashed its moral compass and put a monster in the White House. (Holocaust survivors expressed the same doubts about whether to bring children into a world so awful.)
I know that many of you, perhaps most of you, have spent tormented days and sleepless nights as the country plunges into a phantasmagoria of cruelty and chaos. (As I write this, our president has just called Ukrainian President Zelensky a “dictator” and accused him of starting the war with Russia, and the United States joined an empire of evil in voting against a UN resolution holding Russia responsible for the Ukrainian invasion and devastation.)
To wall myself off from this daily deluge, after November 5, I tried to retreat into my family, my dear friends, my books, my music, my films, tried to keep the insanity at bay by abjuring the newspapers and television news and magazines. I recommended the same to you, my readers, and it still might be advisable if you have the fortitude for it. Just blot out the noise, the terror, the darkness. The estimable Jonathan Simon captured the mood precisely in an essay on the whowhatwhynow Substack aptly titled: “Let Me Hurt and Don’t Tell Me to Hope.” [https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/let-me-hurt-and-dont-tell-me-to-hope/] But there is no escape. We are captives. There is only the nightmare.
I am certainly aware of the price of extinguishing hope. Hope, we are told, is the only means of turning back the Nazification – or what the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser calls the Putinization - of the country. Trump will not succeed, the hopeful tell us. Democratic strategist James Carville predicts a massive, imminent cratering of public opinion toward Trump. “Don’t Believe Him,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein advises of Trump’s boast that he is unstoppable. “How Trump Will Fail,” writes another Times pundit, David Brooks, predicting that reactionary populism carries the seeds of its own destruction. “Why Trump’s Bullying is Going to Backfire,” adds a third Timesman, Thomas Friedman. Substackers like Simon Rosenberg and Jessica Craven and Robert Reich and Michael Moore and the invaluable Robert Hubbell urge us to man the barricades and fight. Just recently Georgia’s onetime gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams declared we must “resist, insist, persist.” Most of them say we are already making progress against the tyranny. Regardless of his self-described “mandate,” they say, Trump won the election by a hair. He will, however, lose the governance, they say, if we can create a robust opposition, never mind that even if we somehow managed to thwart him, he would still be president for four more years. And even if we managed, the hope lurking within the hope, to retake the House, Trump and his Supreme Court henchmen are likely to have overridden congressional prerogatives by then and for all intents and purposes crowned Trump emperor.
Still, these notes of optimism are noble sentiments from some very noble individuals – far nobler than I. I commend them, and I even recommend their remedies as well to try to cure a ruthless, rogue nation that happens now to be our own. The operative word is “try.” Boycott Tesla and every company that has genuflected before Trump. (And patronize companies like Costco that uphold our values and refuse to bow.) Protest non-violently in the streets. Bombard your elected representatives with phone calls and emails, asking them if they will stand up for the values in which this nation was forged and which have now been sacrificed. Join resistance organizations. Pressure your local government to defy Trump. Help the vulnerable combat the evil, as volunteers are doing with immigrants in Chicago and Los Angeles and other places around the country. Make sure that friends, families, colleagues, neighbors know what hurt and harm Trump is inflicting, whether it is on the economy or on medical research or on our standing in the world or on the very function of our government. Don’t let him and Elon Musk and the Republicans control the narrative. Stiffen the jelly spines of our own Democratic office holders by warning them not to heed the advice of those who would turn the party into Republicanism lite. Do any or all of these things, if only because they provide therapy for our misery and pain.
But therapy, while a balm, is not a plan of action, and wishful thinking may very well be a delusion. Make no mistake: Trump is in full control. Yes, I believe him when he says he now owns America. And no, he will not fail because he has already triumphed. And no, his rapid destruction of America – it took 250 years to construct our albeit imperfect democracy, and only two weeks to raze it – will not backfire. We can resist, insist, and persist all we want. Doing so will no sooner circumscribe Trump than the meager resistance brave Germans were able to muster wound up circumscribing Hitler. Conservatives, even the ones antagonistic to Trump, say we suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as if our labeling Trump and his fellow Brown Shirts for what they are, fascists with no regard for democracy, is hysterical or hyperbolic, and that this too shall pass as past political disruptions have. Establishment conservatives said exactly the same thing in Germany as Hitler commandeered the country and as they all, nearly to a man, eventually meekly surrendered to him.
