Our problems weren’t created overnight, and they weren’t all created by Donald Trump. Pre-Donald, it was like this slow drip, drip, drip. We could feel in our bones that things were off but had a hard time identifying exactly what those things were. Most of us assumed a day of reckoning was coming eventually, and it most certainly was. The Donald Trump spectacle – which is both a symptom and a consequence of our severely broken politics – just accelerated the process.

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Before, so many potential policy outcomes were purely theoretical. Across America, we settled in at dinner tables with our families or sat across from co-workers at lunch and argued (with little evidence other than our, obviously brilliant, gut feelings) about the size our federal government should be and the role it should play, or if trade wars really do pay off, or if 38 trillion dollars in federal debt was really that big of a deal, or if significant tax cuts for rich people and Wall Street really do, in fact, ignite the entire economy.

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We debated the condition of our checks and balances and whether Congress had relinquished too much power to the executive branch. We discussed what would happen if we failed to see the warning signs of an international pandemic and, if a pandemic did indeed reach our shores, the role basic science should play… and for that matter, the role science should play in every aspect of our lives.

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We innocently asked ourselves – in the naïve manner of people who are certain something like this could never happen to them – what would happen if our president, vice president, and members of the Cabinet started consolidating authority and amassing power by any means necessary, embracing fascist tendencies and making no secret of their autocratic aspirations – with the president going as far as calling for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

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What would happen, we wondered, if these despotic strongmen wannabes trampled all over the First Amendment, doing everything under the sun to stifle free speech; curtail civil liberties; suppress inconvenient truths; control the news media; quash dissent; silence their political rivals; make political opposition more difficult; attack higher education; strongarm law firms and corporations; and politicize and weaponized the Justice Department to investigate and imprison people they perceived to have slighted them – to the point where Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said, “We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real?”

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What would happen, we asked ourselves, if our leaders turned ICE into an unconstrained paramilitary force or if they dispatched the U.S. military into American streets to incite fear and suppress opposition. What would happen if our president, vice president, and members of the Cabinet openly defied federal courts or habitually declared national “emergencies” on false pretenses or unconstitutionally bypassed Congress on everything from invading countries to dismantling congressionally authorized agencies like the Department of Education and USAID or violated the Impoundment Control Act (which outlines a legal process for the president to request Congress cancel previously approved spending) by withholding funds authorized by Congress for everything from preschools to scientific research to emergency funding for federal programs that provide food, shelter, and temporary housing for Americans after disasters?

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… or one where the president and his staff use their positions as a national extortion scam, taking their culture of corruption to Russia-level oligarchy proportions – unprecedently and unabashedly using the power and resources of the U.S. government to enrich themselves, their families, and their friends.

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We probably would have asked ourselves, if we could have even imagined it, what it must be like to live in a country where the president called the press the enemy of the people; democratically held elections rigged; U.S. cities blood-soaked cesspools of blood; and the nation’s capital a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.

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… or one where our commander-in-chief attacked Gold Star families and called our faithful military generals dopes and babies, suckers, and losers, or if he visited, alongside Retired Marine General John Kelly, the grave of 1st Lt. Robert Kelly – General Kelly’s son who was killed in Afghanistan – and said to the eternally grieving father, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

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We asked one another what it must be like to live in a country where the president, vice president and their charlatans seem to hate the very people they are meant to lead, vilifying marginalized groups and basically suggesting that any group other than white Christians are responsible for every single one of America’s problems… then grossly rewriting history and posting memes that dehumanize everyone from gay people to immigrants, who they love to show comically shuffling, shackled, into “Alligator Alcatraz” – and, of course, the best post of all: the one where Donald Trump, with a crown on his head in the cockpit of a fighter jet, flies over America, dropping feces on it.

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… or one where the secretary of defense announces the end of DEI programs by saying, “We are done with that shit” and, after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured, made the ever eloquent and highly mature comment, “He f’d around and found out;” where the vice president calls an American on social media a “dipshit” and responds to a question asking if bombing boats in the Caribbean could be a war crime with, “I don’t give a shit what you call it;” and the White House press secretary, calling a reporter a “far left hack” who asks “bullshit questions,” responds to his very nonthreatening, responsible question about who planned a meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin with the very mature response “your mom did.”

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… or one where the president and vice president show a shocking level of disrespect for all women, with the vice president saying that women “choose a path to misery” when they decide not to have children and calling female opponents “a bunch of childless cat ladies” and the president saying, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women – I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pu$$y.” Then saying, as Donald Trump did to a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice, that it would be a “pretty picture to see her on her knees.”

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This, in addition to saying that “a little fight with the wife” should not be considered a crime – dismissing domestic violence as some sort of justified nuisance – and telling a female Bloomberg News reporter on Air Force One to be “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy;” saying a female New York Times reporter was “ugly inside and out;” and calling various women horseface, skank, lowlife, slob, ugly, degenerate, disgusting animal, or a dog who has the face of a pig.

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… or one where, during a government shutdown, President Trump and his posse threw a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party deemed “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody,” complete with scantily clad women dancing for the crowd. This, on a night when thousands of Americans had not been paid for a month thanks to a shutdown and just hours before 42 million Americans lost their primary access to food.

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Pre-Donald, our musings went beyond the domestic. We waxed poetic about America’s role in the world. What would happen, for example, if the president of the United States blatantly sold out our intelligence agencies in front of the entire world by siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, then shared classified information with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister right in the middle of the Oval Office… or likened the American intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany while, ironically, actual Nazi wannabes stormed the national Capitol.

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… or if the president and the vice president of the United States heaped praise on autocrats from Egypt, the Philippines, Turkey and Kazakhstan, and had full-on bromances with Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Kim Jong-un.

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We questioned – but only hypothetically because we thought it too unthinkable to even contemplate – what would happen if we suddenly abandoned the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), our loyal allies who served beside us in our fight against the Islamic State, or if two U.S. presidents blatantly reneged on our promise to protect the incredibly brave men and women who risked their lives to serve alongside us in Afghanistan, essentially signing many of their death certificates.

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… or what we would feel like if the United States told members of NATO off right to their faces or if we withdrew from major global agreements or if we abruptly retreated from the entire world and started treating our most trusted allies like they were enemies – insulting them, bullying them, and threatening them in their own countries and even right in the Oval Office.

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Before, we viewed topics like these as theoretical because, for the most part, we had never witnessed their real-life implications. But now, we have first-hand knowledge of the value and/or consequences of these scenarios because we have actually lived – and are once again living – through them. And we have the battle scars to prove it.

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Some of the things mentioned above are subjective and, therefore, leave room for opinion. Things, for example, like the size our federal government should be and the role it should play, or whether we should or shouldn’t withdraw from the entire world.

 

However, many of the things mentioned are objective. Meaning, we have the data necessary to accurately assess things like tax cuts and trade wars. We have provable outcomes and can clearly track the relationship between cause and effect. After all, numbers don’t lie.

 

We now know.