America’s New Path Leads Directly To Mordor

Those of us who worry about upcoming events more than we should know intellectually that our overwrought reactions to stressful situations are unnecessary, and that ninety-nine percent of the time everything works out just fine. But there is that nagging one percent…and Donald Trump.

Trump is the rare case of an experience that turns out to be worse than you could ever imagine. A nightmare come true. Every morning brings headlines of new  horrors from opening up national parks to oil drilling to “alternative facts” to a president more concerned about crowd sizes at his inauguration than governing the country. Americans are living in a worse case scenario, a dystopian reality that was once the stuff of Tom Clancy novels and George Orwell’s imagination.

We were warned many times in the past. Sinclair Lewis, Aldus Huxley, Orwell, Gore Vidal, Margaret Atwood and many others raised flags throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century about the real possibility of a totalitarian take over in America. You won’t find it mentioned in many American history books, but this country narrowly escaped a fascist coup in the 1930s when a cabal of elites (including George Bush’s grandfather) hatched a plan to use the military to overthrow FDR and establish a government modeled on Nazi Germany.

It can happen here and now it has. Today we live in an oligarchy that could slip at any moment into a totalitarian regime. Our status as a democracy is in question around the world, and foreign leaders are clearly alarmed and anxious as they monitor the actions of an American president unhinged from reality. Everything that makes us a supposedly democratic society is under threat, from a free press to freedom of assembly to the ability to hold elected officials accountable, and is being eroded by an insecure, mentally unstable president and his enabling administration.

Donald Trump is as bad as it can get. He represents everything that is antithetical to what was once the world’s most admired democracy. If he is allowed to remain in office for the next four years, our country will end up having far more in common with Mordor than Oz.