But the refutation is its own refutation. Think about it. Their defense is that Trump isn’t really a Nazi, he just poses as one. Posing or not, the German analogy isn’t wild or unhinged. It is apt. And the analogy is terrifying. History rhymes, Mark Twain said. Our contemporary history is rhyming now with 1933. Don’t let those who paved the way for Trump or those who prattle about some way of working with Trump convince you otherwise. He is a malignancy, and he will only metastasize. He already has. And I fear that there is no cure.
So those of us who live in constant apprehension are not paranoid. While it should come as no comfort, it is the nation, or nearly half of it, that is deranged, not us. It is half the nation that has forsaken itself, not us. I called this Substack “Farewell, America” because I sincerely felt that a Trump victory would end the American experiment. I wasn’t bluffing. I wasn’t saying, nor did I believe, that we could yet rescue the nation from Trump, should he win, as he did. I wasn’t normalizing Trump as just another political figure, however malign, on our political landscape – someone whom we could defeat if we could only summon the energy and organization. When I said his threat was “existential,” I meant it. Our last best chance, our only chance, to save our nation disappeared on November 5. We, and by “we” I mean the good and decent people among us, were not up to the task of preventing a Nazi sympathizer, white racist, nativist, misogynist, Islamophobe, transphobe, accused rapist, and convicted felon from becoming president. Now the nightmare mushrooms. Now the nation perishes. Now all is lost.
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Cling to hope, but don’t be fooled by it. This sort of thinking – that Trump, while a bit of an aberration, is manageable – may be the most dangerous illusion of all. Trump has received some derision in the legacy press, but nowhere near the derision he deserves, not only for his dismantling of this country’s institutions but also for his defense as he is doing so. He is unashamed and unabashed. He models himself on Hitler and Mussolini and Putin and Orbán, though the legacy press tries to temper the comparisons. Musk’s Nazi salute was really a Roman salute, it was reported. Sure. Or Trump is half-joking when he keeps hinting that he would not leave the presidency when his term is done, or that the Constitution might be amended or disregarded altogether to grant him another term. Sure.
Trump may be an aberration, but he is not manageable. It is important, necessary, for us to view what he is doing as one of the most consequential projects in human history: history’s biggest demolition. And that is not hyperbole either. The destruction of American democracy will be a lasting historical bruise. Democracies do not come and go. Once they are gone, the loss – our loss – is irreversible. But Trump has managed to engineer something even larger, even more monstrous, even more tragic – something that, despite its enormity, gets no coverage in a press focused on the here and now. Democracy was a product of the Enlightenment, of the great intellectual revolution that pulled mankind from superstition and stupidity and replaced them with reason and rationality. To destroy democracy, as Trump has done, one must also destroy the Enlightenment, which Trump has also done – destroy reason itself, which means destroying hundreds of years of human progress and returning us to the dark ages, What we are talking about, put simply, is the destruction of the very foundation of the modern world. We flounder now in that darkness. And we cannot find our way out of that nightmare either. The damage, I contend, is permanent. And against it, resistance is futile. Reason loses. Reason has already lost.
An especially egregious article in the New York Times Magazine by a novelist named Ross Barkan illustrates what the resistance is up against and how difficult it will be to win. Barkan’s argument is that the resistance has melted away, and it has melted away because it was the result of a kind of political hypertension in which both sides – in the Times, it is always both sides – went to extremes that finally exhausted them. “To be on one side and against the other was to be consumed with a style of activism that demanded righteousness,” Barkan wrote, as if white supremacism and tolerance were just two, equally credible political positions and as if those of us who, terrified of democracy’s demise, were being sanctimonious in challenging Trump’s amorality. (Barkan explicitly equalizes efforts against Trump with protests against the killing of George Floyd.) “But those same pathologies,” which is what he calls them, “did not take over the 2024 election,” he wrote. (Yes, opposing a Nazi admirer is a pathology in Barkan’s view.) Instead, “Now that it’s done with, relatively few on the left are genuinely shocked by Trump’s win, accommodation and acceptance are the new watchwords. . . Democrats do not seem anguished or animated by the Trump Restoration as they were by his ascension.” Barkan even declares the “old discourse around the `normalization of Trump’” as “dead,” which is to say that Trump is already normal.
