Fools Paradise

A National Fever Dream

I saw the writing on the wall in 2016. I really did. I assumed, naively, as it turns out, that four years of Donald Trump would function like an inoculation. That Americans would witness the chaos, the narcissism, the corruption, the relentless lying, the casual cruelty, the degradation of the office itself, and collectively say, well, that was a national fever dream, let’s never do that shit again. I figured he’d drift into obscurity like a musical one-hit wonder with a bad spray tan and a grievance addiction. Instead, America handed him an encore.

And here we are.

What I did not fully appreciate then was that Trump was never the disease. He was the symptom. The loudest, ugliest, most shameless manifestation of something darker that had apparently been fermenting beneath the floorboards of this country for a very long time.

What we’ve witnessed in these first sixteen months is not governance. It’s a smash-and-grab operation dressed up in patriotic cosplay. A fascist improvisation with flags as props and the Constitution treated like an inconvenient suggestion. Due process becomes optional. Human beings are detained as political theater. The emoluments clause might as well be cocktail napkin copy for all the regard this administration appears to have for constitutional boundaries. The poor are told to tighten their belts while the already obscenely wealthy are handed bigger forks.

And then there’s the grotesque vanity project of it all. Plastering his name, figuratively and spiritually if not always literally, across institutions and symbols patriotic Americans have long held sacred, as though the presidency were not a temporary stewardship but a licensing agreement for his personal brand. Remodeling the White House to suit his gold-plated ego, turning the people’s house into some gilded monument to insecurity and self-worship. Always with the underlying sense that the man who dodged service with bone spurs needs a bunker nearby when the turbulence of his own making inevitably arrives at the front door. It would all be darkly comical if it weren’t so serious. Decimating the arts, politicizing cultural institutions, treating places meant to elevate the American spirit as props in his endless reality show performance. Every institution becomes either a mirror or a target.

And I sit here now on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska, looking out at a stretch of American heartland I genuinely love, and I cannot shake the feeling that millions of decent people are being conned by one of the greatest con men ever to occupy the Oval Office, a Cohn man in every sense of the phrase, carrying forward the cynical playbook of Roy Cohn with all the empathy of a casino foreclosure notice. That’s the maddening part. Not just the corruption itself, but the astonishing durability of the con.

Because authoritarians always come for the press.

A free press is not an annoyance to democracy. It is democracy’s immune system. And what does Trump do? He attacks journalists, vilifies reporters, restricts access, weaponizes language against those whose job it is to ask inconvenient questions. But his particular contempt for women in the press has always carried its own special stench. Women who challenge him. Women who refuse to smile on command. Women who don’t package their intelligence in deference. Women who insist on facts rather than flattery. In Trump’s world, women who do not bow become enemies. The pattern is unmistakable: if he cannot dominate you, he will attempt to demean you.

Because that’s always been the formula.

Anyone Trump perceives as inferior becomes a target. Reporters. Democrats. Immigrants. Minorities. Political opponents. Independent women. Anyone unwilling to genuflect before the altar of his endless emotional need.

If you continue to actively support this attack on democratic norms, constitutional governance, and basic human decency, then this is no longer some abstract policy disagreement over marginal tax rates or regulatory philosophy. This is moral territory. You are not merely voting differently than I do. You are endorsing conduct that places people I love—and people you should care about—at risk.

My family.

My friends.

My grandchildren.

Your neighbors.

Because this stops being politics when cruelty becomes policy. It stops being ideology when vengeance becomes governance. It stops being patriotism when dissent is recast as treason by a wannabe strongman wrapped in a flag he fundamentally does not understand.

There are days I feel like a man without a country. That’s a painful thing to admit, because I love this country. Deeply. Imperfectly. Fiercely. I believe in its highest aspirations, even while watching its institutions be hollowed out by a malignant narcissist who mistakes domination for leadership and wealth for virtue.

But Trump is still only one chapter in a much larger American reckoning.

The sentence that may explain all of this is brutally simple: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

And if that’s true, then perhaps that is the most terrifying revelation of all.

Who knew tens of millions of Americans were carrying around this much grievance? This much resentment? This much hostility toward fellow citizens? Toward women who refuse submission? Toward minorities demanding equality? Toward expertise? Toward compassion? Toward democracy itself?

Who knew that beneath decades of supposed progress there remained this much emotional dry tinder, waiting for a demagogue with a microphone and no conscience to strike the match?

Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise.

Now we aren’t.

And so I come back, again and again, to the same exhausting question: What is it going to take?

Because rationally, you would think the answer would be: all of this. The corruption. The cruelty. The constitutional contempt. The performative wars. The assaults on institutions. The degradation of public discourse. The normalization of authoritarian behavior. Surely somewhere in the cumulative weight of the last eighteen months lies the tipping point.

And yet here we are.

As we approach the midterms, I’m trying to remain cautiously optimistic. I have to be. Cynicism is easy; action requires hope. But optimism without honesty is delusion, and the honest truth is that we still have a tremendous amount of ground to cover.

Opposing Trump is not, nor has it ever been, a political decision.

It is a moral one.

Michael Jochum

Author of Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

Veteran drummer, writer, observer of the absurd, and still foolish enough to believe truth matters.