We are only two months into the second Trump administration and already it is much more nightmarish than almost anyone forecast, even its darkest and most pessimistic critics, a team to which I usually belong. But we should have learned that lesson around 2018: No matter how bad you think Donald is going to be on (insert topic here), he’s always worse.

For almost ten years now (yes, it has been almost ten years), those of us who were and are alarmed about Donald Trump have been condescended to by the right, the center, the center-right, and in some cases even the far left. We’ve been told that we’re overreacting, that we’re being hysterical, that we have Trump Derangement Syndrome, that we’re letting Donald live rent-free in our heads. (Can we retire that worn-out expression please?) But I’ve never had any truck with that critique and I have even less now—not even a very small one, like a Toyota Tacoma. The events of the past two months would seem to vindicate my position and that of my fellow hair-on-fire, TDS-plagued, brainspace-landlord anti-Trumpers, even if I do say so myself.

The model usually cited for where a Trumpist United States would be headed has typically been Hungary, but now even that is looking far too tame. The Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, among other books, recently noted that Trump is actually moving much faster and more aggressively than Orbán ever did. Viktor took decades to consolidate power in his country and create a so-called “illiberal democracy” (which is to say, not a democracy at all), to undermine the judiciary and the media and other Hungarian institutions with kabuki-like gestures toward the rule of law while actually running a dictatorship. Trump is ripping through those same institutions in America while barely bothering even to pretend.

As just one benchmark, let’s recall Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James Comey in May 2017, early in his first term. I remember precise moment that I got The New York Times alert on my phone, back when I relied on the Gray Lady as my main source of news. It was a shock to almost everyone who paid attention to such things, and it set in motion a huge swath of the events that followed, including the Russia investigation, the import of which has only grown as Team Trump’s fearless leader daily does Vladimir Putin’s bidding with eyepopping openness. But these days Trump does things on the order of firing the FBI director without cause ten times a day as a matter of course, and almost no one bats an eye, or at least has minimal eye-batting time available before moving on to the next outrage. It’s a deliberate strategy of course, and a chillingly effective one.

The Overton window has moved so far, it’s now located in a house three doors down the block.

LITANY OF HORRORS

We have become somewhat inured to Trumpism over the past near-decade, so now is a good time to pause and take in the breadth of its insanity. A good place to begin is by thinking back to, say, late November 2016, just before he took office for the first time, and how we were told he wasn’t gonna be so bad, that we had to give him benefit of the doubt, that America had strong democratic guardrails, and that everything was probably going to be fine. (Probably.)

Now let’s jump to the present and survey the state of play in early April 2025.

We have Gestapo grabbing people off the streets and disappearing them for no reason other than the fact that the president and his allies don’t like their political views. We have senior GOP leaders arguing that the courts have no power over the White House and calling for the impeachment of judges who try to exercise any, and even suggesting abolishing the federal judiciary altogether. We have a billionaire fond of Nazi salutes turned loose in the machinery of the federal government and given carte blanche to destroy it at whim. We have a vax skeptic in charge of public health (and gutting it). We have the Kennedy Center being turned into a temple of the president’s cult of personality and the Smithsonian ordered to whitewash US history to his personal taste. We have Black and female four star generals and admirals being fired because they are Black and female while the new national security team is led by a drunk former Fox News host and other clowns who accidentally text classified war plans to a journalist because they’re using Signal to coordinate airstrikes on Yemen. We have ICE raiding college dorms and universities under McCarthyite attacks for their DEI policies, starved of funding, and bowing down to the White House’s intimidation. We have major law firms being similarly bullied into submission and similarly caving. We have books being banned, of course, and the FBI going after Habitat for Humanity as a criminal organization. We have a robust economy being needlessly tanked because of Trump’s stupidity and ego and not even the plutocrats able to muster the courage to object, unless they’re onboard with burning it all down on purpose. (Whoda thunk that putting a deranged megalomaniacal con man and serial bankruptcy filer in charge of the economy would be bad?) We have Trump destroying NATO and threatening to annex Canada and invade Greenland, while Russia is given everything it wants on a silver platter. We have the social services into which we have all paid at risk of being gutted while Trump prepares to give another massive tax break to the richest Americans, adding another $4.5 trillion to the deficit that the GOP claims to be so worried about (when a Democrat is in office), and breaking the Senate’s parliamentary rules so that Linsdey Graham can wave his wand and pronounce the math all OK. We have the president selling a “meme coin” that functions as a way for anyone with the means—including foreign nationals and governments—to send him untraceable bribes. We have the names and stories of Black Medal of Honor winners being removed from Pentagon websites, and Dr. Oz in charge of Medicaid, and a pro wrestling exec being allowed to shut down the Department of Education, and Laura Loomer telling the president which national security staffers to fire, and bootlicking Republican Congressmen who want to put Trump on the hundred dollar bill and Mt. Rushmore and rename Dulles airport for him and make his birthday a national holiday.

Oh, and all this is happening after Trump stole classified documents, was convicted of 34 felonies, and refused to participate in a peaceful transfer of power instead summoning a violent mob to try murder his own vice president and various members of Congress by way of overturning a fee and fair election.