So writes Barkan, and it is hard to imagine any analysis more wrong-headed or farther from the truth, or one that legitimizes the normalization of Trump more than this one. For the record: Donald Trump is a fascist. Accepting defeat and throwing in the towel is one thing, as many Democratic officeholders and strategists have done these past few weeks. David Axelrod, the old Obama adviser who has become a reliable advocate of surrendering to Trump on the pretext that if you can’t beat them, join them, even favored Trump’s sinking USAID because, Axelrod said, the American people didn’t like it anyway.
But Quislings hardly constitute a significant portion of liberals, much less the bulk of them, and if there is any diminution of the so-called resistance, it certainly isn’t because liberals have learned to accept Trump or believe that his fascist authoritarian impulses have been curbed, which is what conservatives want us to believe as they curry favor with him. “Why aren’t we in the streets?” the wonderful Susan Glasser asked recently and plaintively about liberal acquiescence. Speaking from my own experience, it is because of fatigue, of torpor, of utter despair at the turn the country has taken, of the dread of the normalization of Trump by the mainstream media and people like Barkan, of the realization that we have nowhere to turn and no one whom to turn to as we see Trump become our Hitler. It is the result, finally, of a sense of futility.
We are as angry as ever, angrier, and we pray for salvation, even in the faux euphoria of the hopefulness that Donald Trump’s hold on his half of America will finally, at some point, perhaps, as Carville says, in the near future slip – slip when he wrecks the economy, slip when he sacrifices the nation’s preeminence to Putin, slip when he disenfranchises millions of Americans, slip when he undermines the health of America’s citizens, slip when he pollutes our air and water, and slip when he dismantles the government while declaring himself king.
Perhaps it will. Perhaps his self-proclaimed monarchy will end. Perhaps America’s institutional safeguards are sturdy enough, perhaps America’s virtue can be resuscitated enough, perhaps there are enough real patriots to contain him, perhaps enough people will see through the charade.
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But if Trump has taught us anything, it is that you should never bet on his being halted. I submit that nothing can stop Trump. He is the most powerful man in the history of the world. He is the most unaccountable man in the history of the world. Corrupt himself, he corrupts the nation. We can hope for that to change and that we will rediscover our better selves if the country slides into decrepitude, but hope is a poor substitute for realism, much less power.
It should be obvious by now that our institutions are weak. They were designed never to let a Donald Trump ascend to power, not to stop him once he attained it. No one in his administration dares counter him; there are no men or women of conscience to do so. Congress will not stop him; Republicans are in thrall to him, and to a man and woman, the House passed his budget resolution, even as a few of them protested vigorously before the vote that they would not do so. And in any case, it is also important to state the obvious: the Republican Party is the most nefarious political organization since the German Nazi party, and it is about time that someone in the mainstream media said so rather than treat them as normal too.
For over fifty years, the party’s primary project has been to reverse the New Deal that enabled Americans to pull themselves through the Great Depression and brought subsequent economic parity to the nation – or, at least, the closest we have ever come to it. For over fifty years, Republicans have propagandized that the government that has helped us is actually our enemy – that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, every government safety measure and health supervision, every regulation to protect American workers from business imperiousness and the American people from business profiteering without regard to the consequences, should be stripped away and government itself gutted. Even Ronald Reagan couldn’t succeed in having his fellow Republicans bulldoze the entire government, no matter how dearly he wished to do so. Only Donald Trump has.
