What might a loaf of bread reveal about our nation’s priorities, and its morality? (Unsplash photo by Yael Hofnung)

A bakery the next county over sells an organic whole wheat sourdough bread that is my current favorite. So when we went grocery shopping the other day at the start of a vacation out West, I grabbed a loaf that looked familiar, figuring I would see how the local craft bakery there stacked up alongside ours. Only after we got back to our rented condo did I notice the pricetag: I had paid $16 for the bread — about a buck-fifty a slice, I figure.

Everybody’s got to make a living, you know, and I’m willing to pay extra for good food. I mean, the chemically-enhanced factory-produced white bread that you can pick up at Trader Joe’s for less than two bucks a loaf is not my idea of healthy eating, and I frankly resent the fact that the farmer’s share of that purchase is probably less than 12 cents, according to a recent Kansas study. We all deserve better than that, thank you. So, yes, I had parted with a lot of dough for a pound of dough. But it was really good bread.

The next morning, though, as I was enjoying my slice of expensive-and-tasty toast, I came across a report that the United States government had ordered the incineration of nearly 1.1 million pounds of high-energy biscuits that had been intended as food aid for hungry children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I laid aside my jam knife and read on: The biscuits could have fed 1.5 million children for a week, but they had gone stale while sitting for months in a Dubai warehouse, apparently a result of the Trump administration’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development and, as ABC News put it, “other logistical hurdles” linked to the Department of Government Efficiency.1

It's not just USAID foodstuffs that are going to waste. President Trump wants to eliminate both the Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education programs, which buy grain from American farmers to feed people around the world. A couple of farm state Republican senators held up the shuttering of those programs a couple of weeks ago, since their constituents’ grain was beginning to rot in Midwestern silos. But don’t for a minute think that those food aid programs aren’t still on Trump’s slash-and-burn list. This president doesn’t let little encumbrances like the law get in the way of what he wants, and the Republicans who run Congress always eventually cave, anyway.2

Yet amid all the insults to thoughtful leadership of this 47^th presidency, you’ve got to especially wonder about cutting off food aid to people so desperately in need around the world. None of the explanations we’ve heard from the Trump administration clearly explain why that’s in America’s strategic interest. And in the context of human decency, no argument can justify it. It is an objective that is obscenely selfish.

The president’s explanation when he gutted USAID — the nation’s main agency tasked with improving health and education and fighting poverty and hunger globally — was that it was run by “radical left lunatics” who allowed “tremendous fraud” to go on. Facts don’t back up that claim.3 Sure, USAID probably could have done a better job. After all, if aid programs had adequately kept up with the need, nobody would be going hungry just now.

But they are: Up to 757 million people around the world face chronic hunger, according to the World Food Program, and perhaps 43 million are on the brink of starvation or worse. It’s not that we don’t produce enough food; in fact, the world’s food system can feed billions more people than are alive today. But that food often doesn’t reach the hungry and starving who are in need. So they are abandoned, victims of poverty, conflict and infrastructure challenges.4

Blame can be spread around. Armed conflict frequently stops food deliveries because one side doesn’t want the other getting credit for providing help. Some 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year. And the growing demand for meat and dairy as nations develop takes land out of production for plants, which provide most of the nutrition for three-quarters of the world’s population; that is, the land is turned over to producing food for the richer people, rather than the poorer.5

So the main driver of hunger isn’t inadequate food production; it is a lack of equitable and efficient distribution. It is a failure not of science, but of politics.

Our political decisions are, of course, a reflection of our moral sensibility. The way we choose to govern ourselves springs from what we’ve decided we value. In that light, it’s hard not to see the decision of the American government to incinerate food rather than share it as anything less than an abject moral failure on the part of the American people.

I went back to my buck-fifty slice of toast. Like a lot of mornings when I’m reading the news these days, I felt ashamed. And angry.

Americans have a complex and often unhealthy relationship with food. Nutrition scientists say many of our most troubling health conditions — heart disease, obesity, diabetes — are linked to a diet that includes too much saturated fat and sugar. That happens as nations get wealthier, and the United States has had a lot of time at the top of the global wealth heap. Almost half of U.S. adults (46 percent) have a poor quality diet, meaning they consume too much salt, sugary beverages and processed meat, and too little fish, whole grains, vegetables and fruit. American kids are even worse off: 56 percent have a poor diet.6

Some people make healthier food choices; research reveals that they tend to be better educated and earn higher incomes. A higher share of Black adults have unhealthy diets than white people; also, food from fast-food or fast-casual restaurants offer worse nutrition compared to food from full-service restaurants, and even better nutritional outcomes are found in meals from grocery stores. This isn’t to demonize the poor or less educated Americans: It’s hard to take time to cook healthy meals, after all, if you’re working two jobs or struggling to support a family on a meager income.

So the solution to America’s unhealthy diet may be found, at least in large measure, in the same remedy that would combat many other social ills: more equal wealth distribution, so that the plague of poverty isn’t exacerbated by bad nutrition. It also could develop if we had better nutrition education. In the same way that smoking over time came to be viewed as an unhealthy choice that carries social stigma, a diet of unhealthy food might someday be seen as a bad decision. But that will only happen if healthy food is affordable and available for all — which would require an adjustment to the social contract that is contrary to the Trump administration’s disdain for programs that would enhance equity.

Let’s not confuse the issue: Wanting to make Americans healthier doesn’t mean we need to be skinnier. In fact, the nation’s obsession with weight is likewise perilous. Too many young women, especially, push themselves into unhealthy choices, in terms of both physical and mental health, by striving to look like Fox News anchors, and in this, too, the Trump administration plays a role. The president has made quite clear that women who aren’t white and thin are “not my type,” and there’s even a term, “the Mar-A-Lago face,” reflecting the idealized look represented by such Trump acolytes as Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kristi Noem and, of course, the First Lady. Some people apparently consider it attractive.

So eager are Americans for a solution to what they perceive as a weight problem that roughly half of the people who are prescribed GLP-1 drugs, which were initially approved to treat Type 2 diabetes, now use the injections to reduce obesity. That number has risen by 600 percent over the past six years. The longterm effects remain to be seen for a drug that already has been used by 12 percent of American adults.7

Many people may see a singular positive development of the Trump administration in the focus by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on promoting healthier eating habits. Kennedy is urging more scrutiny of food additives and ultra-processed foods, and is encouraging the food industry to adopt healthier options — though his impact is so far limited to jawboning. There’s danger, of course, in Kennedy’s wacky notion that diet changes can supplant the need for vaccinations, and his initiatives could disproportionately affect lower-income households in the absence of any support for them.

Besides, an administration with an agriculture policy that continues to encourage corporate farming, with its reliance on chemicals and nutrition-robbing production techniques, isn’t one that will truly make America healthy again — nor will the dirtier water and air that will inevitably result from Trump’s environmental deregulation make our food better or safer.

No, a president who serves Big Macs and Quarter Pounders to White House visitors isn’t about to produce a healthy food policy for the United States, any more than a president who sees every relationship as a transactional opportunity related to wealth will find any benefit in working to reduce hunger around the world. What’s in it for him, after all?

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For all the shortcomings of American food policy, we remain the luckiest nation on earth. We have a rich and productive agriculture sector that feeds the nation and can produce much more. Vast food choices from around the world are plentifully available. And we spend a far lower share of our income on food than other developed nations: In 1960, we spent on average 17 percent of our disposable personal income on food, a figure that is now at about 10 percent.8

That cumulative figure masks the reality of food costs for lower-income Americans. In 2023, households in the lowest quintile of income spent one-third of their after-tax income on food, on average, while in the highest quintile, food took just 8 percent of income. And in the high-tariff world that is being shaped by Donald Trump’s economic policies, food costs will rise, putting added pressure on those least able to pay.9

You would think that the nation with the world’s largest economy would be able to simultaneously make better food choices available to all its citizens, not just the wealthy, and support the unprecedented need for food aid around the world. And we could — if we had the political will.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current calamity in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people are facing catastrophic hunger; roughly one-third of the population of 2.1 million has gone multiple days without food, and dozens died of malnutrition in July. Starvation is an awful way to die. The World Health Organization says “a worst-case scenario of famine” is gripping the territory. This is the fault of the State of Israel, a political ally of the United States, which was drawn into war in Gaza by unspeakable violence but is now violating international law by using famine as a tool of that war. By inaction, our government is complicit in this crime.

The failure of America to act to end politically-induced famine in Gaza is of a piece with our turning away from providing food aid to countless other nations. It is a moral choice that our government is making on our behalf. Rather, it is an immoral choice.

Ultimately, of course, this requires a political solution, one that rests in the power of our democracy, which is now under assault. If we want change, people of good will need to care more and work harder. We need to summon the considerable energy that it will take to turn out of office all the weak people who feel no compunction about leaving fellow humans to die of hunger in a world with plenty of food.

A nation that produces a $16 loaf of bread owes humanity no less.

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You see why we love our Upstate? Here’s Lower Saranac Lake, in New York’s Adirondack Park. (RS photo)

Dear readers,

We’re taking some time away from home this week, and we hope you’re getting a chance for some downtime this summer, too. Americans are notorious for not taking time off: Nearly two-thirds of workers leave paid time off on the table each year, according to a national survey. That’s a mistake, because you’ll never know what you’re missing — in perspective, experiences and beauty — if you stick to only what’s familiar.

Our notion of this column is that it’s good for us all to encounter ideas and experiences in what we call the Upstates of America, and that there are many places apart from the centers of power that are home to insights worth hearing. So while we love our home in Upstate New York, we’re traveling to another upstate just now for a little adventure.

Thank you for being a part of this community, and for sharing our love of the Upstates of America. We’ll be back with another edition of The Upstate American next weekend.

Always,

Rex

Before hope takes flight, it often requires our help. So, too, this incipient butterfly. (Photo by Derek Ramsey)

There were tiny black dots on the parsley and dill in our garden last summer, though when you looked more closely you could see a sort of white stripe on each dot. And the dots seemed to be moving on their own. Trying to figure out how to keep our herbs from being decimated, my wife checked an app on her phone, and then got pretty excited. “They’re caterpillars,” she said. “They’re going to become black swallowtail butterflies.”

This is how we became butterfly breeders. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration: Last summer, we put two of those little white-striped dots in a mesh box on our screened porch, and they both made the transition from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. But my wife is enthusiasm in size 9 sneakers, so this year I found myself planting a huge patch of dill specifically because that’s what black swallowtail caterpillars like to eat, and then ordering more mesh boxes for the porch, the better to house more butterflies-to-be. You might want to check back next year to see if we’ve added a butterfly room on the back of the house.

I’d draw the line on a construction project — I’m pretty sure — but I’m otherwise all in with my wife on this initiative. Black swallowtail butterflies are common in many areas of America, but they’re hardly ordinary: wide black wings featuring yellow spots along the edges, with a bright blue band on the hindwings that’s especially prominent among females. Even the caterpillars are gorgeous, in the way of such creatures. The black swallowtail’s beauty likely explains their scientific name, Papilio polyxenes, honoring a figure in Greek mythology, Polyxena, the cherished younger daughter of King Priam of Troy. Various tales depict handsome young Achilles as being smitten by the alluring Polyxena, but the story line of their ill-fated romance gets complicated, as myth often does, so we might return from etymology to entomology.1

Unlike many species of butterflies, the black swallowtail isn’t considered in danger of extinction. But a study published this spring in Science reported that populations of butterflies across the United States fell by 22 percent in just the first two decades of this century. At that rate, many more butterflies will disappear over the next few years. We can’t worry, then, only about such threatened butterfly species as the Karner blue, nor the persistent and documented decline of the beloved monarch, because beyond usual predators — wasps and rodents and birds — butterflies and other crucial pollinators are broadly at risk, victims of habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change.2

We can imagine an America where those threats might be matters of concern among our leaders; in fact, that was true until quite recently. But the administration of President Donald Trump has moved quickly to make the world dirtier again. It is encouraging coal production and chemical manufacturing. It announced this week that the Environmental Protection Agency’s entire science staff has been eliminated, with the goal of taking overall EPA staffing back to Reagan-era levels. It is even reassessing the 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health, which is the legal underpinning of the nation’s entire fight against climate change — which, let’s not forget, Trump in 2012 labeled a “hoax” perpetrated by China. (He back-pedaled on that a bit during his first term, while still insisting he wasn’t sure humans had anything to do with climate change, and, anyway, “it’ll change back again.”) 3

So our task is clear. If our government, tragically, won’t protect the environment — if the people elected to set the nation’s course disregard not only threats to fragile pollinators, but more generally to the clean water and air that is the basis of life, and the exquisite natural world that gives us respite and joy — then who will do that work, if not all of us? Indeed, as reasonable people try to shape an effective political response to Trumpism, how do we now counter this benighted administration’s many assaults on hope, if not by taking action, each of us, in little ways, day by day?