I could go on, but you get the idea. And now Trump is talking openly—no joke—about staying in office for a third term.

If you had a time machine and went back to November 2016 and told the American people this is what they were in for, they’d have never believed you. Because a fair number of prognosticators did tell the American people that way back then, even without benefit of a time machine.

OF BOILED FROGS AND PERFECTLY ROBUST DUCKS

The frog in boiling water is an apt metaphor, although there have been times in the (ugh) Trump era when the water temperature was ratcheted up much too fast so for anyone to miss. But there is no doubt that we have slowly become accustomed to this madness, so much so that looking back, it’s hard fathom what was once considered normal and what aberrant. 

I’ll offer just one more example of how far we have fallen and what we have come to accept as normal, everyday life in Trump’s America. That example is Trump’s post on his Truth Social joke-of-a-social-media-platform last month in which he attacked federal judge James Boasberg, who had ruled that the administration’s summary rendition of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals to a gulag in El Salvador was unlawful.

The content of what Trump did—attacking a judge—is mind-boggling enough. But the language and the tone and the trademark ALL CAPS style is absolutely demented and unthinkable for a US president prior to 2016.

That’s from the President of the United States, y’all.

Last December, before the inauguration, I published a somewhat hopeful blog titled “A Lame Duck on Day One?,” in which I pondered the possibility that, once free of the threat of criminal comeuppance, Trump might be too lazy to do any of the bad shit we were really worried about. Like others who entertained such starry-eyed notions, I turned out to be wildly wrong, grossly underestimating Donald’s appetite for revenge, muscle-flexing, and sheer nihilism. The odious libertarian columnist Megan McCardle noted as much in a recent piece in The Washington Post, where she was sort of obliquely gleeful about it, repeatedly complimenting Trump on blowing through both the conventional wisdom and conventional norms like a superman. The piece didn’t hide its sympathies, titled as it was “Trump Has Been Liberated by the YOLO Presidency” and subtitled “The president doesn’t feel constrained in his second term. Instead, he’s doing as he pleases.”

It’s a good time to be an admirer of psychopathic assholes, I guess.

But that is the state of the once proud WaPo these days. The paper that brought down Nixon now offers the risible spectacle of the pathetic sycophant columnist Marc Thiessen arguing with a straight face that the real lesson of the Signal fiasco (he just calls it a “chat”) is as “a window into the inner workings of a highly competent national security team carrying out a successful military operation on the orders of a decisive US president,” which he contrasts favorably with what he calls “Joe Biden’s disastrous leadership on the world stage.” (Ask Zelenskyy about that.) The big takeaway, he argues, is that “Trump has built an effective team.”

Memo to Jeff Bezos: Loving your new editorial policy!

I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE, BROTHER

Surveying our ongoing descent into fascism and ignominy, the question before us is how much farther will we drop, and can we climb our way back up again to some semblance of decency and democracy?

In a recent piece for The Bulwark called “What We May Forget,” Andrew Egger called back to Phillip Larkin’s 1969 poem “Homage to a Government,” and its line about Britain rebuilding after the Second World War: “Our children will not know it’s a different country.” Egger wrote that, “The damage being done today, the scope of the global cruelty and tragedy, is hard to take in,” speaking of “a slow hardening into the new normal.”

Trump and his allies know that, as they work to build a future that is smaller and crueler, more paranoid and more violent, human nature is on their side. We rationalize the current, block out the past, and imagine something brighter can emerge in the future….

But even if this does happen, that doesn’t mean putting things back together will be simple. Whether it will even be possible remains to be seen.

Getting out of this starts with remembering. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.

As I’ve said before, if this is how far we’ve come in just two months, it’s hard to fathom where we’ll be in six months, or a year, let alone four years. But it is very possible that the United States will be fatally damaged, perhaps beyond repair…..or at least repairs that will take decades, presuming the authoritarian movement is sufficiently defeated and discredited and the soil from which it sprung salted such that sanity can prevail.  

In an influential article for The New York Review of Books called “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.”

published right after Election Day 2016 (and later expanded into a book of the same title), Masha Gessen imagined an alternate history in which Hillary Clinton’s concession speech offered not the usual congratulations to her opponent and platitudes about the peaceful transfer of power, but this:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

Of course, Hillary would have been excoriated if she had said that. Then again, Hillary gets excoriated even when she pets a puppy. But it would have been the God’s honest truth, and set a tone, and nudged us toward the aggressive mindset that is now called for, one that is appropriate when one’s foes are irredeemable fascists. (So, yeah, I guess I am saying that it’s all Hillary’s fault, isn’t it?)

So as we feel the temperature continuing to rise and our skin scalding in this frog soup, let us try to keep some perspective as to just how low we have sunk, and remember that THIS IS NOT NORMAL. In part two of this essay, coming in a few days, we will consider further thoughts on the beginning of a movement to change course.

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Photo: Don descends the golden escalator in Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan to announce his presidential run, June 16, 2015. Credit: Tom Briglia/FilmMagic.