Meanwhile, the courts could and should hold Trump accountable as he tramples our Constitution and our laws, but the legal system is corrupted too, so politicized that it is yet another adjunct of Trump’s power – a facilitator of his lawlessness rather than an impediment to it. So far, district courts have blocked some of his excesses. In the end, however, whatever rosy predictions the legal establishment might make about a system of laws, the Supreme Court will doubtless give Trump free rein, as courts in dictator-ruled nations normally do because the law is only functional when informed by virtue and is meaningless in the face of power. This is the court, after all, that bestowed upon Trump an all-purpose Get Out of Jail card.
In the civic sphere, he has intimidated the media to the point where they surrender even before a shot is fired; ABC settled a suit with Trump they were very likely to win, and CBS is demonstrating the same cowardice in Trump’s “60 Minutes” suit in which he accuses the network of editing an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look better. Jeff Bezos has turned the Washington Post into a Trump apologist and pretty soon, no doubt, he will close it and put it out of its misery. The business establishment is lined up behind him – our very own Putinesque oligarchy. Social media is his house organ, disseminating lies, distortions, mis- and disinformation. Organized religion has largely canonized him. In short, all defenses fail. The Maginot Line put up more resistance to the German Army than these cowards and sycophants put up to Trump.
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But even none of this would matter if it weren’t for one more fact, one agonizing fact: as institutional America cowers before him, Trump is very, very unlikely to be held accountable by the American people either – at least one half of them. The professions of hope from the optimists on the left are predicated on the belief that there will eventually be voters’ remorse and if, when, Trump wreaks his havoc, he will pay a stiff political price from those who had no idea he would do what he has done. (Never mind that no presidential candidate has ever been more transparent about his plans for destruction than Trump, and half the voters put him in office anyway or, perhaps more accurately, because of it.) I hear this dream repeatedly from friends of mine. Just wait. Just you wait until ordinary Americans begin to suffer. Indeed, my friends are only invoking one of the fundamental tenets of politics: You screw up, you pay.
When politics operated ordinarily, which is to say, when politics was basically a way to meet the needs and desires of the country’s citizens, a mess like the one Trump is creating would have created a backlash. But this previously immutable tenet does not hold for Donald Trump, perhaps the singular politician who can toss aside institutions, rules, laws, traditions, the Constitution, morality itself, like a rampaging Godzilla, while paying no price whatsoever. In America today, fewer and fewer people judge the political system by how well it serves their own well-being, or rather they don’t judge it by how well it serves their own economic well-being. If they had, Kamala Harris would be president. (And don’t bring up inflation; it was just slightly higher than two percent, the Fed target, at election time.) Rather, many of them, perhaps most of them, seem to be judging it by how well it expresses their cultural and psychological dissatisfactions and how well the system vents their angers. Politics is about priorities. Revenge seems to be the top priority among the largest swath of Americans.
This is a sea change in politics. Basically, Trump’s lack of accountability among the American people generally for the way he conducts government disables politics as we have known it. For Donald Trump has discovered and then exploited something that no other American president had ever dared to exploit. He has touched the heart of darkness among the American people, which, unleashed, is the most powerful and terrifying of forces. Like the old radio hero, the Shadow, Trump knows the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
That darkness, that evil, is the very thing that most empowers him. And that darkness today is more significant for his voters – far more significant - than whether the price of eggs is rising. How do we know? We know because even as the Biden administration was bringing down inflation, raising the GDP, lowering unemployment and adding millions of jobs, Republicans thought the nation teetered on the brink of Depression. And now? Well, now as inflation is beginning to rise and Trump’s tariffs threaten our financial security, those same Republicans think Trump is doing a bang-up job. In short, you see what you want to see. They see disaster under any Democratic administration and glory in Trump’s.
But the economy isn’t salient anyway, no matter how much pundits love to cite it. It is the darkness that is salient – Trump’s appeal to Americans’ worst instincts. You don’t have to govern well if you are Donald Trump. You just have to strike the right discordant chords with the public.