A few miles down the Hudson River from our place, in an urban neighborhood near the New York state capitol, Eric and Debbie Fagans learned a few years ago that only 13 percent of the children at Giffen Elementary School could read at grade level. The school was an eight-minute drive from the church the Fagans attended.

Determined people can make a difference. So along with some of their fellow members of Albany’s First Presbyterian Church, the Fagans set out to improve the reading skills of those children. They raised more than $50,000 to transform what had been an industrial kitchen near the school into a tutoring center. They recruited volunteers who would not only tutor, but also act as a board for a new non-profit organization they set up. After a while, the Fagans concluded that their commitment to the project demanded more than occasional involvement. So they sold their home in a mostly white suburb and moved into the community.

The free one-to-one after-school tutoring program took on the name Wizard’s Wardrobe, a mashup of a storyline from C.S. Lewis and the Harry Potter books. It developed a training program for volunteers that includes segments on how racism, poverty and toxic stress affect children. And the recent reports are heartening: Focusing on children who were reading below grade level, Wizard’s Wardrobe has found that after three years of tutoring, two-thirds of the children can read at or above grade level.

Sociologists can tell you why this is important, but you could just ask a teacher. It starts with the fact that reading is the fundamental skill for human success. Reading stimulates brain development; it improves memory, focus and problem-solving skills. As children read, they learn to process their own emotions, and as they explore different characters’ experiences, they develop empathy for others.

The work of Wizard’s Wardrobe to encourage reading is more important now than the Fagans could have imagined when they began its work. The Supreme Court’s ruling this week giving Trump the go-ahead to dismantle the federal Department of Education is only one part of this administration’s assault on schools. For example, it is moving to impound $6.8 billion in funds that local schools are scheduled to start receiving this month — money meant to help immigrant students attain English proficiency, to fund after-school and summer programs and to support the hiring and retention of teachers in low-income areas.4

The Fagans have recently gotten much-deserved community recognition for their inspiring work.5 If you ask why they’re doing this work in their retirement years, they will explain that they were motivated by the teachings of their religious faith. And they’ll probably also encourage you to look around, because you actually can find a lot of people doing this sort of thing: engaging in individual acts of community support based upon their own skills and capacities.

Of course it is true that we desperately need political leadership to counter the negative impact of Trumpism. How often do we hear frustration these days that the Democrats who might mount a fight to seize back our country seem sluggish? But we can’t wait for them if we hope to sustain the sort of society that America has long imagined itself to be. To combat the Trump administration’s attacks on social justice, economic equality, scientific advancement, education and even fundamental decency, we must commit ourselves to many acts of personal responsibility.

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Political movements often are driven by the collective action of large numbers of people. Women’s suffrage and the contemporary civil rights movement, for example, succeeded because individual acts of insight and courage sparked collective action that forced massive change. Leaders tend to emerge from the powerful chemistry created by shared commitment.

The most eloquent statement about this in my lifetime came 59 years ago, in the summer of 1966, when the United States senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, spoke in Cape Town, South Africa, in what came to be known as his “Ripples of Hope” speech. It was two years to the day before his tragic death, and some of the words he spoke that day are reproduced at his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” Kennedy said, at one point. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”

The Fagans of Albany are modest folks, and I’m certainly not claiming here that the mesh butterfly boxes on my back porch are driving down oppression. We just like the idea of providing cover and food to help some fast-growing caterpillars move into the next step of their life cycle. What difference, really, can a handful of insects make?

But over a few weeks, my wife and I witnessed a transformation, and realized that those tiny spots we had found on our dill and parsley can’t fail to inspire. This week it was time for us to take those butterfly boxes outside and open them.

We watched in wonder as, one by one, seven black swallowtail butterflies flitted about, then emerged from the boxes and alighted on some nearby plants. They waited a bit. And then they flew off into the summer sky, leaving two humans marveling at their beauty, and feeling a bit lighter and more hopeful.

We wish the same for you.

In our Upstate garden, one of “our” butterflies takes a moment of sun before flying away. (RS photo)

The day after a tragedy in my hometown, 53 years ago. (Photo from Rapid City Public Library)

The tragedy that struck the Texas Hill Country over the 4^th of July weekend is too familiar, and so is the response. It evokes painful memories.

One warm night in the summer of 1972, a billion metric tons of water fell on South Dakota’s Black Hills, swelling the winding mountain tributaries of the Cheyenne River. At the edge of Rapid City, my hometown, picturesque Rapid Creek turned into a 20-foot wall of water that tore down a narrow gulch known as Dark Canyon, destroying along its path dozens of lovely homes that I can yet picture today. People looking down on pretty little Canyon Lake from the hills above watched helplessly as the water began to overflow the lake’s shoreline, and then suddenly flush out as it breached the 20-foot-high dam built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.1

My little city was torn in half. More than 1,335 homes were destroyed, some 3,000 people were hurt, and 238 died. The property damage was estimated at $160 million — in 2024 dollars, that’s $1.2 billion. As significant as that toll was in a community our size, I must say that the impact on our citizens’ mental health was incalculable.

Here’s something I didn’t know until much later: Some 15 years before that tragic night, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, noting that the Cheyenne had flooded 33 times since 1878, had proposed flood control projects in five areas of the Hills, including Rapid City. But the residents of our little city didn’t like the idea of channelizing Rapid Creek and extending nine bridges to accommodate the creek’s wider path; they blanched at the $2.7 million pricetag. And so when the 1972 flood came in the middle of a summer night, there was little that could prevent devastation.2

My family was lucky that night. I was away at school, and my parents lived on a hill, so even though phone lines were down and I couldn’t talk with them, I figured they would be safe. Three days after the flood, I caught sight of my dad in a Today show segment; he was presiding at a funeral. Later I learned that my folks had taken in a family that had survived losing their home. Others were not so fortunate; some friends died, others endured devastating losses.

So what happened this month along the Guadelupe River in Texas was sadly resonant for me, as it surely was for many who have witnessed up close the impact of a natural disaster. At this writing, 121 people are confirmed dead and some 170 remain missing. Our sincere empathy, well-meaning as it surely is, may have little effect on those who are encountering the searing pain of loss just now.

Empathy, after all, is just a feeling. It is has value only if it motivates moral behavior — that is, if it provokes action.

Yet some of what strikes me as an appropriately empathetic response to the tragedy along the Guadalupe River is these days being rebuffed, largely by people who seem to have a stake in limiting our response to something more superficial, and less threatening.

As questions emerged this week about whether the Hill Country had been appropriately prepared for the flooding and warned of impending disaster, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott used an analogy from football, the state’s favorite sport, to deflect questions. Blame, he said, was “the word choice of losers.”3

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that it was “depraved and despicable” to question whether President Trump’s cuts to the National Weather Service had left people unprepared to absorb the storm’s impact. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she oversees, was slow to respond to the Texas disaster were “absolutely trash.”4

Yet journalists on the scene in Texas and covering their beats in Washington and Austin have uncovered facts that officials cannot hide, and that raise questions of whether government cuts under this administration set the stage for the Guadalupe disaster.

Trump has said that he wants to eliminate FEMA and leave disaster response to states, and Noem earlier this year imposed new limits on the agency so that her personal sign-off is now required on any expenditure over $100,000. Officials told CNN that as a result of that rule, they were unable to quickly deploy critical search-and-rescue teams and lifesaving resources as the floodwaters raced through the Hill Country.5

It's also unclear if cuts to the National Weather Service, which lost 600 employees this year, might have had any impact on the forecasts. The Austin/San Antonio NWS office currently has six vacancies, including the position of warning coordination meteorologist, who acts as liaison to local officials. To be sure, the NWS had warned of “pockets of heavy rain” and dangerous flash floods in the region, but twice as much rain as was forecast fell on the two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of where most victims have been found. Experts say it would have been impossible to predict that the horrifying reality of the river rising 26 feet in just 45 minutes.6

Yet I hear an echo of Rapid City in what we’ve learned in recent days about the local response to the threat of floods in Kerr County. About eight years ago, it turns out, county officials in Kerrville considered installing an early-warning system for the region. But year after year, the state didn’t come through with a grant that would have paid for it, and officials say that local residents didn’t want to shoulder the tax burden themselves. It would have cost $1 million.7

That sounds too much like the South Dakotans’ refusal to contemplate flood control along Rapid Creek until after the 1972 calamity.

Fortunately for my hometown, the federal government responded quickly to the Black Hills flood. Even though the state was then represented by two Democrats in the U.S. Senate — one of whom, George McGovern, was just then on the verge of becoming his party’s presidential nominee — President Richard Nixon quickly dispatched a top aide, Robert Finch, to assess the damage on the ground. An urban renewal plan was shaped that included contoured levees and channel improvements, as well as acquisition of 1,100 parcels of land containing 3,100 acres, at a cost of $48 million. It stands today as a mark of effective government: It includes nature areas and trails, ballfields and a golf course. Over the past half-century, it has protected the city from significant flooding damage.8

While Trump similarly promises quick aid to Texas now, his vow might fairly be absorbed with some doubt, and not just because he is demonstrably an inveterate liar. Consider, for example, the jealousy that a Californian may fairly feel: The deadly January wildfires around Los Angeles killed 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 homes and businesses, yet the state is still waiting for Trump and the Republican-led Congress to free some $40 billion in disaster aid. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s congressional delegation are pleading for help, so far in vain.9

California, of course, is led by Democrats; Texas these days is reliably red. You may observe that Californians no less dependably fund the federal government than Texans, but the pain of their losses seems to strike officials who now lead our nation as less worthy of response. Trump has suggested the California wildfires were caused in no small part by bad forest and water management by Democratic officials, and that they should change their policies as a condition of any help.

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That sort of quid pro quo, or anything other than a fulsome response to need, is inappropriate to consider for Texas just now, the White House insists. Doing anything but focusing on the immediate losses “serves no purpose during this time of national mourning,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.10

Nor, presumably, is this a time to note that Trump’s vigorous efforts to undermine any government action to lessen the impact of climate change make it all but certain that there will be more frequent disasters like the Hill Country flood, and indeed more severe weather events generally. He wants to cut up to 40 percent of the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and abolish the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Climate scientists warn that we are degrading our best efforts to avert climate disaster.11

Perhaps this isn’t the place to note that. Sympathy and care are indeed the appropriate first reactions we might rightly summon to the Texas calamity. But how often have we heard politicians claim tragedy as an excuse to dodge responsibility for action, or for inexcusable inaction?

In 2017, after 58 people were murdered in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, President Trump declared that it was “premature” to explore how the government might respond to such violence. “We are not going to talk about that today,” he said.12 After 18 people were killed during a deadly shooting spree in Lewiston, Maine, in 2023, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that “the problem is the human heart, not guns,” and that it was inappropriate to discuss gun control “in the middle of a crisis.”13

So if a crisis is not a time to discuss solutions to its cause, when might it be appropriate? Perhaps when people have moved on to other concerns, and when the hot impetus for meaningful response has cooled? For those comfortable with the status quo, that seems convenient.

Time, after all, is finite; opportunities can fade if they’re not acted upon promptly. There’s a familiar line attributed to Hillel the Elder, a Jewish sage who wrote in the first century BCE: “If not now, when?”

That notion, incorporated as part of the Talmud, likely influenced Charles Dodgson, a student of religion as the son and grandson of Anglican clergy, who as Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to his more famous classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the second novel, the White Queen offers Alice a sweet treat of “jam every other day,” but not on that day. “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today,” the queen declares. Alice is perplexed.

For the reader of that book, whether child or adult, the message is clear: It is folly to consider a reward as something only imagined in the future or recalled from the past, but never realized in the present. How silly; how like contemporary American politics.

“Jam today,” in contrast, represents the notion of seizing the present moment. It’s not just about having fun now; it’s about making reality out of what we imagine or aspire to achieve. “Jam today” is, thus, a call to activism.

Yes, as Ecclesiastes teaches, there is a time and a place for everything. And if today, then, is not the time to draw attention to steps that arguably made the Hill Country flood more disastrous, and actions that make its repetition more likely, then when might the time be right?

Or isn’t it in fact the very time, just now, for “jam today” — and isn’t this in so many realms likewise the right moment for us to engage in the activism that is the manifestation of true empathy?

13

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/27/speaker-mike-johnson-gun-control-gay-marriage

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The button was a Christmas present a few years ago from my daughter, who embraces its meaning.

