Life in a Blender

Friends from other countries are sometimes curious about what life is like in this country (the USA) since 2016, the last time it seems that everyone felt that the US was its normal, stable, often belligerent but mostly friendly self. Back when we were living in a country that had offered at least some rebuke to its past by electing a Black man to the highest office. Racism wasn’t gone, of course; if nothing else, it was still built into the systems of our society, Black and brown people were still disadvantaged in thousands of small and large ways, white people still had their privilege, and there were still plenty of racists, though they were careful to whom they exposed their prejudice. But we were getting better. There was, to use the term of the day, hope.

Then came the election of 2016, when one of the brightest, most prepared people who had ever run for the office was edged out, in the electoral college if not the popular vote, by an obvious conman, someone with no preparation or experience to lead and very little intelligence beyond the animal cunning necessary to con people. She had demonstrated her acumen in public office; he had played someone with leadership skills on a “reality” show, his character carefully crafted by the show runners.

I remember thinking it would be humorous if he were the nominee, since she would thoroughly thrash him in debates. Which she did. But what I hadn’t considered was the large segment of our population in his thrall and who had been waiting for someone like him, a largely blank moral and political canvas onto whom they could project their fears and grievances. In the end, it wasn’t all that humorous. More like, as we used to say, funny as a heart attack.

He arrived at a time of demographic change, when white people were poised to no longer be the majority in the country. He arrived to a place prepared for him by decades of extremism by the party he represented. (I can’t say “his party”, since he had never been a member of that party before, as far as I’m aware.) A party that had become racist—extremely ironic for the party of Lincoln, but irony is so often lost on the Right. A party that had taken to labeling “socialist” or even “communist” their opponents, a party that had turned socialism into a curse word, despite the socialist features of American society dating back at least to Roosevelt: Social Security, Medicaid/Medicare, welfare safety nets, a host of others. Though the rank and file loved—and disproportionately depended on—these, party leaders abhorred them and were always ready with their knives to whittle them down to nothing.

The latest bogeyman was, of course, the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature legislative legacy. The party leaders tried, repeatedly, to kill it, and ginned up such hatred for “Obamacare” among the members of the party that even today, mentioning it to them evokes sneers and derision, even among those millions of party faithful who rely on it. That it’s a bogeyman is highly evident from recent opinion polls that show that these misled folks hate Obamacare, while having high regard for the ACA—not realizing that they are one and the same. (Cue the quote attributed to Mencken about intelligence and the American people.)

All that racism that had been carefully suppressed by racists during the Obama years was also simmering like a pressure cooker reaching its safety limit. It was obvious the candidate was racist; his company had its hands slapped for racist housing policies, he had taken out a full-page ad to support the death penalty for the Central Park Five (and refused to recant even after they had been exonerated), he had spent a good portion of his time during the Obama years hounding the man with false rumors of not being born in the United States. Suddenly, the racists had one of their own to support, someone not only unafraid to use the dog whistles they understood, but also who would actually say racist things on the campaign trail. So they could be openly racist now, too! The pressure was released, the backlash to the sanity of the Obama administration was unleashed.

What was it like living under the new guy? I had lived under plenty of administrations on the Right—the crookedness of Nixon, the bland stewardship of Ford, the bellicosity and appalling policies toward the poor and mentally ill of Reagan, the doddering but well-meaning administration of Bush senior, the stupidity of Bush junior—but I’d never seen anything like this, nor had anyone else in the country. We were used to the occasional blunder or outrage caused by the president, but also used to relative steadiness in the steering of the ship of state. Not now.

Now, there were multiple outrageous statements and/or actions per news cycle, making days seem like weeks, exhausting everyone who was paying attention. The president was only predictable in his overall meanness and hateful behavior and in his unpredictability. With no moral compass, with his only lodestar being grift and self-interest, the ship of state was jerked from one course to another, seemingly kept from capsizing only by one or another of the adults on board reaching a hand up to steer her back toward a sane course. These individuals, hardly icons of tolerance and peace, came to be seen as essential in staving off disaster. It’s a weird day when the likes of John Bolton come to be relied on for taking the political middle ground.

Thinking back, it makes me think of what it would be like to live in a blender. Not one that is on all the time, that chews everything into a homogenous blend. No, rather one that has a pulse button that an overgrown, rather dim child presses from time to time for no real reason other than because it makes noise and he enjoys chaos, or because the status quo is not bringing him the quantity of attention and toys he thinks he deserves. Life would settle down for a week, a day, or even an hour, then the dim bulb presses the button again and all is upended and thrown about, settling down, eventually into some new normal that would be a diminished version of the prior state. Then the enfant terrible goes for the button again.

When the impeached (though not convicted due to the temerity, stupidity, or cupidity of those in his party—oh how the party has devolved since Nixon’s time!) oaf finally was voted out, this time losing the electoral college as well as the popular vote, he pressed the button one last time and summoned his goons and cultists for an assault on democracy, all while they cloaked themselves in some perverted version of patriotism. He was impeached again, though again acquitted by his spineless cronies.