Trump knows, as I have written previously, that deep in the bones of the nation are a penchant for chaos and a penchant for cruelty. From the nation’s inception, Americans have identified order with aristocracy and elitism; as historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in his classic The American Mind, Americans rather liked disorder: “"Rules represented tradition, and discipline authority; he [the American] knew that his country had become great by flouting both."
Chaos was a way for Americans to thumb their noses at those elites. Similarly, the nation’s rough-and-tumble frontier experience led to a sense of cruelty, whether it was exterminating Native Americans or enslaving Africans – a cruelty that was justified as necessary to domesticating a land. Americans have never really purged either proclivity. They surface regularly in our popular culture; our films have championed disruption and violence nearly above all else. But our political culture was different. In our political culture, we repressed them under the pressures of civility – at least until Trump made civility seem like a form of weakness and released all that pent-up chaotic energy and meanness.
The last election, I am convinced, became finally a referendum on American resentments – resentments against the educated class, against expertise, against feminism and the emasculation it seemed to represent to vulnerable white men and many men of color as it turned out, against assumed advantages bestowed upon minorities, against immigrants who threatened to pollute the purity of our culture, against a sense of moral condescension toward racists, misogynists, homophobes and other haters by so-called “woke” culture, against a belief that America was being taken advantage of, against globalization and the shrinking world, among many others. Resentments piled upon resentments, vengeance upon vengeance.
And Trump understood that these resentments were paramount over everything else among a significant segment of America – again, roughly half - and Trump knew both how to inflame those resentments and channel them. He promised to be retribution for the aggrieved, to tear down everything they hated, and to elevate chaos and cruelty to the highest valence of American values. Liberalism was compassion. Trump would eradicate it. That was his bargain with his supporters. That is why they apotheosized him. That is why they will never abandon him. His transgressions were proof of his hostility to the politesse they despised. The worse he was, the more his supporters liked him. (This explains in part his nauseating mistreatment of Ukrainian President Zelensky last week; it violated every principle of decency, not to mention democracy.) And no matter what he did, certainly no matter what he did policy-wise, they would not and will not ever, ever, ever, ever hold him accountable so long as he was incorrigible, so long as he espoused the rot, so long as he was the personification of cruelty. As I said, he is freed from the chains that have bound every other politician. In fact, his incompetence is an advantage.
So when we hear that voter’s remorse will doom him, that assumes there can be voters’ remorse, even when Trump has done everything he can to earn it. But there will be little or no remorse. He provides far too much psychological pleasure – including or especially the exhilaration, and it is exhilaration, of cruelty over the most vulnerable among us – for Americans to punish him. He can attack veterans and threaten to strip veterans’ hospitals to the bone, and he won’t lose the veterans’ vote. He can cheer thugs who killed policemen on January 6, and not lose a policeman’s vote. He can stiff farmers for outlays for which the government was supposed to repay them, and not lose a farmer’s vote. He can laugh along with Elon Musk about firing factory workers who dare unionize, and not lose a blue-collar vote. He can subject your child to measles because of his objection to vaccines, and not lose the parent vote. He can disembowel the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid, threatening the very lives of the people who rely on them – 40% of births in America are underwritten by Medicaid – and those voters who lose their medical insurance will not break with him. (Just look at a state like West Virginia where over 600,000 residents are on Medicaid or CHIP but which nevertheless gave a 42% advantage in the last election to the man who threatened them.) He can break every single moral law, be the most profane man in the history of American politics, and then compare himself to Jesus, and have the religious community sing his praises. He can speak approvingly of Hitler and consort with neo-Nazis and actually gain Jewish votes, and he can dismantle DEI programs and gain the votes of Black men and Hispanics. He can appoint judges who take away a woman’s right to choose and still win the white women’s vote. He can fuel inflation, and not face a backlash, even when polls show consumer sentiment plummeting. He can discard United States foreign aid, which will cost thousands if not millions of lives in destitute and desperate countries, and Americans will shrug. (Read the Heather Cox Richardson link to see the damage he will do and how many lives are likely to be lost.) He can threaten to disband FEMA and not lose a vote in areas most likely to be stricken by disaster. He can blow up the very alliances that have kept this world safe for eighty years, and cast his lot with tyrants and murderers, and Republicans nod approvingly while most other Americans don’t seem to care. He can hack away at government and deprive Americans of necessary functions in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and not lose a vote. He can tank the stock market and slap on tariffs that dismay the business community, and have every businessman in America lining up at Mar-a-Lago for the privilege of kissing his ring and a part of his anatomy. (If you really want to jump off a bridge, read Steven Rattner’s recent article in the Times on how businessmen love Trump, even former Democrats, because he doesn’t spend money on the public welfare, he won’t regulate them to prevent them from doing the harm to us that they would like to do, and he hates DEI as they do. Forget democracy: business always cares only about its own selfish needs.)
