The Path to Post-Trumpism

We face a binary choice between America and something else

Photo by Aaron Burden / Purchased by author

Never in our lifetime has a single person so influenced our collective state of mind.

For the devotees of Donald Trump, he is their singular savior — the answer to all of their questions, the avatar of their many grievances, and likely the rare convener of community for them in an otherwise lonely life of desperation. Not for all of them, of course, but let’s at least concede he fills a void for a critical mass of his followers. From their perspective, America, as they imagined it should be, is doomed without him.

For the rest of us, it is just the opposite; his very presence invades our daily lives and hangs over us like a shadow of doom. So much of our anguish is not the man itself, but the reality that so many of our fellow citizens, including loved ones, do not see, hear, or believe what we find irrefutable. We the people have migrated from a shared belief in unity to a nation increasingly divided by conflicting interpretations of reality and the American ethos. It has always been hard enough to pursue a more perfect union, but it’s been eight score years since we had to seriously consider whether the union itself could survive our own internal strife.