The past four years (I write this in January of 2025) were to me like a balm for nerves frazzled by the last guy’s antics. He didn’t quite leave the stage, and occasionally he was thrust back upon it due to the various criminal and civil trials resulting from his January 6 “fuck you” to democracy and to his general lack of morality and adherence to the laws of the land. But now it was more of a sideshow. The country was operating normally, or as normally as it could given his legacy, such as the Right-controlled, blatantly political Supreme Court. Alliances were reestablished, environmental policies reinstated, and America once again took its place as, if not now the leader on the world stage—thanks again to the former guy for that—at least a leader. I’d like to believe some trust was regained from the other people in the world.

I was hopeful that this would continue, and we would get back to at least a semblance of normality. No one could be stupid enough to vote for a convicted felon (it was a given he would run again, of course), after all. People would wake up as from a fever dream, look at the shambles of the political system, the botched response to the pandemic that needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the train wreck that was the economy under the previous guy, and they would shout No more!

Of course it turns out I overestimated my fellow citizens. That the racists would vote for him again was a given, and the evangelicals, who had sold their collective souls and perverted the teachings of Christ to back him, the most un-Christ like leader ever on the ballot, due to the lip service he gave to Christianity and his newly-acquired stance on abortion, they would vote for him, too. But those were minorities, I thought, among the majority of rational, good-hearted Americans.

There were many factors leading to his win. Far more racism than I had ever thought still existed, for one. His first opponent having a horrible night at a debate that raised questions about his mental acuity (never mind the regular servings of word salads and outright batshit craziness spewing from his own mouth). His second opponent being a triple threat to misogynists and racists: female, brown, and Black; or perhaps a quadruple threat, since she was also highly intelligent, thrashing him easily at their sole (at his insistence) debate.

But the factor that seemed to resonate with most people was inflation, which was inevitable after the crash, then growth, of demand and supply chain mess, all due to the pandemic and his botched handling of it. I’m not trying to minimize the toll inflation took on everyone, but of course disproportionately on the poor and the lower middle class. For people already living paycheck to paycheck—or with no paycheck due to the pandemic and the atrocious way it was handled—inflation on groceries and energy costs was potentially catastrophic. But Mencken’s phrase was apropos again; people couldn’t see that ultimately this inflation was caused by the pandemic and exacerbated by his botched economic policies and handling of it, not by his successor, who in fact had rather amazing success in getting it back under control. The price of eggs became emblematic.

So, against every sane reason to reject the felon, the conman, the hateful oaf, we have him again. It’s been less than a week since the inauguration. It feels like it’s been weeks. The rate of unwise, mean and petty, shortsighted, and just downright, well, batshit crazy (to reuse a term) things that have flooded out of the White House has been almost unbelievable. Environmental policies trashed, even as climate change-induced flames engulf California: Out with wind energy! Drill, baby drill! (Yes, juvenile and cringy.) Eliminate credits for EVs! Abandon the Paris Agreement! Health policies in crisis: Abandon WHO! No public information from the CDC! Propose an anti-vaxxer for head of Health and Human Services! The beginnings of disarray in the armed forces and intelligence: Appoint a misogynistic drunk who has literally written the book on politicizing the military as Secretary of Defense! Appoint a governor with no intelligence experience to be Director of National Intelligence! Domestic upheaval, check: Float a plan to get rid of FEMA, so that aid can come directly from the administration! (I.e., those who voted for him get aid, those who didn’t, don’t, as we saw in his first term.) Rename Denali to again honor a white guy! Plan tariffs, and damn the inevitable resulting inflation! (Gas prices remain the same, by the way, and the price of eggs have actually gone up since the inauguration—though he was going to bring prices down immediately, according to his campaign rhetoric, which his cultists of course believed.)

So we’re back in the blender here, thanks very much, with an idiot toddler again with his finger on the pulse button. But this time, it is different. This time, he is gutting the government of any guardrails that may have still been in place, and his thralls are in control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. He has a plan for how to garner all the power in the country, Project 2025. He is installing people in the highest roles in government who have no allegiance to anything or anyone but him; when Mitch McConnell sides with the opposition in voting against a nominee, that’s got to be at minimum indicative of a disastrous choice, if not an actual sign of the end times. Already there has been a bill introduced to amend the Constitution so that he can run for a third term; one can only assume that’s just the start of efforts to extend of his reign. (Luckily, the man is the oldest person ever to assume the office, and he can’t live forever. He can’t, can he?) Already he has declared at least one, maybe two states of emergency and has directed troops (National Guard so far, I believe) to our southern border, even though illegal immigration has actually decreased in the past few years; it’s not that far a stretch from “national emergency” to “martial law”, is it, really? After all, he was itching during his entire first term to use the military domestically. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents now have the authority to go into churches and schools to look for illegal immigrants, and they or their sympathizers have flooded some neighborhoods with flyers urging neighbors to inform on neighbors; not at all like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, right?

What will survive in 4 (or 8, or…) years? Well, the planet will, that’s a given. It’s got another 5 billion years in it before it risks getting destroyed. The ecosystem? Well, not quite the current one, given climate change, but a similar one; and though how long that will survive is questionable, some ecosystem will still be around for a long time. Human civilization? Unless the toddler pushes the Big Red Scary Button, sure; though it may be doomed by choices made in these next few years. Humanity? Same. American democracy?

Well, if it makes it to 2026 intact, that’ll be 250 years. It’s had a good run.