For some, this is just abject fear. Trump is the bully to beat all bullies. He scares them. He runs the country like a Mafia protection racket, and they are afraid he will break their fingers, even as they seem to harbor a certain admiration for this threat. But for others, I believe for most, it is the joy of hurting others even if they themselves become collateral damage. As I said, the priority for these supporters is wrecking the establishment, both conservative and liberal, but especially liberal, and demonstrating a swaggering macho cruelty, the more hurt the better. This is how they satisfy their resentments.
My friends take comfort in recent polling. Trump is the least popular president at this stage of his presidency. His numbers are dropping. His favorability rating is underwater. Many of his policies draw heavy disapproval. But this, too, is something of a delusion. The polling is actually surprisingly inconclusive. Some polls have him down, some have him up, but in just about every poll his favorability rating hovers around 45% - way too high for the malevolence and mayhem he deploys. If there is anything encouraging about his numbers, it is that Democrats are near-unanimous in hating him, and independents are skeptical of him too, and that his support comes primarily from a near-unanimous cheering squad of Republicans. Yet there are awful portents in those numbers: growing support among young men, the “bros” who hate women, and from Black men and Hispanic voters; a narrowing of the gender gap; and, perhaps worst of all, those astronomical Republican numbers, which means support within the Republican Party itself will never crack, even as he sells out his own country to Vladimir Putin.
We all know that Trump is the quintessence of American ugliness. He is everything that others despise in us and that the best of us despise in ourselves. But I have said it repeatedly: nearly half of American voters anointed him, in my opinion, not because they paid too much for eggs, but because they liked that ugliness, liked the power it seemed to exude, liked the vicarious thrill it gave them, liked the echo of vengeance in it. Whether or not Trump is our most hated president, half the country loves him, worships him, for the very reasons the other half hates him.
And so I think of Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty, welcoming words we once memorized in school, words that reflected who we were, that reflected the capaciousness of our hearts, and the amplitude of our aspirations – her extended arms to the “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” And I think now how this nation is better reflected in Dante’s famous admonition, appropriately above the gates of Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Abandon hope.
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I know this is not what you want to hear. It is not what I want to say. I would be the first to admit that I might have it all wrong and that the optimists have it right. I dearly wish that I am wrong. After all, I was fairly certain that Kamala Harris would beat Trump, based not only on predictive data – the gender gap would be yawning, when it wasn’t – but based on my fervent desire that the American people could not possibly be cruel enough, amoral enough, foolish enough, to put Trump back in office. It was my misplaced faith that misled me, and that mistake may be distorting my vision now. I oversold my fellow Americans then. I may be underselling them now.
But it is hard to ignore that half of American voters put him back in office, hard to ignore that Americans engineered this comeback, hard to ignore that at least half and probably more actually seem to enjoy the terror he brings, hard to ignore that kindness and generosity are now largely absent in this country – hard to ignore that we are responsible. The nation is us. We cannot possibly pretend that we didn’t know who he was. He declared it with obscene pride. And if I am right, if Trump is the avatar of the American people, if his values are our values, those who do not subscribe to his viciousness keep asking ourselves – I keep asking myself - what can we do? How can we survive? How can we love a country that is itself so unloving? How can we be citizens of what may now be the worst country in the world?
I wish I had answers. But the reclamation project is so overwhelming that I have none – save this: Trump owns the present. He doesn’t own the future. Therein lies a faint, flickering hope.