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

- Rex Smith

Does what used to instill pride in America still have resonance today? (Unsplash photo by Brandon Mowinkel)

At dusk on the 4^th of July when I was 9 years old, my family was having dinner in the grand Buffalo Dining Room at the base of Mount Rushmore — we usually ordered roast bison and fresh rainbow trout there in those days — when we heard a bustle and a barely audible “lights!” being repeated by several of the college students hired as summer waitstaff (including my older brother). Towering over us, the four icons of democracy had been suddenly illuminated against the cerulean sky by 62 giant 1,500-watt lamps. As the shy Filipina who had been playing dinner music at the grand piano in a corner of the room picked up the tempo and volume, we all stood and turned to face the mountain. “God Bless America,” we sang. I put my hand on my heart.

In such moments as that was my deep patriotism born. Growing up in the shadow of what sculptor Gutzon Borglum called the Shrine of Democracy, I heard over and over again the ideals of what America was said to represent: equality of all under the law; the freedom to believe, speak and act according to our conscience; and the opportunity in this blessed and beautiful land to pursue whatever path to happiness that we each might imagine.

Of course, the reality of America has always been at best an imperfect approximation of that vision. In drafting the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago, our founders didn’t foresee extending the promise that “all men are created equal” to women or anyone who wasn’t white-skinned; in practice, greater freedom and opportunity have tended to accrue to those with more resources, both political and financial.

Yet even America’s shortcomings always seemed to me to present an opportunity, because they suggested a chance to strive toward perfecting the dreams of the four presidents I had been taught to admire: George Washington, whose dignity and humility set a model for future leaders; Thomas Jefferson, whose eloquent statements of political and religious freedom established the nation’s democratic course; Abraham Lincoln, who ended American slavery and preserved the union; Theodore Roosevelt, the passionate conservationist whose progressive energy began to protect ordinary citizens against the abuses of powerful commercial interests.

On this Independence Day weekend, though, the presidents on Mount Rushmore seem not just of another time, but of some different place. Many of us have reached this national holiday with our idealism bruised and our activism exhausted, unsure if the America we thought we were inheriting and building might ever exist, or whether it ever did.

We are heartbroken that the legacy of our greatest leaders has devolved in our time to the selfish caprice of the amoral Donald J. Trump, and infuriated that the promise of equality is being rolled back, shifting even more wealth and power to those Americans who already disproportionately enjoy its benefits. We are disappointed at the apathy that is meeting the destruction of momentum in the nation’s progress toward justice for all.

It's beyond ironic that President Trump decided to use this Independence Day to sign into law the most retrogressive legislation of our time — a massive law passed by the narrowest of margins in Congress that will siphon wealth to the top tier of Americans from the middle class, reduce food aid and healthcare protection for millions of poorer citizens and overturn efforts to slow the ravages of climate change.

This is not the America that the generation of that little boy at the base of Mount Rushmore should be passing along to those who follow. What a lucky child like me couldn’t yet understand, of course, and what it is hard to accept even now, is that human progress is as tidal as the sea. In 2025, freedom and fairness are ebbing.

Unlike the tides, though, democracy isn’t carried along to its next high point by the pull of nature; it is elevated only by our own initiative. That’s why if this 4^th of July is a time of tempered pride, it’s also a ripe moment to recommit to the principles that we have imagined and wished to be the reality of our land. For many of us, then, this is a moment not to set off fireworks in celebration as much as to kindle a new spark of determination.

When President Trump visited Mount Rushmore five years ago during his first term, South Dakota’s then-governor, Kristi Noem, welcomed him with a four-foot replica of the mountain, with a fifth face etched into the model’s stone, that of the real estate developer-turned-reality-TV-host-turned-President. Trump had told Noem that he fantasized about being added to the sculpture, and every Republican politician nowadays knows that you cannot cultivate success in the party without fertilizing the presidential ego. Maybe Noem, now the Secretary of Homeland Security, would have gotten a cabinet appointment anyway, but the flattery couldn’t have hurt.1

Now legislation has been introduced in Congress directing the Secretary of the Interior to “arrange for the carving” of Trump on the granite peak. The bill hasn’t gotten a hearing in the House, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a March podcast with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, that “they definitely have room” to add a big Trump head there.2

That is an opinion not shared by experts. Since the carving at Mount Rushmore ended in 1941, speculation from time to time has focused on adding figures — John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were often mentioned — and geologists have always said there simply isn’t any room. Just last month, the National Park Service issued a statement to The New York Times concluding, “The carved portion of Mount Rushmore has been thoroughly evaluated, and there are no viable locations left for additional carvings.”

It is worth noting, though, that the NPS is a division of Bergum’s department, meaning the Secretary can override whoever fashioned that discouraging statement. Plus, Trump has seldom shown regard for experts in any field – including national security, economics, healthcare and education. Indeed, the world wouldn’t be in such a precarious place just now if Trump ever elevated decision-making above his gut.

But there’s risk in any effort to immortalize Trump in the granite of my old home state. Geologists note that in blasting and chiseling nearly a half-million tons of rock from the mountain face over 14 years, Gutzon Borglum’s crew uncovered fissures and fractures that greatly limited the flexibility to shape the sculpture. More work on the mountain now, scientists say, could lead to crumbling. For example, an effort to add another head next to Lincoln’s could cause the Great Emancipator’s nose to fall off.3

Science aside, though, any fair review of Donald Trump’s record — that is, an analysis beyond partisan Trumpian groveling — reveals the vast gap between what the four presidents on the mountain did and what our current president has accomplished:

• George Washington brilliantly led the troops that overwhelmed England’s powerful military, then as president prioritized national unity over regional interests. He oversaw passage of the Bill of Rights, established Cabinet departments, overcame economic fragility and established a neutral foreign policy that brought stability to the young nation. Donald Trump, by contrast, avoided military service during the Vietnam war thanks to a podiatrist’s diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels. He eagerly prioritizes partisanship, attacks constitutional rights – notably including freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment – and threatens such key allies as Canada and Mexico.

• Thomas Jefferson was a strong advocate for individual liberties, including freedom of religion, speech and the press. Flawed as his record was by slaveholding, a sin typical of his generation of wealthy Americans, he was the first president who assured the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another, and he cut the national debt by 31 percent during his presidency even while doubling the territory of America by his visionary addition of the Louisiana Purchase. Unlike Jefferson, Trump has denigrated First Amendment rights, attempted to overturn the fair election of a president after his first term and just now pushed through legislation that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt – mainly in order to reward the financial standing of the richest Americans. He has vigorously attacked every key element of civil rights progress of the past 60 years.

• Abraham Lincoln was the foremost advocate of unity, equality and freedom in the nation’s history, not only saving the union from the Civil War but also laying the foundation of a more just and equitable society – “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” as he said during his second inaugural. Trump’s impulse is quite different: He eagerly attacks states that supported his Democratic opponents, even encouraging insurrection to overturn a fair election, and from his first appearance on the national political stage he has pushed division at every opportunity.

• Theodore Roosevelt’s “square deal” for the American people greatly expanded conservation of the nation’s national forests and parks, limited the power of giant corporations and trusts and expanded the protection of consumers from business fraud. He denounced big businesses as “malefactors of great wealth” and attacked the courts as beholden to commercial interests. Trump has slashed support for national parks, forests and wildlife refuges by one-third; he is embracing steps that will make our air and water dirtier, cutting corporate tax rates despite the impact on the nation’s debt – his One Big Beautiful Bill Act raises the federal debt ceiling by $5 trillion – and is targeting middle-income taxpayers to benefit those at higher income levels.

We might also point out that Trump is the only twice-impeached president, the only president convicted of a felony (or any crime, for that matter) and the only president found liable for sexually abusing and defaming someone. By comparison, then, those in line ahead of him for honor on a stone monument might include, say, Andrew Johnson (impeached only once), Richard Nixon (pardoned before trial) and Bill Clinton (impeached for fibbing about his sex life, one of Trump’s signature habits).

Mind you, no one has seriously suggested adding Johnson, Nixon or Clinton to Mount Rushmore. So you have to wonder: Is the talk about carving Trump on the mountain a frivolous appeasement of the leader’s ego, like North Korea’s claim that the late dictator Kim Jong-Il got 11 holes-in-one the first time he played golf? Or have our standards so fallen that the notion of honoring Trump at an historic monument isn’t really a farce?

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Admittedly, the comfortable patriotism of my childhood was rooted in naivete about our nation’s history. I didn’t recognize the impact of racism throughout generations, the brutal toll of westward expansion on indigenous populations and the legacy of American adventurism on foreign soil. I didn’t know how many injustices had permeated a society during the decades of the nation’s history that seemed to my young view to have been marked by continuous progress.

Yet it would be equally unfair now to ignore what ought to make us grateful inheritors of the legacy of the United States.

Our Constitution enshrined fundamental freedoms and democratic principles that have inspired movements for liberty worldwide. Our nation’s rich tapestry of cultures and traditions has been a source of strength and dynamism. As a leader in scientific, technological and artistic innovation, America has contributed to human advancement. And when called upon to serve, our military and diplomatic efforts for more than two centuries have often resisted totalitarianism and repression.

Yes, the nation has fallen short of the ideals articulated by the great leaders of our past. And today we must be especially shamed by the cynicism and superficiality that has gripped our politics, leading to what seems at this moment to be the most corrupt and perhaps dangerous administration in our history.

In the decades since I grew up in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, I’ve experienced moments of hope about our nation’s future and, nowadays, great sadness, and sometimes anger, about its direction. Yet I wonder: If I found myself on this 4^th of July night back in Mount Rushmore’s Buffalo Dining Room as floodlights suddenly revealed the images of those four great presidents carved into the side of a mountain, what would I do?

I would stand and sing again, I think. Probably I couldn’t avoid weeping for what we have lost to carelessness, cynicism and greed. But with those figures looking down at me, with the knowledge of what they did, how could I resign myself to today’s reality? How could I fail to hope, especially now, that blessings will accrue to America? And how could I not then commit to working, still, to make that so?

If public figures set standards, we’ll soon be a nation of ranters. (Photo by Tycho Atsma for Substack)

History, literature and the movies are filled with famous rants.

Consider Anthony Weiner, a fiery congressman before he became a pornographer and a punchline, flipping out on the House floor during the 2009 debate on Obamacare, shouting that the Republican party was “a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” Even then, some people were worried about his obviously limited capacity for self-control.

Or think of Shakespeare, who offered actors many opportunities for fine rants. There’s King Lear, driven to madness by betrayal, baying into the storm, “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! … Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!” There’s Shylock, corrupted by a lifetime of anti-Semitic abuse, memorably insisting in Merchant of Venice that the collateral of a pound of flesh is, in fact, a matter of justice. “The villainy you teach me, I shall execute,” he seethes.

And there’s Peter Finch’s Oscar-winning portrayal of TV anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network. Drenched by rain, he fiercely faces the camera and exhorts viewers to throw open their windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” And so they do. Who hasn’t felt like shouting to the skies at some point?

To this genre, let us now add this week’s star turn by Pete Hegseth, the weekend Fox News host elevated by President Trump to lead the most powerful military in history. Onstage in the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense used what was billed as a briefing about the American bombing of Iran as a chance to rant about journalism, a discipline he never practiced and clearly regards as subordinate to propaganda.

Hegseth and his boss were furious that news organizations paid any attention to a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report suggesting that the bombing had set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities by months. It was downright unpatriotic, Hegseth and Trump contended, to report that fact and note that it seemed to contradict Trump’s eager claim — delivered to the nation before the stealth bombers had returned to their bases — that the mission had caused “total obliteration” of the Iran nuclear program.

When doubts about the veracity of that surfaced, Hegseth accused reporters of intentionally distorting facts, though he didn’t rebut what the DIA report said. The journalists did that, Hegseth insisted, just to make Trump look bad, “because you cheer against Trump so hard — it’s in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump.” He praised the attack as both historic and personally orchestrated by the commander-in-chief. “President Trump directed the most secret and most complex military operation in history,” he said firmly, repeatedly praising the president, who gave the OK for the mission from his New Jersey golf club.

Perhaps Hegseth forgot about the D-Day landings at Normandy, which involved the movement of 160,000 troops, clever deception via radar and radio broadcasts, and intricate planning. It might have slipped his memory that on Christmas night, 1776, George Washington stealthily moved 6,400 troops across the icy Delaware River for a bold attack that gave hope to the American Revolution. Maybe, too, he wasn’t paying attention when Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the Iran attack was “fifteen years in the making,” which would date its origin to the administration of President Barack Obama.

