The Second Coming of MAGA's Messiah

How a rapist, felon, and traitor became millions of Americans' savior—and what the rest of us can do now

For as long as America is remembered on this planet, people will try to understand these days through the distorted lens of time and distance.

Authors, sociologists, criminologists, cult experts, political scientists, and brilliant minds in future generations will attempt to explain how tens of millions of once-reasonable, sane, seemingly goodhearted human beings betrayed their love of country, their spiritual beliefs, and their moral convictions—and passionately embraced a man who lived with complete contempt for all of them.

Hundreds of years from now, a myriad of creative theories will be proffered, as to how a court-adjudicated rapist convicted of 34 felonies successfully used every available legal and illegal method to avoid accountability for engineering an insurrection in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election, as well as for the stealing and sharing of classified documents.

The greatest scholars of their times will strain to explain how a career criminal, serial predator, and bankrupt businessman commandeered an entire political party, a compromised Supreme Court, and a complicit media, to not only evade justice of any kind for his crimes, but to be rewarded with the presidency a second time in spite of them.

And no matter what history records, they won’t have a prayer of truly explaining it—because we’re living it right now and honestly it makes it makes no damn sense to any of us. Oh, sure, we can rattle-off a few likely motives and contributing factors, but ultimately we’re still left incredulous.

All the available research, carefully-sifted data, well-researched think pieces, and late night talking-head commentaries don't explain once rational, otherwise decent, educated people fully taking leave of their senses: people we’ve grown up and shared our homes with, people we’ve worked and worshipped alongside: older relatives we spent decades aspiring to become, ministers we once respected for their compassion, old friends we knew until we realized we didn’t.

Nothing adequately explains their complete rejection of Science and Medicine and objective truth.
Nothing completely accounts for them completely embracing the most nonsensical of conspiracies.
And nothing, from racism to ignorance to poverty to partisan media to irrational fear, will ever fully justify throwing your nation away for objectively-speaking, one of the shittiest human beings on the planet.

There’s no real satisfactory answer coming to those in the future, and certainly not to those of use who are presently horrified that what we spent a decade trying so hard to help our nation avoid, is coming to pass right now.

And at this point, the how’s and why’s really don’t matter anymore, anyway. We’re simply left with the what—and that what, is that America as we’ve known it up to this point is no longer anything we can count on seeing or experiencing again. None of the systems or safeguards or rules of engagement are relevant.

With three branches of Government, a cadre of billionaires, a negligent media, and 77 million unwavering cultic sycophants willing to kill and die for him, the damage we’ll see to our Republic is impossible fathom, the cost in human and civil rights losses beyond what we can measure.

And yet, that doesn’t mean hope is lost.

It simply means that the shit is about to spectacularly hit the fan in ways we’ve never known or seen—and the rest of us need to decide that we’re not going to go quietly:
we’re not going to normalize him.
we’re not going to capitulate.
we’re not going to bow down, bend over, sit down, shut up, bend the knee, or kiss the ring no matter how many others do.
we’re not going to make vulnerable and oppressed people fend for themselves,
we’re not going to join the cult’s mindless, breathless fevered adoration.
we’re not going to compromise our convictions to make peace with people who’ve sold their souls and lost the plot.
we’re not going to easily cede an inch of ground or legal or moral.

Look, I don’t have a clue what’s coming or how to best prepare and I’m not sure any of us truly do.

What I do know, is that I’m not letting this bastard win.

I refuse to allow this loveless, joyless, rotted-out husk of a man and his deplorable disciples get the best of me—and I hope you won’t either.

And the way we’ll do that, is by fiercely holding on to our empathy because that is what makes us different,
by staying laser-focused on what matters to us so that we remember why we live when it gets terrifying or infuriating (because it will),
by loving well, laughing often, embracing strangers, by healing and helping and giving,
and by defiantly living with joy so that we do not become as devoid of it as he and his coven of relentless grievance and insatiable hatred have become.

I don’t know what the future will record about these days but I damn sure know that right now, with my voice and my circle of influence and my time and my work, I won’t make it any easier for this wretched fraud and those who worship him to write the epitaph for America.

Today and every day we’re here, may we stand together and raise a strident middle-finger to their hateful parade as it passes by—because we will never join it.

How do you see this moment in the bigger story of our nation, and what is your personal response? Let me know in the comments.