In fact, this hope actually begins in despair, and there is a model for it. When Holocaust survivors were released back into a world that had tried to kill them, they faced what is perhaps the greatest reclamation in human history: to reclaim their hope from despair and to reclaim their world from evil. Now, in a world that Trump had sworn to destroy, that task falls to us. Our job – the job of the good and decent Americans who take no pleasure in the suffering of others but only in its relief – is to bear witness. We have to provide a record of what Trump has done to our country. We have to watch and report upon how he threatens everything that has made this country great, especially our values. Such reporting didn’t stop the Holocaust, in part because nobody really cared, but it has made another Holocaust much less likely. Because the survivors remembered. Because the survivors refused to forget their nightmare and wouldn’t let us forget. Because the cruelty was burned into our consciousness.
What made this difficult for the survivors, aside from the obviousness of the unspeakable horrors they had witnessed and torture to which they had been subjected, was a sense that they should keep silent about their experiences, presumably as a way of saving themselves but also of sparing the world the guilt of having to face what it had done. As Elie Weisel has told it, when he arrived in America, he was advised, “Forget about it. Put it behind you. Start over.” And, ironically in light of our contemporary situation, he was told, “Look, now live here in America, in a free country where happiness is part of the Constitution.” How naïve we were!
One of the worries of those survivors is that if they did talk, no one would want to listen to them. Primo Levi said he would walk down the street seizing people, strangers, because he felt a compulsion to tell them his story of Auschwitz, like the Ancient Mariner, with whom he felt a kinship. Weisel said he needed to tell his story too – not to unburden himself, but in a way to burden us, the listeners – burden us so that the Holocaust would never be forgotten, burden us so that no one could ever pretend that such savagery had never been perpetrated. The world then, as now, was largely indifferent – then to Jewish suffering, today to the suffering of so many marginalized groups America will either punish or cast to the wind. Weisel challenged that indifference by bearing witness. He spent the rest of his life doing so. Memory became a safeguard. Memory became a way of preventing a repetition of the sins of the past. And for eighty years, until Donald Trump, it did just that. NATO provided military protection. But the ongoing, vivid memories of Hitler and the Holocaust provided an even more potent form of protection – a reminder of the nightmare. Never again
I am not by any means comparing the Holocaust of six million murders to Trump’s destruction of democracy and law and truth and morality, but the impending damage is nevertheless great, the awful toll yet to be determined, and I do believe that our best means of facing it, even restraining it, is similar. Right now, we are survivors-in-waiting. Our immediate task is not letting Trump be normalized or skate from the injuries he imposes. We must understand that the sanguine pronouncements in the media like Ross Barkan’s about Trump and Musk and Project 2025 and all the gauleiters only too willing to do Trump’s dirty work are misleading, and to recognize that Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation and the world and that we mustn’t let down our guard. We need to be on high alert. We need to be flashing a danger signal. This isn’t hysteria. This is truth.
Just ask the survivors. In his holocaust classic Night, Weisel told of Moché the Beadle, the clownish, barefoot custodian of Weisel’s childhood synagogue in the village of Sighet in Transylvania. One day Moché was dragooned by the Hungarian police rounding up foreigners, of which he was one. But he returned some weeks later, now no longer clownish, now with tears in his eyes, having escaped his captors and needing to warn his fellow townspeople what awaited them, which was death. “I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death,” he said. “So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time.” He begged them to listen, but they thought he was mad. Had they listened, Weisel says, they could have escaped the Nazis. But they didn’t. As we bear witness, we must warn, and we must beg to be heeded, as I am doing here. (Weisel would later say that the American media and President Roosevelt should have born witness too and issued warnings to those who had yet to flee the German advance.) Just know this: that normalization of Trump and the soft-peddling of what he promises is the end of civilization. That is not hyperbole either.