No, Hegseth had to be fully aware of both history and reality when he stood before the Pentagon press and joined the ranks of the ranters. But he seemingly decided that it was more important to bring theatrics to his role than to offer leadership with nuance and depth. And you have to think that he needed to show his boss, once again, that he’s on the team.

We teach children to avoid exaggeration, to behave with equanimity and to tell the truth. Yet that seems to no longer be what we expect of our leaders. So with erect stance, crisp delivery and an American flag pocket square tucked in place, Pete Hegseth delivered his rant. It’s part of the way governing is done in America these days.

To understand such ranting, we might look back to England in the middle of the 17^th century. It was a chaotic time: King Charles I had been executed, a civil war pitted royalists against parliamentarians and the established church was roiled by dissent. One of the noteworthy dissenting factions was a loosely-organized group of mostly ordinary people who came to be known as Ranters.

They didn’t take on the title by choice; their opponents gave the Ranters their name as an insult. The term might have derived from the notion of the people being rent away from the proper worship of God — “rent” turning to “rant” since language was more porous in spelling and pronunciation in those days. Or it might have come from the establishment’s ridicule of their beliefs: Etymologists say that our English word “rant” originates in the Dutch randten, which means “to talk foolishly.”

The Ranters were an antinomian sect. That is, they insisted that humans should not feel bound by such religious teachings as the Ten Commandments, nor in fact by any particular moral code. Rather, people ought to be free to shape their behavior by an internal code, they believed, because eternal security — a place in heaven, that is — depended only upon professed faith, not good works. The Ranters’ beliefs had originated a century before, with the German Protestant reformer Johannes Agricola, who said, “If you sin, be happy; it should have no consequence.”

Or, as one of the leading proponents of the Ranter philosophy, Abiezer Coppe, wrote happily, “I can if it be my will, kiss and hug ladies, and love my neighbour’s wife as myself, without sin.”

While you might imagine such a notion would attract both attention and not a few adherants, it also drew widespread condemnation at a time when a more strict Christian faith held sway in western societies. Yet some of what Ranters believed is represented today in a number of churches that consider themselves neo-Calvinist. Strict Calvinism teaches that God chooses who will be saved and who will not, regardless of an individual’s merit — a notion that would have been reassuring, surely, to Johannes Agricola.

And, perhaps, to Pete Hegseth. He has said that he and his third wife, who together have seven children in a blended family, chose where they live based upon a school where they wanted their kids educated, a private school near Nashville that is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. About 120 churches are a part of that denomination, including the Hegseths’ church in Tennessee. They trace their theology to the Calvinist tradition that inspired the Ranters.

CREC churches teach that Christian men have authority in three spheres — the church, the government and the family — and that they are to maintain order in all three through various forms of discipline. The righteous indignity that Hegseth summons in attacking the reporters who cover the U.S. military can be seen as just such discipline; it is of a piece with the tough image he has sought to project since Trump tapped him for the role.

It’s a different person, certainly, from the Hegseth who had to tamp down allegations of excessive drinking and womanizing in order to win Senate confirmation for his job. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, for example, Hegseth denied any wrongdoing involving the financial settlement he made after a 2017 allegation of sexual assault, which arose while he was going through a divorce from his second wife and after having a child with his current wife.

So it's not hard to imagine that the earlier version of Hegseth might have taken comfort from Abiezer Coppe’s view that the behavior he exhibited would matter not a whit to the Almighty. Not that people can’t change and turn their lives into better models of themselves, of course; we all hope to have done that throughout our lives, and to set ourselves on a constantly better course. But Hegseth has shown how much easier it is to be a ranter than righteous.

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You could make the argument, in fact, that ranting is one of the skills most associated with Trumpism, since the President has often revealed himself to be practically unparallelled in bluster, bombast and rant.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this week that Trump should be impeached for launching the bombers without congressional approval, Trump attacked her in a lengthy post on X (née Twitter) that questioned her “Test Scores” (suggesting that she wasn’t very smart), then wandered in the same sentence into a multi-pronged attack on other members of “The Squad” before turning to bragging about his own cognitive test results from years ago, then returned to AOC and the “disgusting” district she represents while advising her not to challenge “our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” – and more. Reasonable discourse it certainly was not; rant it was.

When Iran and Israel exchanged strikes after the American bombing run, the president stood in front of the White House and angrily asserted that the countries “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” perhaps the first time a president has used “the F word” on camera. Some journalism organizations wouldn’t publish the word, since it violated their decency standards. It was just a typical Trump rant.

And who can forget the commander-in-chief’s Memorial Day Weekend performances? They included a commencement address at West Point that diverged into a rambling diatribe about the 1950s developer William Levitt and his “trophy wife” and yacht; then the next day, at what was to be a solemn memorial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the President instead wandered into declaring that God had made sure he would be president during the World Cup and the Olympics.

Journalists reported all that, which is one of those things that only draws the President’s ire and brings more rants. Some voters clearly like it, just as they like Trump’s seeming ability to do whatever he wishes and evade penalty for any misbehavior. That has been Pete Hegseth’s experience, too.

You might be inclined to conclude that those 17^th-century dissenters were right — that whatever pleases you is just fine. In an earlier era, the President and his Secretary of Defense might have been Ranters. Today, they’re just ranters. It’s an American embarrassment.

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The 1963 March on Washington: What turns a protest into a movement? Do we have that capacity now?

Since it was about a thousand miles from my hometown to the nearest ocean, my childhood experience on water came in a canoe, not a sailboat. But the woman I married spent her youth sailing around New York’s Little Neck Bay and in the ocean beyond, a salty heritage that brought me opportunities as an adult to absorb the lessons that emerge when your vessel is propelled by just the wind and your wits.

Like, for instance, the afternoon some years ago when I was more than a bit terror-struck by what looked to me like an imminent collision between our 22-foot boat and another that was aiming to round the same buoy at the same moment. Luckily, we had on board an older sailor, a steady hand who had faced such situations often before. “Hold your course,” he said calmly. I heard only the lapping of the water on our hull, a bit of wind vibration in our full sail and the thumping of my heart. Again, insistently this time, he said, “Hold your course.”

Then, in an instant, we rounded the buoy tightly, the sail snapped across the boat’s cockpit to catch the wind on the other side, and suddenly we had cleared the threat of disaster. The other boat trailed in our wake.

It was only a moment in a sailboat on an Upstate lake long ago, but the sound of that sailor’s reassuring voice has always stayed with me: “Hold your course.”

History is full of stories of people who have done just that, and so through such perseverance have powered change. Abraham Lincoln, a failure in two businesses, four campaigns for Congress and a bid for the vice presidency, was elected President of the United States exactly when he was needed to save the union. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years for fighting apartheid, emerged from captivity with his message of hope and justice intact, so that he could forge a path toward reconciliation as South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. Thomas Edison purportedly tried 10,000 different versions of a light bulb before he could get one that burned long enough to be practical. He is said to have remarked, “I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that there are 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.”

Certainly there are examples to the contrary, of unexpected success without a slog beforehand. Notably, Donald Trump arrived at the White House as the only U.S. president without a moment of either military or government service — bone spurs, you know, ostensibly precluding the former, and what I consider the good judgment of New York voters preventing the latter. But that almost proves my point: What’s won without effort is rarely justified. We can cheer the good luck of the woman from west of our place who won $3.3 million from the state lottery a few weeks ago, but only superstition, not inspiration, might lead anyone to visit the convenience store where she bought the winning ticket, and nobody will try to emulate her brave scratch-off technique.

It is perseverance that we admire and that we know is a prerequisite of success. And now, as a growing share of Americans are recognizing that our democracy and our cherished values are threatened, it is perseverance that we need.

In fact, this is the moment for us to consider whether we are up to the task at hand. Millions of Americans were energized by last week’s “No Kings” rallies, which far overshadowed the costly military parade that Trump staged in Washington on his 79^th birthday. But those demonstrations, as successful and attention-grabbing as they seemed, raise a question: Will the events in 2,100 communities be forgotten, or at best recalled as merely a diversion from the incessant right-wing effort to undo America’s progress toward economic and social justice, which arguably began with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt at the start of the 20^th century? Or will the anti-democratic thrust of Trumpism finally meet its match, as the people who were inspired by the “No Kings” events hold their course? The answer awaits us.

As widespread social protests roiled America in 1968, a young University of Wisconsin public policy professor, Michael Lipsky, argued in a journal article that the demonstrations wouldn’t yield political results unless they could reach beyond the core constituency in the streets. Lipsky became a distinguished MIT professor and now, at age 85, is affiliated with Demos, a progressive think tank.

Lipsky argued at the height of 1960s activism that if protest organizers hoped to do more than make noise, they would need to “nurture and sustain” an organization that would include people who may not share their own values. They would also need to devise sophisticated media strategies, he wrote, as well as draw in those who might not be directly affected by the immediate issue at hand and, significantly, find ways to appeal to those who hold the levers of power. Lipsky cited the civil rights movement — then fresh off victories such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — as an example of political activism that managed to do all that, and thus achieve many of its goals.1

Because the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s so galvanized Americans, we tend to think of marches in the streets as a tactic of the left. But more recent years have presented right-wing protests that were wildly successful — notably, the Tea Party movement launched by protests in 750 cities in the spring of 2009, just after the inauguration of America’s first Black president. The call for lower taxes and less government regulation propelled the election of a Republican majority to the U.S. House the next year. In turn, the dynamic of that success pushed the Republican party rightward, setting the stage for the launch five years later of Donald Trump’s ultimately successful presidential campaign.

Success in politics tends to breed further success, of course, which is shown by the transition of another conservative campaign from the streets to official success — namely, the anti-abortion movement. The activists pushing to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights initially were largely Catholic, but their ranks were joined in the late 1970s and 1980s by evangelical Protestants. As the cause grew more radical, it often drew attention by creating a spectacle, blockading clinics and even turning to criminal activity: Between the 1980s and the 2000s, there were 153 assaults, 383 death threats, 3 kidnappings, 18 attempted murders and 9 murders related to abortion providers.2 Meanwhile, anti-abortion absolutism grew in the Republican party, so that when Trump’s election yielded an avowedly anti-abortion majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, the protesters’ goals were met: the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned.

Those two examples underscore the validity of the Lipsky framework. In both the Tea Party and anti-abortion ranks, the original protesters set clear strategic goals, reached beyond their initial constituency and eventually drew in those with power.3

Importantly, both of those movements also were able to draw upon wealthy backers and institutional constituencies. While the Tea Party movement posed as a populist revolt, for example, arguably its most important backer was the wealthy businessman David Koch, a member of the hard-right John Birch Society. And the anti-abortion crusaders had the strong support of both Catholic hierarchy and politically active evangelicals.

Yet there have been plenty of notable street protests that failed to turn their initial energy into policy. Occupy Wall Street, for example, captured public attention in 2011 with a 51-day occupation of a park in Manhattan’s Financial District, and copycat demonstrations in other cities. In an environment seemingly ripe for change after the 2008 financial crisis, it targeted corporate greed, economic inequality and the influence of money in politics. Its slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” alluded to the wealth disparity between the top 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. (The top 1 percent nationally now comprises those who earn about $800,000 a year.)

But the movement largely fizzled without accomplishing any clear objectives. Perhaps that was because the Occupy organizers, intent on shared decision-making and eager to please a broad constituency, refused to narrow or even clearly define the movement’s agenda. Organizers were also criticized for not actually representing that so-called “99 percent” of Americans; both the leadership and the rank-and-file at demonstrations were overwhelmingly white. And there was little sign that the movement had a plan for gaining the political clout needed to accomplish its goals, since its argument included a denunciation of those in power. It's hard to see the effort as anything more than a squandered opportunity.4

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The effort to sustain our democracy and fight the excesses of the 47^th presidency begins with a huge advantage that no other recent protest movement can claim: at least the nominal allegiance of about half the nation’s population. But it also confronts potent opposition that sometimes seems impenetrable, in the remarkable hold that Trump exercises on the Republican Party.

Last month’s House passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — yes, that is the technical title of the Trump spending and tax plan — suggests that Trump’s clout is undiminished. Yet a spate of recent polls show that the American people aren’t on board with key provisions — including cuts to green energy initiatives that fight climate change; to Medicaid, which provides healthcare for one-fifth of the nation’s population; and to SNAP benefits, which provides food aid for 41 million Americans (and a market for U.S. farmers’ crops). Across four major polls analyzed by CNN’s Aaron Blake, on average 55 percent of Americans oppose the bill and 31 percent support it. “The president’s asking a lot,” Blake said this week, pointing to George Washington University research. “In fact, he appears to be asking them to pass the most unpopular major legislation in decades.”5

If the legislation fails, or if something so unpopular passes, it could fuel growing opposition to Trump among people who weren’t among the “No Kings” demonstrations this month. Those people might not be as motivated by the threat to democracy that drew perhaps as many as 6 million demonstrators on June 14, in what was among the biggest-ever single-day protests in U.S. history. But it is a connection to that broader group that is the sort of outreach that the Lipsky theory holds must be made for a demonstration to move toward success.

