Who Kept Applauding

Moral Decay

It’s close to noon out here on the prairie, our fifth day on this ten-day odyssey through Sturgis Bike Week, and I still cannot shake what I saw at three o’clock this morning. Maybe it was the hour. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe after five straight days of playing music, sleeping strangely, fitfully, eating whatever we can find and living out of a van and a little cabin on the prairie, my tolerance for bullshit has finally reached zero. But I watched Donald Trump once again turn cruelty into entertainment, this time mocking President Joe Biden over his golf game, and I found myself thinking about something much larger than golf. Hunter Biden has just publicly described his father’s cancer as having metastasized into his bones and beyond, causing tremendous pain and debilitation. (Reuters⁠) And somewhere inside the mind of the president of the United States, the appropriate response was apparently another opportunity to ridicule the man. Not policy. Not politics. Not some legitimate disagreement about the direction of the country. Golf. Scorecards. Mockery. While another human being is suffering from metastatic cancer. At some point we have to stop pretending that this is merely Donald Trump being Donald Trump. This is a character test, and America has been taking it for more than a decade.

I remember another moment, long before Trump reached the White House, when he stood before a crowd in 2015 and grotesquely imitated New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who lives with arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting the movement of his joints. The episode was reported contemporaneously by major news organizations; Trump later denied that he was mocking Kovaleski’s disability and claimed he did not know the reporter, while Kovaleski disputed that account and said the two had known each other during his years covering Trump. I watched that footage and thought: enough. That should have been enough. For me, as someone who understands disability not as some abstract political category but as part of the human condition, it was personal.

I cannot stand the motherfucker.

There it is. I’m not going to sanitize it for polite company. But what increasingly disturbs me more than Trump himself is the willingness of millions of people to watch this behavior, absorb it, excuse it, rationalize it, laugh at it and then march into a voting booth and reward it.

For most of my 67 years on this earth, I have tried consciously, deliberately and sometimes with enormous effort not to allow hatred of horrible people to dominate my life. I have tried to live according to the moral discipline modeled by people I admire: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis. People who confronted cruelty with conscience, hatred with courage and injustice with an almost incomprehensible devotion to human dignity. King reminded us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but history has taught us the rest of that lesson: it does not bend by itself. Human beings bend it. Citizens bend it. Courage bends it. Voting bends it. Resistance bends it. And sometimes people decide instead to grab that arc with both hands and bend the goddamned thing backward.

That is what frightens me about this era. Trump is one man. Trumpism requires millions. A strongman without followers is merely some loud asshole standing on a box. A strongman surrounded by legislators, propagandists, donors, media personalities, bureaucrats and voters willing to surrender their consciences becomes something infinitely more dangerous. That is how democratic norms erode, not necessarily with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue one morning, but through thousands of smaller acts of surrender. One senator decides not to speak. One representative decides reelection matters more than principle. One television host turns an obvious obscenity into a “controversy.” One voter decides character doesn’t matter as long as his team wins. Another says, “Well, I don’t like everything he says, but…” And brick by brick, excuse by excuse, the backbone disappears.”Trump being Trump?” Fuck that.

I have been seeing increasingly ugly talk on social media about the possibility of “civil war,” and I refuse to romanticize that phrase. There is nothing romantic about Americans killing Americans. There is nothing heroic about families burying their children because political disagreement metastasized into violence. Civil wars are not memes. They are blood, grief, destroyed families, shattered economies and wounds that can take generations to heal. I do not predict one, and I certainly do not want one. What I do believe is that a nation that continually dehumanizes its political opponents, rewards cruelty, treats compromise as treason and encourages citizens to regard one another as enemies is playing with something it may eventually discover it cannot control.

History is merciless about these things. Every era produces men convinced that power makes them immortal and movements convinced that normal rules no longer apply. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the bureaucratic machinery surrounding men like Adolf Eichmann were products of radically different countries, ideologies and historical circumstances, and I am not pretending Donald Trump is interchangeable with any of them. That would be historically lazy. The lesson worth remembering is more uncomfortable: authoritarianism never belongs to the authoritarian alone. It requires permission. It requires accommodation. It requires people who know better deciding that obedience is safer than courage. It requires ordinary citizens willing to rename cruelty as necessity, propaganda as truth and submission as patriotism.

And that brings me to what may be the most dangerous participant in any democracy sliding toward authoritarianism: the citizen who voluntarily stops thinking. The politically illiterate voter who wraps ignorance in a flag and calls it patriotism. The person who cannot tell the difference between governing and performance, between evidence and propaganda, between a president and a cult leader. At some point, “I was fooled” stops being an explanation. You cannot spend a decade watching the same man insult women, ridicule opponents, demean the vulnerable, attack institutions, demand personal loyalty and treat virtually every criticism as betrayal and then claim you had no idea who you were voting for. Eventually the excuse expires.

Cruelty has become one of the currencies of this movement. That is what I cannot get past. The insult is the entertainment. The humiliation is the applause line. The suffering of the perceived enemy becomes proof that the movement is winning. And once politics reaches that point, we are no longer arguing merely about taxes, immigration, foreign policy or the size of government. We are arguing about what kind of people we are willing to become. When an 83-year-old former president is enduring advanced cancer that his own son describes as painfully debilitating, and the current president apparently sees another opportunity to score a cheap point about golf, I am not interested in hearing another lecture about how we should simply understand Trump’s sense of humor. (Reuters⁠) I understand it perfectly. That is precisely the problem.

And before somebody inevitably says I am consumed by hatred, understand the distinction. I do not hate half of America. I do not believe every Republican is evil, every conservative is stupid or every Trump voter is irredeemable. I have played music all over this country for decades, including right here in South Dakota, and I have hugged, laughed with, worked beside and loved people whose politics are nowhere near mine. That is America. Political disagreement is not the disease. The abandonment of conscience is. My contempt is reserved for the deliberate choice to witness cruelty and celebrate it, to witness corruption and excuse it, to witness democratic norms being demolished and cheer because the wrecking ball happens to have your preferred political logo painted on the side.

This is why November 3 matters. The 2026 midterms will determine all 435 seats in the House and roughly one-third of the Senate, and therefore which party controls Congress for the following two years. Vote like your life depends on it. Vote like someone else’s life depends on it. Vote because democracy is not self-executing and the Constitution is not some magical force field surrounding the republic. Pieces of paper do not defend institutions. People do. Courts do. Legislatures do. Journalists do. Citizens do. And voters do.

This is not simply left versus right anymore, at least not for me. It is conscience versus surrender. It is empathy versus cruelty. It is citizenship versus cultism. And ultimately it is the question every generation eventually faces in one form or another: When you saw what was happening, what did you do?

At three o’clock this morning, before sleep found me, sitting out here in the middle of this strange, beautiful prairie, exhausted from another night of music, I realized that this is what continues to haunt me about Donald Trump. It isn’t merely the man. Men eventually disappear. Presidencies end. Political movements mutate or collapse. The question that will remain long after Trump is gone is what his rise revealed about us. We saw the disabled reporter. We heard the insults. We watched the cruelty. We witnessed the lies, the humiliations and the endless demand for loyalty to one man above virtually everything else. And still millions said yes.

History will eventually conduct its accounting. The slogans will rot. The red hats will fade. The rallies will become grainy archival footage. Trump himself will someday be reduced to chapters in history books written by generations with no emotional investment in MAGA or resistance, Republicans or Democrats. They will simply have the record.

And somewhere in that record will be the answer to the only question that ultimately matters:

When enough finally became enough, who stood up?

And who kept applauding?

—Michael Jochum

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