Bearing witness, however, is not just a warning of doom or a reminder of it. For Weisel it is also a near-religious obligation to remind us of our humanity, even as we sift it from the ashes of the ovens. On the face of it, as Weisel has written, the German executioners were not monsters. Many were educated. Many were refined. Many were what we would call civilized. What they lacked was humanity. As Weisel has put it, “No one in Germany – all the scientists and philosophers and the highly educated – asked this simple question: What about humanity in all this? In Auschwitz? What about humanity?” And Weisel added, in what could be a description of our own predicament among the MAGA enthusiasts: “They just did it and enjoyed it.” Enjoyed it. So we must bear witness to the humanity we have lost and the morality we have forgotten – this, perhaps, above all. Again, Weisel: Morality “is the ability and the duty to say no.”
Trump may be popular now. He may be the retribution he has promised his MAGA supporters. He may be the answer to their resentments. He may be to America what Hitler was to Germany – puffing us up, letting us cockwalk, ignoring decency, and brutalizing our former allies in a display of muscle. But in the end, whatever Americans may feel about him now, history will render a verdict too. And that verdict is important. That verdict will tell us whether Trump will be celebrated as an American hero or demonized as one of the great villains of history. It is not only important, it is essential, that he be found guilty in this, the biggest trial he has faced – the only trial in which our compromised Supreme Court cannot possibly save him. And here we must also bear witness, for we are the ones who shall make the case against him and against all those who facilitated him: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, McConnell, Johnson, and the list goes on. We are the ones who shall remember what he and they did and whom he and they hurt. We are the ones who must save and then protect the remnants of humanity and morality in order to convict Trump and his allies for all time. And herein lies hope, because I believe that there is some faint hope in that conviction – some hope that Trump will not escape moral condemnation, though it is by no means certain, some hope that future generations will come to realize how and why we failed, and they will say: Never again.
This may seem like small consolation or no consolation at all. In practice, bearing witness may seem feckless. It means telling the story again and again and again – to our friends, our colleagues, our relatives, especially to our children. “To listen to a witness is to become a witness,” Weisel would say. In today’s context, bearing witness means never letting us forget the nightmare that has now descended upon us. Weisel calls this process “active pessimism,” meaning we dare not forget the past (pessimism) but we must work to stop the past from repeating itself (active), though, as I have said, I have some doubts about the efficacy of the active side.
In fact, I have another name for it, an oxymoronic name, and a different emphasis. I call it the “hope of despair.” Because out of this deep, deep despair that is shared by so many Americans, out of this terrible nightmare that we cannot escape, we may be able to find, as the Holocaust survivors found in their despair, a community of individuals who realize the stakes and keep them in full view. And, not incidentally, it will be, as that Holocaust community was, a community of kindness – kindness arising from our common suffering.
We know this is a malign world. We know that political efforts are likely to fail against the tide of Trumpism. We know the power of evil because we see it daily and because we have those historic reminders of it, though they have now faded from our collective memory. We know the media will give Trump a pass. We know most Americans will give him a pass and more. But we must nevertheless bear witness, even when it is painful, even when it seems futile. We must bear witness because we cannot let the demons own the memory of these terrible. terrible times. We cannot let Trump win history. And for each of us, individually, we must bear witness because we cannot let the nightmare devour us.
Notes
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-putinization-of-america
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-collapse-james-carville-2035164
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/trump-mckinley-populism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/trump-tariffs-economy.html
https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/lmrox.bsky.social/post/3lincjmzpnk25
See Heather Cox Richardson, March 3, 2025
Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 19.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/trump-wall-street-biden-big-business.html
https://dhhr.wv.gov/humanservices/Pages/default.aspx
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-most-unpopular-president-more-101237841.html
https://apnews.com/article/young-black-latino-men-trump-economy-jobs-9184ca85b1651f06fd555ab2df7982b
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/27/trump-popularity-young-americans/
Howard Reich, The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Weisel (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019).
The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987, Primo Levi. Ed. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (NY: The New Press, 2001)
Elie Weisel, The Night Trilogy, (NY: The Noonday Press, 1988), p. 17.
I hope you are wrong, dear friend (about the most pessimistic parts of this). I know you hope you are wrong too.
Right on point... it is done.