Only 1,000 more days of Trump’s dangerous and barbaric bullshit

By James J Devine

Let us pause for a single, sober fact: as of this morning, we have roughly one thousand days left. That is not a promise of relief. That is a countdown on a bomb that is already ticking somewhere inside the walls, and nobody in charge seems particularly interested in finding it.

You are being asked to accept the unacceptable every single morning. A president who treats the nuclear codes like a set of golf course privileges. An administration that has turned the nation’s health security over to people who believe fluoride is a mind control experiment. A Congress that cannot even pretend to care about the next pandemic because they are too busy investigating the sexual habits of some librarian in Iowa.

Here is what can kill us all, and here is why nobody is doing a damn thing about it.

First, the electrical grid. It is soft. It is vulnerable. A half-competent adversary could shut down the eastern seaboard for weeks, and the Trump administration’s idea of cybersecurity is tweeting angry emojis at Russia. We have known this for twenty years. Every report says the same thing. And yet the political establishment yawns, because fixing it would require admitting that the age of American invincibility is over, and that admission might hurt someone’s reelection chances.

Second, the next pandemic. COVID was a dress rehearsal. The next one could be airborne with a forty percent mortality rate. The Republican response to that possibility has been to defund the very agencies that track such things and to mock anyone wearing a mask as a weakling. The neo-fascist wing of the party has decided that public health is a conspiracy against freedom, which is a lovely philosophy right up until you are drowning in your own lungs. But by then, of course, it will be someone else’s fault.

Third, climate. You have heard this before. You will hear it again. The difference now is that the window has shrunk to a crack, and the men running the show are still insisting the window is actually a mural of a coal mine painted by Jesus. They are not stupid. They are worse than stupid. They are willfully, criminally indifferent, because their donors own the oil leases and their voters have been trained to see science as a liberal plot. The Doomsday Clock now sits at eighty-five seconds to midnight. Eighty-five seconds. That is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, and the White House responded by inviting oil executives to a fundraiser. The scientists who set that clock are not alarmists. They are people who have run out of polite words.

But let us be clear about something. The things that can kill us are only half the story. The other half is the slow, grinding destruction of the rule of law, which the establishment also ignores because it is happening in increments small enough to miss if you are not paying attention.

And then there is the question nobody in Washington wants to ask out loud. The Constitution says two terms. Plain as day. Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, no ambiguity. But watch what happens over these next thousand days. Listen to the hints already dropping from the more candid corners of the Trump Republican movement. They talk about a third term like it is a problem of legal interpretation rather than a flat prohibition. They have already floated the idea of repealing the amendment. They have already suggested that a president who refuses to leave could simply be protected by a compliant Supreme Court and a Congress that has forgotten what an oath means.

This is not paranoia. This is reading the playbook they have written for themselves. They have tested every other norm. They have lied about election results. They have tried to overthrow a certification. They have praised dictators who serve for life. The only thing standing between you and a Trump presidency that never ends is a piece of paper and the willingness of a few hundred people to say no. Given what we have seen so far, how confident are you that they will?

The Justice Department has been turned into a personal litigation service for the president. The courts are being packed with judges who believe the executive branch should have no checks at all. The post office was nearly dismantled to steal an election. And the response from the respectable political class has been a series of concerned op-eds and a few stiffly worded letters. That is not resistance. That is performance art for people who still believe in the decency of a system that is already on fire.

This is a neo-fascist assault. Those words are not hyperbole. When a political party openly embraces the idea that the loser of an election should simply refuse to leave, when they purge election officials who tell the truth, when they praise authoritarian leaders abroad while dismantling democratic norms at home, that is the definition of the thing. And the rest of the political establishment pretends this is just the normal churn of partisan politics because acknowledging the truth would require them to do something risky.

One thousand more days. That is what we have. That is what the people who voted for this man have given us. They did not do it because they love America. They did it because they hate the same people they have always hated, and Trump was the only one willing to say the quiet part loud enough to wake the dogs.

So here we sit. A nation with its hands on a hot stove, complaining about the smell of burning flesh while refusing to let go. The political establishment will continue to ignore every clear and present danger because paying attention is hard and doing something is harder. And the rest of us will watch the calendar flip, one day at a time, wondering whether the thousandth day will bring a reckoning or simply another excuse to look away.

Do not look away. That is the only instruction that matters anymore. Keep your eyes open. The next thousand days are going to be the longest you have ever lived. And if you think they cannot get longer than that, you have not been paying attention to what they are already planning.