At the same time, per Lipsky, the anti-Trump movement must make inroads with the mass media in areas where the right has held strength. A prime example is a Tik Tok video recently posted by “The News Girl” (real name: Lisa Remillard, ex-TV anchor) about the real-world consequences if, by mishandling the OBBBA, the Republican-run Congress forces a default on the federal debt. It’s hardly a usual topic to find there, but the attention battleground of network newscasts in the 1960s has shifted now to social media.6

What is most unclear just now, though, is whether the Trump opposition can find the leadership and sustain the energy that combined to motivate past successes in turning street protests into successful political power. Think, for instance, of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous “I have a dream” speech. It was at the time one of the largest protests in history. There is no such dynamic and acknowledged movement leader today — not yet, anyway, despite valiant efforts by such figures as Corey Booker, Chris Murphy and Gavin Newsom.

And the millions of people who took to the streets on June 14 still weren’t as numerous as the crowds that gathered on the first Earth Day, in 1970, when perhaps 10 percent of the nation’s population took part in events that within two years forced the Republican administration of Richard Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Imagine, though, what might happen if we can persevere — that is, if we can make the numbers grow, if we can encourage the leaders to emerge, if we can assure that the media messages are delivered and if we can form the necessary coalitions. If all that can happen, then the direction that was set on June 14 might continue. And that would surely enable us to save our country from the sort of assault that greets each of us daily as we weigh the latest terrible news from Washington.

What we have to do, really, is to calmly but firmly hold our course.

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The military parade in the nation’s capital 160 years ago, for a good cause. (Matthew Brady photo in the Library of Congress collection)

Six weeks after the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865, some 145,000 soldiers paraded past the White House over two days in a national celebration of victory. The troops were flanked by bands and banners. Trailing behind was a ragtag crowd that had accompanied the soldiers from the battlefield — freed blacks, laborers, adventurers — and some herds of livestock commandeered from southern plantations.

Historians say that what was labeled the Grand Review of the Armies wasn’t just a display of triumphalism, though. With the weary nation grieving its losses — both the war dead and the assassinated Abraham Lincoln — the untested new president, Andrew Johnson, hoped to strike a new mood in the capital while honoring the troops.1

Unlike many European countries, America at age fourscore and nine didn’t have a tradition of big military parades, but others have since followed. On June 13, 1942, some 2.5 million people lined Fifth Avenue in New York City to witness a parade supporting military mobilization for World War II; a little less than four years later, a more subdued crowd showed up for a war victory parade. Washington hosted a National Victory Parade in 1991 at the conclusion of the 40-day First Gulf War, with 8,000 troops following Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf up Pennsylvania Avenue.2

This week’s parade in Washington is different from all of those. This event wasn’t created to celebrate a recent war victory or to bolster the national will for a looming challenge. Nor is it a bipartisan celebration of goodwill; in fact, it’s happening over the objections of many Democrats and without the authorization of Congress. And the expected pricetag of up to $45 million, which the Pentagon says it will cover, is unprecedented: The 1991 parade was organized and funded by a nonprofit group, which saved money by fielding 700 volunteers to help pick up parade-goers’ trash.3 (A poll this week found that 6 in 10 Americans say this parade is “not a good use” of taxpayers’ money.)

Most notably, the intent of this year’s pageant is dubious. Yes, June 14 marks the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, but celebrating that with a display of 28 tanks, scores of other ground vehicles, 50 aircraft rolling on flatbeds, dozens of helicopters hovering overhead and 6,600 troops passing a presidential reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue is a bit of extravagance surely related to another anniversary on the day: Donald J. Trump’s 79^th birthday. We know that this president loves pageantry, though perhaps not quite as much as he simply adores having honor lavished upon him.

To summon the line so memorably delivered on a similar occasion by the late Marilyn Monroe, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.” Better than a line of tanks, that.

Mind you, I’m not one to disparage the idea of parades, in general. In fact, I love a parade. I can’t count how many parade routes I marched as part of my sharp high school band or rolled along over the years on floats sponsored by the newspapers I edited. Just last week I walked the length of a local Pride Parade, thrilled to be an ally on a joyful day. That was one fun parade.

But Donald Trump’s grand military parade marks something else: It’s a distraction conveniently arriving as the president’s popularity is sinking and his policies are failing. It comes as the world teeters dangerously on the edge of widespread war and economic uncertainty. And, significantly, there is this: It reminds us of how thoroughly the work of the U.S. government is being debilitated by a focus on performance over substance.

So in the aftermath of the showiest event yet for our showbiz president, we have to be ready to present some alternative programming. I’ve got some ideas for you.

All politicians project images aimed at winning our allegiance to one degree or another, making it hard to tell what’s real and what they’ve concluded we want them to be. Theodore Roosevelt embraced what he called “the strenuous life” as he overcame a sickly childhood, and his physicality became a defining aspect of both his persona and his political philosophy. Ronald Reagan’s ability to convincingly deliver well-crafted lines was no surprise given his acting background; it’s easy to imagine movie roles with him as the genial-but-tough character that he portrayed in the White House. Did he shape policy based on thoughtful conservative values, or was he the 1980s’ ideal projection of what a conservative political figure would be like?

Donald Trump has taken the performative aspect of politics to a new level, one that goes far beyond his own presentation. It’s not just the fact that 23 current or former Fox News personalities now hold White House jobs, a mark of how much performance matters over competence to this president. Nor should we wonder at Trump’s admiration for such figures as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who traveled all the way to El Salvador to answer questions in front of a prison cell filled with dozens of shirtless, tattooed men who were allegedly Venezuelans deported from America. Noem clearly knows what the cameras like.

This sort of play-acting — did we forget the square-jawed, loose-lipped Secretary of Defense, a former weekend cable TV show host? — is no longer surprising. Anybody who pays much attention to real reporting understood what we risked by re-electing this reality TV star. Just before last year’s election, the former chief marketing officer for NBC, John D. Miller, offered an apology for his role in advancing Trump’s 14-season run on “The Apprentice” — which, Miller said, “did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader.”4 The apology came too late: An image of Trump that appeals to his partisans was created long ago, and humans resist challenges to their conclusions once their minds are made up.

During Trump’s first term, we shook our heads at his lies and marveled that more Americans weren’t horrified. Now, crucially, matters have grown more serious: Trump is has gone beyond just playing the character he fashioned when he moved from reality TV to political campaigns; now the whole dangerous world is the set as he acts out his fantasy life.

Like TV’s Lone Ranger, the actor Clayton Moore, who wore the mask in public long after his show had gone off the air, Trump is so fully invested in his character, with supporting actors likewise playing along, that we’re all now cast as extras in what’s certainly his show. The results are as wild as an unscripted improvisation.

Wars are raging in the Mideast and Ukraine without a clear American policy that could help limit the conflicts because Trump can neither abandon nor deliver on his cocky campaign pledge to quickly end the foreign wars. National economies are upended by the uncertainty caused by Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs, which he offers as a mark of his business acumen. Children are dying in Africa and America’s standing in the world is shrinking because the character known as Trump, eager for history to judge him an era-defining figure, is determined to radically redirect American foreign policy.

It’s not Trump’s fault, certainly, that so much of governing has devolved into role-playing. It’s also a function of how we get information, which for most people does not involve sitting down with a newspaper (or an emailed column) and reading accounts from well-informed journalists. Instagram’s short-form videos draw two billion active monthly users, including half the population of the United States; almost two-thirds of the internet users in the U.S. access YouTube daily. Those statistics underscore the fact that Americans are increasingly glued to quick-take videos that grab our attention, make an impression and then let us move on. That’s at the core of today’s information ecosystem. It’s a discouraging reality.

No wonder most people have only a superficial understanding of many of the complex issues facing the country. Consider this: The independent Congressional Budget Office estimates that the massive tax bill awaiting Senate approval would increase the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion; the White House says that’s based on an incorrect assumption, and that the legislation really would cut the deficit by $1.4 trillion.5 Try to imagine a snappy 30-second video that might explain those competing views and present what’s true, and you’ll grasp a key challenge confronting contemporary journalism — one hard to solve, yes, but imperative for the sector charged with delivering the information citizens need to exercise their rights.

And so shows being staged for a populace with a limited attention span become reality. In one episode, Trump sends National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles to project an image of toughness, but their presence can enflame passions and lead to a genuine crisis in the streets. In another, a crackdown on higher education aimed at thrilling anti-elite voters will seriously erode America’s scientific edge and undermine the economic engine that universities are throughout the country.

To this, add a parade aimed at giving America’s leader the same sort of birthday show enjoyed by authoritarians all over the world. It makes the sad point that America is, really, just like all the rest of them: Nothing exceptional here, folks; just another egotistical leader eager to show off his big toys. Take that, Vladimir and Little Rocket Man: the Don is back.

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Our word “parade” is derived from a Latin word, “parare,” which means “to prepare.” Soldiers long ago marched in parades to prepare for battles they would enter in disciplined ranks. Their readiness was showcased to citizens to instill pride and unity.

Maybe the big Trump parade will do some of that. But, really, we ought to be thinking more about some parades of our own. The “No Kings Day” demonstrations planned in 1,800 locations across the country to coincide with Trump’s birthday parade are a terrific example. Consider the message: A nation can be stronger through the diversity of its communities than in the power that a single man wields in Washington.

Good news emerged on the eve of those parades, suggesting that the resistance to Trump’s posturing may be working: The New York Times reported that Trump has abruptly ordered a scaling back of his mass deportation campaign, by pausing arrests of immigrant workers in the agriculture industry, hotels and restaurants — sectors of the economy, of course, that are crucial to Trump’s political standing.6

And there was this: The latest Quinnipiac University poll found that 58 percent of voters wanted congressional Republicans to stand up to Trump more, and that less than 30 percent of Americans support the president’s signature domestic policy bill, that multi-trillion-dollar deficit-buster.7

Maybe it’s too soon to conclude that the audience is catching on to the difference between the show and reality. The star has a contract for seasons yet to come, and the show is unlikely to improve. But surely many of us looking at images of the great military parade will see it as only preparation, as the word originally suggested, not as an end of anything. And maybe we can help more people reach the conclusion that a government’s strength really isn’t in its hardware, but in its effectiveness, its compassion and its responsiveness to its citizens. That would be worth a real celebration.

Christening and launch of the USNS Harvey Milk in San Diego in 2021. (USN photo by Sarah Burford)

In the hills of southern Indiana, where my dad hunted small game during the Depression with a 12-gauge shotgun, most people would likely have recognized a “bird dog gift.” It’s something you give to somebody else that’s really what you want yourself — like a guy in those hills who might decide that what his wife really needs for her birthday is a hunting dog, though she doesn’t own a gun and has never shot a bird.

So it happened that I became the owner of a 22-foot sailboat one birthday a couple of decades back, a gift from my wife, who grew up sailing on saltwater. A sailboat would surely be just what I wanted, she assured me. We christened it “Bird Dog,” for reasons that you now understand.

In the three years that we owned the boat, I learned a lot of sailing lore, including stories about the powerful force of superstition. Which is why I know that renaming a boat is nearly a taboo among sailors. Oh, you can do it, of course — but you risk disaster at the hands of the gods, the old salts say, at least unless you follow specific de-christening customs. Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, demands certain offerings if you wish to withdraw from terms of the grant he has awarded you to safely traverse his realm.

This seems not to have been in the curriculum that Pete Hegseth studied at Princeton before he became an infantryman, and then a weekend cable TV anchor and then — incredibly, given his inexperience in leadership and his poor record of personal deportment — the United States Secretary of Defense. He may not know about the wrath of the gods, but Hegseth is big on power; he claims to be single-minded in his quest to restore what he calls “a warrior ethos” to a military that he says has been weakened by “the distractions of diversity.”1

Mind you, there is no evidence that the American military has been weakened by efforts over the past decade to assure that, in the words of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “our military looks like the nation that it defends.” Austin, a retired four-star general, felt that diversity efforts strengthened the military; Hegseth, who was a major in the Minnesota National Guard, is intent on reversing them.2

It is in pursuit of that goal — specifically, drumming out the supposedly pernicious influence of women and gays in America’s fighting forces — that Hegseth decided that June, as Pride Month, is the exact right time to change the name of the USNS Harvey Milk, which was named for the iconic gay rights leader who served in the Navy during the Korean War. Milk, a lieutenant (junior grade), was forced to resign and accept an “other than honorable” discharge in 1955 rather than face court martial for homosexuality.3

Hegseth hasn’t gotten around to it yet, but he’s likely to want to rename other ships that reflect a military commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion — words that abruptly became anathema, it seems, when Donald Trump regained the White House.

