Roughly half of our nation, namely the Maga supporters, are super psyched, for a variety of reasons. The anti-DEIs are happy about getting white heterosexual males back in charge of everyone else. The anti-abortion side plus some incels are excited about moving toward a Handmaid’s Tale-style society. The Dominionists are ready to re-create an Amerika that follows the teachings of the Vengeful Christ, whoever that is. A group recently released from (and a subset already returned to) incarceration are busily exercising their right to carry guns, chant, and intimidate average citizens on the nation’s average streets. A small but prominent minority, the Gazillionaires, are thrilled to find that for a few million dollars and utter abandonment of all moral principles plus everything they were taught as children, they may soon become gazillion-illionaires.

Then there’s President Musk, a man of action, who is continuing to live the values he learned as a child in South Africa, as he always has. He isn’t messing around; he’s taking over every government system of the United States and systematically destroying it from inside. He currently has complete control of federal spending and has gutted USAID, a pretty impressive effort for two weeks. He is being helped by executive orders and non-meritocrat Cabinet nominations by shadow president Trump. Did I get those backward?

Whatever. The other half are astounded by how easy it is for a small number of persons to bring our country to a near total halt just because they want to. It turns out that for the past 249 years the reason systems kept working is only because people didn’t try to break them. That is demoralizing.

I wouldn’t say there’s no resistance, but it’s feeble. A lot of this stuff is illegal, but if the enforcement branch is the one breaking the laws, the “normal” way to stop them is through the judicial system, which works pretty slowly, and is riddled with sycophants and capped by a nine-person bench of which six are cultists/corrupts.

There are some protests, and various interest groups trying to get attention, and lots of people and groups asking for money to help, but no person or group has a plan of action that appears to me will be in the slightest bit effective against the combination of power and norm-flouting currently practiced by the scofflaw co-presidents.

The Democrats and their supporting media organizations spend a lot of time being aghast or shrieking about the latest travesty, seemingly feeling that if they show Trump is “bad” we will all immediately conclude Democrats are what we need. Isn’t that the strategy that just lost them the election?

That’s bad, but even worse are the ones who are trying to find a way to compromise with our new administration. As we saw during the campaign when they couldn’t stop consulting their billionaire doners, denounce genocide in Gaza, stem government corruption, break up predatory conglomerates, or take one concrete step to reduce grocery prices, many Democrats are so enamored by hanging out with the cool kids that they’re going to drink the Kool-Aid.

Leaders of our nations universities are very much in this last category. Their organizations are reeling under new DEI strictures, but every single one is carefully tempering comments on the topic, fearful of retaliation.

In other words, it turns out that those of us who should be leading the resistance are either craven or ineffectual. Bernie Sanders would be the exception; he does not appear afraid of retaliation in the slightest. However, he is still focusing on using our nation’s process, spending his considerable energy and influence on finding truly progressive and perhaps bold leaders to run for office in 2026.

I think it is perhaps optimistic to think we will have an election in 2026. Even we do, we need to do something before then. This last election was at least in part decided by gerrymandered precincts and reduced voter rolls, and those sorts of activities will only increase between now and then.

My husband and I are thinking we should leave. That also seems craven, but as two retired people, we are in no position to turn any aircraft carriers around, especially without a strong organization spearheading a viable plan. As people depending on Social Security as part of our retirement plan, we are very vulnerable to impoverishment. We are angry; we’ve spent nine years building a new life in California, and we will have to start over again at this older age. However, that is something we at least can figure out how to do.

Honestly, it’s not clear that we will be able to get out in time. The US has now officially stopped tracking/reporting bird flu, and if it transitions to human-human transmission, which seems inevitable, we may not even find out until it has spread halfway across the country.

Season 2 of Trump v Pandemic could be more of a killer than Season 1.