There’s the USNS Medgar Evers, named for the civil rights leader murdered by a white supremacist in 1963, and the USNS Harriet Tubman, honoring an Underground Railroad conductor and Union spy during the Civil War, and the USNS Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which honors the late Supreme Court Justice.4

Evers, we might note, enlisted in the Army in 1943 at age 17, and served in the segregated 657th Port Company, which played a critical role in the Allied advance at Normandy. Tubman led an 1863 raid that liberated some 700 enslaved people, and was posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard. Ginsberg didn’t see military service, but her legal work in the late 20^th century helped end the military’s policy of discharging women for becoming pregnant. Patriots all, I’d say.

But naming Navy vessels for such folks apparently undermines our military preparedness, in Hegseth’s view. I’m sure we are all grateful that our Secretary of Defense — who leads the largest bureaucracy in the world, with three million employees globally sworn to protect our republic — is paying attention to such important matters. Who can doubt that this focus will make America stronger?

Unless Poseidon is ticked off, you know — or Neptune, if your polytheism runs to Roman tradition rather than Greek. In polytheistic cultures, people tended to believe that they had to do all sorts of deeds to flatter and please the gods, and that the deities’ displeasure could be as deadly as it was capricious. If that sounds a bit like how people now approach the current god of Pennsylvania Avenue, we may be gaining insight into the decline of American society. We’re being led by a guy who thinks he’s the American Zeus.

Maybe just to be safe, then, Hegseth should take some note of the traditions of christening and, well, un-christening. It might be good practice for dealing with the boss.

Given the influence of Christianity in the Western world, it’s unsurprising that a number of English words are derived from that specific religious tradition. We bury people in a cemetery, a term derived from the Greek koimeterion, which means a “sleeping place,” honoring the Christian concept of resurrection. The Greek work for witness, martyr, which referenced early Christian behavior, is now what we use in English to refer to people who die for their beliefs.

Likewise, the notion of a christening derives from the old English term cristnian, which literally meant “to make Christian.”5 That’s not what you do when naming a ship or a boat, obviously, though the peril of the high seas has prompted prayers for safety at the launch of a vessel throughout history.

That part might be appealing to Hegseth, who eagerly flaunted his religious beliefs during his Senate confirmation hearings in January. Questioned about squaring those views with numerous allegations of his excessive drinking and infidelity, he said, “I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real. I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my lord and savior Jesus.”6 Such language is quite popular in politics, you know, when troubling personal histories surface.

At the risk of stepping too deeply into religious matters, I must note that the word Hegseth used — “redemption” — is a term that Christian teachings have loaded with meaning. Its promise arises not from mere remorse for past bad behavior, but from a commitment to leading a better life, one that is more in keeping with the teachings of the faith.

And about those teachings: Hegseth has said that his faith compels him to lead an “American crusade,” invoking images of the brutal medieval wars that European Christians waged against Muslims.7 Some might not consider the bloody fights of a millennium ago as the appropriate model for a contemporary national leader. They were generally unsuccessful for Christian forces, by the way, and fostered violence and mistrust between Christianity and other religious faiths that linger to this day.

There are other options that those who consider themselves people of faith might choose as their guide, including teachings that don’t require bloodthirsty vengeance. One could start, for example, by taking note of Jesus’ frequent condemnation of the hypocrisy of the religious people of his time, and take a vow against sanctimony. Or those in positions of authority might check out the call of all major religions to justice and mercy (see Micah 6:8 in the Old Testament), and the warning that the powerful will be held to account for oppressing the poor and those marginalized by society. Jesus himself, whose followers comprise almost two-thirds of American adults, is quoted in the Gospel of Luke as saying that his task was to “proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners… and to liberate the oppressed.”

Might the historically oppressed in American society include people of color, gays and women? Its number surely would include Harriet Tubman, the freedom fighter who was born into slavery, such military men as the gay activist Harvey Milk and the black activist Medgar Evers, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who fought for women’s rights. Aren’t they the sort of righteous Americans whom political leaders claiming to honor cherished tenets of religion would honor?

But those standards aren’t, in fact, what our government is about these days — not as a Republican-led Congress and White House advance legislation that will further enrich those at the top of society with trillion-dollar tax breaks while eliminating healthcare for millions of Americans, and that will authorize foreign aid cuts that already have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, with millions more certain to follow the statutory end of the Bush-era PEPFAR program that has saved so many from HIV/AIDS infection.

These are not the actions of a civilized, caring society. We are reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s pithy observation, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”8

But we were talking about Poseidon’s judgment, weren’t we? That’s less troubling to weigh.

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Polytheism isn’t widespread today, and in Western society we tend to think of it as mere superstition. It was the typical form of worship before the emergence of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Islam and Christianity — which brought new teachings while absorbing some of the customs of what came to be considered paganism. Nowadays, we don’t think much of all the pantheons and players in those early religions — from Aphrodite to Zeus, Apollo to Vesta. Mostly, we simply find it all amusing.

But we still play along with some of the old customs handed down from millennia ago. So the National Maritime Manufacturers Association a few years ago helpfully posted a guide for how to rename a vessel. It begins with a “purging ceremony” to rid the ship or boat of any trace of the old name, which includes a direct address to Poseidon — “Oh mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans…” — and then moves on to an invocation of the four wind gods (Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus and Notus). Eventually the ritual calls for a whole bottle of champagne, half of which, sadly, must be poured into the sea, from east to west. “Share the rest among yourselves,” the instructions kindly suggest later.9

And so it should go, I might suggest, if Pete Hegseth wishes to rename all those ships that right now honor people who have fought for justice or stood up to oppression: Do the ritual, Pete, or risk displeasing the gods.

It’s just superstition, though, which makes it about as sensible as believing, say, that diversity weakens our military, and that we therefore need to rename a bunch of ships to try to put those types of people back where they used to be. That’s a bird dog gift for America if ever I heard of one: Some of those pious folks in Washington may want it, but we Americans don’t need it.

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Is paying cash for every newborn a good policy? It hasn’t worked anywhere else. (Unsplash photo by Christian Bowen)

There’s just too much news. Like, here I was, worrying about famine in Gaza and government attacks on press freedom, health protection and independent education in America, and paying so much attention to the economic consequences likely to flow from a tantrum-induced trade war and billionaire-benefiting tax breaks, that I nearly missed the effort to put half our population back where they damn well belong, which is clearly in the kitchen and the bedroom.

Oh, sorry — that was not written in the neutral tone of journalism that I was long ago trained to use, and which I insisted upon during my decades as a newspaper editor. Let me try to explain more precisely, then, and without offensive sarcasm, the Trump administration policy initiatives that I had largely ignored until my wife — a part of that misplaced half of the population, you know — insisted that I take a closer look. So:

Eager to promote so-called conservative family values and stimulate the declining birthrate among American citizens, the Trump administration is moving toward embracing policies that would reward people for having babies and encourage larger families. People familiar with the thinking of White House advisers, however, say the benefits would likely flow only to families that conform to traditional gender roles and family structures.

In other nations where the policies have been tried, they have been ineffective. Critics say they wouldn’t address the crisis in child care and elder care that has put enormous pressure on women in the workplace, leading millions to leave their jobs or temper their ambitions.

There. I think that says it.

But if you, too, have missed most of the talk about this topic while you were worrying about something else — about, say, America abandoning its democratic principles and its global allies, or about the millions of children who will surely die after losing food and health aid that the United States had provided, or about the global chaos that looms ever more likely as this nation surrenders in the fight to slow the devastation of climate change — well, here’s a chance to pay a bit of attention to this issue.

So if you’re part of that half of the American population who might be most affected by these policy changes, or if you love someone who is, I invite you to turn away from those other issues for just a bit here, and check out this chapter of Donald Trump’s Devastation Tour. (If you’re happy with the way Donald Trump has handled his interactions with that half of us, you should feel free to move on to something that you’ll surely find less unsettling.)

My mother dropped out of college after two years to get married, and so did her daughter, my older sister. My mother was 19 and my sister was 20, both just about at the median age for women to marry for the first time in their days — my mom in 1941, my sister in 1964. Both of them said they wanted nothing so much as to be good moms and wives, roles they had been raised to believe would fully satisfy their innate human desires for safety, belonging and mattering. When I was in elementary school, I learned that rather than referring to my mother as a “housewife,” as I had at first been taught, I should use the term “homemaker,” which was more respectful of her many duties.

While not much had changed in the expectations of women in that nearly quarter century between the marriages of mother and daughter, a lot soon did. My sister’s wedding came just a year after the publication of Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book credited with launching so-called second-wave feminism. It set in motion new demands for social equality regardless of sex, along with resistance to the norms of a male-dominated society that idealized certain notions of female beauty and pushed women to settle for lower-paid jobs, or to stay at home.

Not every such effort succeeded — notably, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution wasn’t ratified — but as more families acknowledged that Mom might want to get out of the kitchen and the laundry room, women emerged into previously off-limits roles in many workplaces. It’s one of the many factors that contributed to a changing demographic that now finds people getting married later in life and having fewer children, and an increasing share choosing to never marry.

So while the stereotypical American family in the early 1960s and before featured a husband as the sole breadwinner, two-thirds of families today have two earners, and almost half of all workers nationally are women. Yet a pay gap remains: For every dollar that men earn, women earn about 82 cents. And while women have moved into roles in society that my mother wouldn’t have imagined, the notion of gender equality is far from realized: In the current Congress, just 28 percent of the lawmakers are women; among the Fortune 500 companies, only 10 percent have women as CEOs.

Part of what makes it hard to be a woman in the workforce is the reality of home life: Moms still shoulder a disproportionate load of the work, surveys show. And, significantly, there’s a nationwide shortage of direct care workers for both children and the elderly, leading millions of women to decide that they need to stay home to provide care.

That problem is on the verge of ballooning into a crisis as a result of two Trump administration initiatives: proposed cuts to Medicaid, which will reduce the dollars available to hire caregivers, and the crackdown on immigrants, who comprise 28 percent of the long-term care workforce. Even if families can find caregivers, they’re likely to discover that persistent inflation, which will be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s tariff policies, will push many of those options out of reach.

Common sense, then, suggests that families would benefit from federal initiatives to expand care options and make them more affordable, so that women could remain in the workforce and succeed there. You might think that the U.S. would finally join every other industrialized country in requiring employers to provide some paid family leave; we’re one of only five countries that requires no paid leave. For example: Canada requires employers to cover 50 weeks of leave at 55 percent pay, and the U.K. requires a full year at 90 percent pay.

The Trump team takes a different approach: It is trying to encourage women to have more babies and to stay home and care for them. If this strikes you as counter-intuitive, you’ve been paying attention to the wrong things. Common sense is not a prerequisite for policy development in Washington these days.

Maybe if we give moms money for having a baby, some Trump advisers are saying, they’ll decide to reproduce. Just a moment — we will get to why that is perceived as a good idea when it’s already hard for parents to keep up with childcare costs.

One proposal gaining currency in the Trump White House would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery — which might sound like a boon, unless you consider the cost of everything from diapers to new shoes. A 2023 study put the average cost of raising a child to age 18 at $389,000. A $5,000 baby bonus, then, would cover about three months of the child’s life.

But the baby bonus proposal isn’t really about helping families get by. Nor is it really aimed at hiking the U.S. birthrate, which has been declining since 2007. That’s a valid concern, since if there aren’t enough new workers to support an aging population as it leaves the workforce, the nation’s economy could collapse.

There’s an easier solution to that issue than trying to grow more workers from little seeds. We might turn, as America historically has, to immigrants, who comprised one-fifth of the U.S. workforce in 2023. Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell noted recently that immigration is “a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance.” But that’s not the kind of workforce that the Trump administration wants to encourage, of course. It is working to deport, not support, the immigrant workers.

Nor are non-traditional families part of the Trump vision of America. Ever since his first campaign for president, Trump has stressed that any family leave plan that might come to him from Congress ought to apply only to biological mothers who are legally married. Families created through adoption, fostering or any other means would be denied support, as his daughter Ivanka declared early in his first term as she articulated his views on the issue.

Which is where the Trump family policy and the emerging push for baby bonuses finds its sweet spot: among the Christian conservatives who have always formed the core of Trump’s support. To evangelical and fundamental Christians, marriage should exist only between a man and a woman, and the purpose of marriage is to build Christian families. Women belong in the home, and a baby bonus would seem to support the command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply,” a command that deeply religious Christians and Jews alike take literally.

It's a notion that is popular among people close to Trump, including Elon Musk, who has acknowledged that he is the father of 14 children, and Vice President JD Vance, who has said that parents should have more political clout than childless people, and that Americans without children should pay higher taxes.

Critics might note that the idea conflicts with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that declared that the right to marriage cannot be restricted to only heterosexual couples. Based upon that Constitutional view, other benefits also can’t be denied non-traditional couples — not a family leave benefit, for example, nor a baby bonus.

Interestingly, a baby bonus has been tried elsewhere — in one form or another, in Russia, Italy, Greece and Hungary — and nowhere has it convinced parents to have more babies. You would think that their experience would be instructive. But when has the Trump administration been discouraged by clear signs that its direction is futile, or even harmful?

As the product of a so-called traditional family, you might think that I would be in the camp of Vance and Musk. But I’m not lucky by virtue of being the biological child of a married dad and mom; it was, rather, the love in my home that provided a foundation for the dreams that my family encouraged me to pursue. No cash bonus can generate that.

And I was lucky to grow up at a time when our government wasn’t run by a morally compromised ideologue driven primarily by personal ambition rather than by society’s needs, and whose vision for America never grew beyond what he could see as a teenager — a time I well recall as an excited 12-year-old usher at my sister’s wedding. I’m sorry for the children in today’s America.

It’s odd, of course, to imagine anyone viewing Donald Trump as a champion of the family — he who has been convicted of sexual assault, who has violated the vows of his three marriages, and who bragged on tape, with vulgar language (the most memorable line of which we won’t quote here), that “when you’re a star… you can do anything.”

And he will do anything, it seems, except what really might benefit American families, and women in particular. So, yes, it’s hard to keep track of everything emerging from the White House these days that might rightly worry us. Probably the notion of paying people to have babies is pretty far down the list of the ways this presidency can hurt us.

But it’s unwise and unfair. In another time, that would mark it as intolerable. How sad it is, then, that we hardly notice it now.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

This essay suggests that the Trump administration’s policies are aimed at returning America to a time when only traditional family forms were tolerated, and that the result would limit the options for today’s women. Do you agree?

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Dean Jelani Cobb shots a selfie with jubilant Columbia Journalism School graduates this week (RS photo)

From the home where I grew up, we could see 60 miles across the barren prairie to our east on a clear day. Those of us who come from what some people consider remote parts of the country have a different perspective on distance: We understand that to get to where you need to be, you have to keep going. You don’t really have the choice of turning around when you get tired — unless you’re willing to settle for where you’ve already been, and that’s a retreat too far.

If that sounds like a guiding philosophy, it was actually just the way a kid from South Dakota looked at his surroundings. But I’ve come to understand over the years that I was shaped by my experience as a traveler — that is, as someone who had to drive two days to see any relative outside my immediate family, or put in 20 hours on the road to get home from college at Christmastime. You can’t be daunted by a long haul. You just have to keep at it.

That notion came back to me this week when I had the great privilege of speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. My term as chair of the school’s Alumni Board is ending, meaning this was my valedictory — a final opportunity to share some thoughts with young people just beginning the trip that I launched from the same place so many decades ago. For a lot of them, the trip just to reach the launchpad had already been a long one — even further, both literally and figuratively, than I had traveled to get there when I was in my 20s. And now they had arrived at an inflexion point.

Here's the thing about graduations: They inherently offer a vision of hope. That’s true whether the graduates are moving up to middle school, aiming for a job after high school or being draped in a doctoral hood. Whatever uncertainty a graduate may feel about the road ahead — where they’ll find a paycheck, how they’ll pay off student loans, whether they’re even ready for a life’s next step — there’s a sense when people show up in a graduation gown that the closing of one chapter presents a fresh opening for the next.

That’s the notion that I took to heart this week in what has to be considered a quite unlikely place for any encouraging thoughts in Donald Trump’s America. After all, if any dominion might realistically imagine its proud palace reduced to Trump-trashed rubble, it would be one connected to both journalism and higher education — especially, surely, at Columbia University, the first big institution targeted by our nation’s experiment in authoritarianism. Yet in a crowd of nearly giddy graduates and their glowing loved ones, you couldn’t help but sense an elusive emotion in the Era of Trump: We felt hope.

Even in a landscape already ravaged by Trump’s malignancy, there is reason for hope. And we need to let it come. We’ve traveled a long way to get here — that is, America has endured a lot over the past 249 years — and there’s simply no way to turn back now.

There are so many reasons, certainly, to feel beleaguered and dispirited these days, one-tenth of the way through what we have to presume will be a four-year term of the most corrupt, malicious and erratic leader in our nation’s history. Mornings bring the dread of overnight news alerts; updates during the day rarely offer respite. It’s hard to keep up with all the bad news

Trump is carelessly imperiling America’s future by demanding a “big beautiful bill” of huge tax cuts mainly benefitting the wealthy while adding trillions of dollars to the debt that successive generations will have to pay. In addition to the market-roiling debt, the legislation will pay for the tax cuts by slashing nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and nutrition benefits, likely cutting off food aid for 5.4 million people and healthcare for 7.6 million. Trump’s rash tariff plans that have upended both stock and bond markets are making economic enemies of historically friendly nations around the world, leaving gaps in partnerships that China and other powers are already moving to fill. He is eagerly making the world dirtier and less healthy by ripping up efforts to encourage the transition to clean energy and limit climate change.

He is decimating the research that has for generations put America at the forefront of science research and made our higher education system the world’s envy. He is dismantling government programs that have built the nation’s economic stability. He is resetting our defense commitments in a way that is making Vladimir Putin very happy.

Some of what he is doing seems simply idiotic: making our weather forecasts less dependable and our disaster response less robust, disabling the Internal Revenue Service, downgrading veterans’ health care, even giving tax breaks for gun silencers and gym memberships, the latter at a cost to the U.S. Treasury of $10 billion a year. Some of his moves reflect Trump’s deeply flawed character and his contempt for the U.S. Constitution: deporting people without the due process that the Constitution demands and that federal judges have ordered; attacking law firms for representing clients he dislikes; encouraging discrimination against and cruel treatment of LGBTQ citizens.

Trump has never seemed to care much for facts, but his re-election has seemed to free him from any lingering constraints that might signal respect for truth. This week, for example, he advanced the wholly fictitious notion of “white genocide” in South Africa, and welcomed the resettlement in the United States of 50 Afrikaners whom he claimed were legitimate refugees, even as his administration continued to speedily deport non-white people who fled to America for safety, many with our government’s blessing. It was a display as racist as it was fallacious.

Any listing of the latest egregious behavior by the president is necessarily incomplete; his offenses against America’s historic principles of fairness and justice over the first 14 weeks of this 47th presidency have been too many to recount here. But while Trump’s popularity has fallen to the lowest point of any recent president at this early point in a term, he shows no sign of letting up, and his political clout is enforced by a campaign cache of $600 million, with a target of $1 billion.

No wonder ambitious Republican politicians are giving Trump whatever he wants. No wonder people of good will are discouraged.

Yet we can’t overlook the fact that when what Trump is doing is made clear to Americans, a lot of us are horrified. His actions aren’t popular. Sooner or later, public opinion will catch up with him — that is, if people figure out what’s true.

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It was against this backdrop — all the now-usual bad news of the day — that I visited the Columbia University campus this week for the awarding of master’s degrees to journalism students. It’s an easy Amtrak trip down along the Hudson River from my Upstate home.

From the auditorium stage, I looked out on more than 200 young people in blue academic gowns; behind them sat their families and friends. They listened as the school’s brilliant dean, Jelani Cobb, decried the “effort to suppress dissent and freedom of the press” that they had witnessed during their time at Columbia — a free press which, he declared, remains “a prerequisite for a free society.” Yet amid “the tempest surrounding both higher education and journalism,” the dean said, he remained optimistic for one reason: “It is your talent, your courage, your caliber and idealism,” he told the graduates.

It occurred to me at that moment that the most encouraging point of the day might be the fact that the newest recruits to honest journalism are likely better prepared than those of us who have been around for years at a crucial task: delivering essential truth-telling in a way that can reach a contemporary audience. After all, as I explained in my own remarks to the class, I went through the Columbia program when we were still using manual typewriters; it wasn’t until 14 years after I wore one of the Columbia blue academic gowns that I first saw something called a web site. We Boomer journalists have now mostly yielded newsroom leadership, but the digital revolution occurred on our watch, coinciding with a decline in the audience for news. Maybe tomorrow’s generation of newsroom leaders will do a better job.

The challenge facing the new journalists is daunting: a lot of people aren’t paying attention. A New York Times/Siena College poll last month found that while most voters don’t support the direction of Trump’s presidency, many of the 42 percent who do approve have something in common: Nearly half said they had not heard much about at least some of the ups and downs of his administration. For example, the Trump term featured the worst stock market plunge since 1974, but about one-fifth of voters had heard little or nothing about it; likewise, about one-third of the Trump supporters said they didn’t know about the chaos created by DOGE, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump has always done best with these so-called “low-information voters.” The Siena poll found that the voters who hadn’t heard much about the problems associated with Trump’s tenure were much more likely to get their news from social media — a platform filled with influencers and podcasters with less allegiance to the truth-telling than to audience-building. A key challenge facing today’s journalists, then — and one that the young people I saw this week are surely ready to tackle — is to deliver honest reporting in a way that will reach even people who aren’t usually inclined to seek out news. I think they can do it.

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For those in search of hope beyond what can come from the promise of journalistic truth-telling, though, it might be found most readily in the fact that American democracy has been in retreat before, and has recovered.

It wasn’t only the threat to the Republican posed by the Civil War, though that was the closest we have come to losing the nation. A dozen years after the war, the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states, ending Reconstruction and giving rise to a new era of repression of civil rights and the resurgence of white supremacy as accepted custom. The Ku Klux Klan ran rampant; lynchings were common. The so-called Jim Crow era was an ugly time in America, especially for non-whites and under-represented ethnic groups. It was a shameful period that lasted for decades, faltering after World War II, but only falling, finally, during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.

Twice in the 20^th century, so-called Red Scares led to government persecution based on political beliefs: After World War I, the Justice Department authorized raids targeting suspected radicals, leading to thousands of arrests and deportations. It happened again after World War II, during a political cycle now labeled McCarthyism: Intense political repression cost thousands of innocent people their reputations and livelihoods; governments and private employers alike screened people for beliefs that some politicians considered un-American.

In each instance, Americans rediscovered their conscience and regained their senses, and lawmakers followed the lead of their constituents. Citizens turned away from demagoguery and toward honesty, and began to insist again that the nation apply the values of fairness and justice that underpin the Constitution. The law followed public opinion.

It’s not that the dark days didn’t do great damage, nor was the resurgence of Americanism speedy in each case. But the truth caught up with even those public officials who committed the worst offenses against the nation’s values.

Our best hope now, then, is that the sheer weight of the Trump administration’s offenses against what people truly want will begin to drag down the president’s popularity to the point that the unswerving Trumpian allegiance of Republican officials will falter. The recovery will take time, but it can be speeded by the work of a capable and energetic corps of truth-tellers now finding their way into the field.

In these difficult days, we need to remember how far America has come. It is a distance that included some hard times for democracy. And so we find ourselves today. But there’s no turning back. Eyes on the horizon, maintaining our forward course, we need to keep hope alive until we’ve regained sure footing on the values and principles that have always sustained the nation.

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. - Rex Smith

Here’s Roscoe last week, watching for his pals to show up. He loves our neighborhood, too. (RS photo)

Our neighborhood, a place where the rolling countryside meets the edge of town, positively buzzes in springtime: frogs and bumblebees add their humming percussion to the songbirds’ music, with humans pitching in a less melodic bass line of mowers, chainsaws and the noisy motorbike of a kid up the hill. It’s the kind of place where I imagined living back when I was squeezed into the city. There are big lots with a jumble of comfortable homes, some filled with young families and others housing retirees who aren’t yet ready to give up the greenery and elbow room for the downsizing that eventually attaches to aging. We’re in the latter category. We love it here.

It's not just the place we like; it’s the people, too. One neighbor brings in our mail and newspapers when we’re away, and we water the plants for the folks next door while they travel. Since we’re on a corner lot, all the dogs stop by to play with our friendly mutt, Roscoe, yielding inter-generational friendships among their human families. We’ll have a neighborhood picnic across the way on the first day of summer; I’ll set up a croquet course and a badminton net, and another neighbor will fire up the grill for burgers and hot dogs.

We know we’re lucky: A just-released Pew Research Center study finds that only a quarter of Americans say they know all or most of their neighbors, and just 44 percent say they trust those they know. It’s not a new phenomenon, this who’s-my-neighbor notion, but the data shows that a decline in human connections has continued across our society for decades.1 Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General reported that half of Americans are afflicted by the loneliness that tends to follow social isolation, which raises their risk of premature death by 29 percent — an impact similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia, the report said, and it’s expensive: Social isolation accounts for an extra $6.7 billion in Medicare spending each year.2

Our government won’t do anything about that just now, of course, because the warning about the toll of social isolation was issued in the Before Times — that is, before the federal government was placed into the hands of an administration and a Congress that is more concerned about enhancing the assets of the wealthy than protecting the health of the ordinary. The House stalled this week in its drive to deliver the trillions of dollars in tax breaks that Donald Trump has promised not because the budget was too skimpy in its protection of the American people, but because it was seen by many Republican lawmakers as yet too generous. Of course, the tax cuts in the budget bill would disproportionately benefit high-income earners, and the spending cuts would be disastrous for middle-income and poorer Americans, but a MAGA speedbump arose because the empowered right wing wants to wring even more savings from social safety-net programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Does anybody who doesn’t own a red MAGA cap think this won’t lead to more distress and instability in a population that is already hurting?

It's out of vogue to mention it, but there is even greater need among those beyond America’s borders, whose cries for help America increasingly meets with a shrug. Oxfam has estimated that the cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development alone will mean that 23 million children will lose access to education and as many as 95 million people will lose basic health care, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths each year.

We don’t know those people, though — nor, apparently, do we care to. We seem to think that they’re not our neighbors.

This is precisely the challenge that Pope Leo XIV spelled out in his first homily last week, as he pointed to “the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.” In the breadth of his call to action, Leo seemed to be alluding to the expansive definition of who our neighbors are that emerges from the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, who cared for an enemy he found in need by the side of the road.3

In fact, all the world’s major religions teach that believers should care for strangers. By that standard, our neighbors are not just the people we know or those who look and think like we do, but everyone around us, including those we might disdain or distrust. The scriptural imperative in the Judeo-Christian heritage, for example, is clear: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the book of Leviticus declares, though the pious today are less likely to recall a command just a few verses further along: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself,” it says.4

That’s not the way of the Trump administration. Rather famously now, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost pushed back on the suggestion of Vice President JD Vance in a Jan. 29 Fox News interview that Catholicism taught a hierarchy of care — first for family, and then, in order, care for neighbor, community, citizens of your own country and, last, others in the world. “JD Vance is wrong,” the man who would become Pope Leo XIV posted on X. “Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”5

But we are far beyond the point of hoping that spiritual or ethical standards will influence the thoroughly transactional Trump administration. So what, our current leaders seem to say, if most of us don’t know or trust the neighbors nearest us, and if our isolation is making us sick? No worry of that sort has been mentioned in the first four months of the Trump administration; to the contrary, it has been made clear to us that Americans really are supposed to care for themselves, mainly, to expect less of their government and surely to not worry about distant lands.

You cannot blame the isolation of Americans on Donald Trump; the trend of loneliness predates his golden escalator glide into politics. In fact, Trump may be the ultimate product of our disconnectedness from each other: People who feel alienated from their neighbors and their society are surely more likely to embrace a go-it-alone political philosophy laid out by someone who postures as a tough guy. And so he leads us further away from the global connections that sustain our nation as surely as personal connections sustain us individually.

It is an attitude that speaks of a whole society tumbling into deeper isolation from the world, placing the nation itself on a trajectory toward risk no less acute than the growing personal isolation imperils individuals.

We know what can help people who are feeling isolated. Mental health experts suggest that we can reach out to help bring people together to share experiences of art, music, the outdoors, history, sports, culture and religion — the sort of things that make us human. We can encourage the lonely among us to connect with people who share their interests. We can be more present in their lives.

But what of whole societies that are slipping into isolation? Take note, for instance, of Trump’s determination to break the tight seal of America with Europe, and of his attitude toward our nearest neighbors — his threats to take over Canada, perhaps by military force, and to send U.S. troops into Mexico to fight drug traffickers. Let’s hope America doesn’t need to call on its old friends for help anytime soon. The neighbors might not answer the doorbell.

It’s reasonable to infer that as a kid growing up in Queens in the 1950s, Donald Trump didn’t get a great grounding in neighborliness. Too bad that his childhood didn’t coincide with the 33 years that Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the legendary public TV program that focused on children’s social and emotional needs. Imagine if the wealthy youngster who would become president had been taught about civility, tolerance and sharing, rather than what came his way — a childhood described in a scholarly paper last year as including “parental neglect, physical beatings, the development of survival instincts and an obsession to win.”6 What could we expect of the man who would emerge from that?

He will not change now, certainly. So if we are to get through the years of sad isolation and turmoil ahead, it will be up to us to provide the comfort that comes from connection.

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Like most American neighborhoods, ours isn’t very racially or economically diverse, but we do have varying political views. One of our friends up the street kind of sheepishly told us this week that he now regretted casting his vote for Trump. We know him well enough to not be too sympathetic about his belated chagrin. “Really? Again?” my wife said. “What did you expect?”

But Americans have always tended to believe and hope for the best. That same Pew survey found that three-quarters of us would bring in the mail or water plants for out-of-town neighbors, that almost the same number would conserve water or electricity if a public official asked them to do so, and two-thirds would bring a meal to a sick neighbor.

That sounds like the kind of people we Americans still aspire to be, even if our leaders are more selfish, less kind, less neighborly. We just need more of the kind of neighborhood that Fred Rogers described. “Look for the helpers,” he often said. “You will always find people who are helping.” We have to hope that is true, and to understand that now, especially, those people must be us.

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It was the bartender who jolted me to reality. But the burger was mighty good. (Photo by Mike on Unsplash)

The concept of the modern sandwich, we are told, developed in 18^th century England, when John Montagu, the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, an habitué of gambling tables in public houses, ordered his valet to bring him a slab of roast beef between two slices of toasted bread, leaving the Earl one hand free for his cards and dice and the other available to eat dinner without fork or knife. Portability and easy consumption thus have defined the sandwich from its origin.1

Which is why the purported sandwich served to me the other day at a pub I hadn’t visited in some decades was an exercise in unreality: It was too big to be grasped by anybody with hands smaller than Michael Jordan’s, or to be eaten by anyone with a mouth smaller than Popeye’s. It was a giant, vegetable-adorned, bacon-laden hamburger with melted cheese — and, yes, since you asked, pursuant to a 2019 ruling of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, a hamburger is indeed a sandwich, as are wraps, burritos and bagels (the latter only when “served buttered or with spreads, or otherwise as a sandwich,” but apparently not when purchased whole).2

I had gone to a place in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District called the Corner Bistro, a little bar that I recalled happily from my 20s, when a mini-review by Mimi Sheraton in The New York Times described it as “a dark, relaxed taverny neighborhood hangout.” Back then, I could barely afford the extravagant $2.90 tab for the big burger. Even at seven times that price, it did not disappoint now, 45 years later. But the nostalgic lunch came with an ego blow on the side: As the friendly bartender slid the plate onto my table, he said, “Here you go, Pop.”

Who, exactly, was he addressing? Are you telling me that it’s OK for a middle-aged bartender — with, let it be said, markedly less hair than I have — to call me by the name that belonged to my father? Just then I was wishing for nothing so much as a sweet “Hon” from a diner waitress.

Yes, I recognize my biological age, though I prefer to view it with the perspective of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a contemporary of the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, who wrote, “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” In my imagination, you see, when I walk into a room — even a taverny hangout in New York City — people might look up and think, “Seems like a nice young man.” Let a guy dream!

Yet imagination, too, has its limits, making reality often a cold splash to the face. I wake up every morning wishing that I lived in the America that has been part of my imagination since I was a little boy singing “God Bless America” while gazing up at Mount Rushmore — a nation, that is, that projects the values of freedom and self-determination to the world, that works to deliver equality for all under fairly applied laws, that elevates to its leadership only individuals who strive to display the character of history’s greatest figures.

That’s not our America right now, and wishing for it won’t make it so. And here’s the thing: We all need to accept the reality of what’s required of us to make that imagined place our home. Waiting for the next election — or imagining that we’re participating in the solution by complaining about the status quo — is an inadequate response to what’s at hand. There’s work to be done, folks.

Among students of western history, Napoleon Bonaparte is remembered for both military conquests and lasting reforms. As the ruler of France, he created a system of higher education, a central bank, a civil code and even, for its time, an enviable road and sewer system. But we remember him especially for his leadership skill, a task that he defined as this: “The role of the leader is to define reality and give hope.”3

By any fair measure, Donald Trump’s approach to leadership is based not upon defining reality, but defying it. He lies expansively, even eagerly — claiming, for instance, that the tariffs he has ordered will be paid by foreign governments rather than American consumers, that the rioters he sicced on the Capitol in 2021 were participating in “a day of love” rather than insurrection, that Ukraine and not Russia started the war in Ukraine, that China is operating the Panama Canal. He is exercising power without congressional authorization by falsely claiming that Venezuelans are participating in an “invasion” of the U.S., that decades of trade with other countries present such a threat that he can impose massive tariffs on an emergency basis, and that our “national energy emergency” — in fact, we’ve never produced more energy — allows him to revoke by decree federal environmental and health laws.

Indeed, there is so much distance between truth and Trump that the preceding paragraph had no logical end; I cannot here recount the 30,573 false or misleading statements that The Washington Post counted during his first term, nor the tens of thousands since.4 Here’s a fun fact: Wikipedia has a separate entry for “False or misleading statements by Donald Trump” that carries a warning at the top: “This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably.” It goes on for about four dozen pages, including 605 footnotes, and features a sentence that editors of the multi-volumed encyclopedias of old couldn’t have imagined: “It has been suggested that Trump’s false statements amount to bullshit rather than lies.” Whatever.5

In fact, much of Trump’s second term has been focused on attacking key institutions of American society, because that tactic yields the sort of chaos that makes a society ripe for an authoritarian leader. It isn’t to stop antisemitism that Trump is trying to hobble higher education; it’s because our colleges and universities are a force for stability and reason, attributes that pose a threat to the reality-challenged Trumpian rule. He isn’t gutting the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Institute for the Humanities to save tax dollars; he’s not attacking the scientific establishment, gutting research into cancer treatment and childhood diseases and hobbling the National Park Service because he wants kids to get sick and wants to let cancer run free, or he hates nature.

No, he is doing all that because those are institutions that hold order in our society. It is in disorder that tyrants can arise and thrive. Trump needs chaos to survive.

Many of us who are horrified by the Trump presidency can’t quite imagine why people continue to follow someone with such a record of deceit. Some of it can be explained because people are left in darkness if their media diet is made up of platforms that provide only a slender account of what Trump is really up to — if, for example, they watch Fox News or One America News (OAN), the Trump propaganda outlet that he has decided will be carried worldwide by Voice of America. Politicians in the Republican Party that he now fully controls follow him because it’s the path of least resistance toward their ultimate goal of holding onto their jobs. (I have reached this notion slowly and reluctantly; I hate to infer such bad character in public servants, but facts dictate the conclusion.)

Yet there’s a reality check needed, too, among those of us who aren’t Trump fans. We need to understand our present responsibility, and not turn ourselves into caricatures of the resistance. We have to face what’s real and act upon it.

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There remain some 1,350 days until Trump leaves office, presumably — too long a timeframe for the delusion that we’re doing our part by posting snarky anti-Trump comments on social media, or telling like-minded friends and relatives how upset we are, or by nodding along as people on radio and TV programs criticize the Trump era, or even by waving signs in an anti-Trump demonstration. In response to what’s really happening, we need to act. And our action is most likely to be successful if it’s done in support of an institution that reflects some of our fundamental values.

Here's an example: My recent encounter with the Bistro Burger happened because I was in the city to attend an alumni event at Columbia University, a prominent battlefield in the MAGA campaign against American institutions. As the head of the Alumni Board at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, I heard in recent weeks from alumni who wanted to demonstrate against the university — to burn their diplomas, perhaps, or disrupt the dean’s presentation — to protest Columbia’s response to the Trump administration stripping of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts and aid from the university. That struck me as a terrible idea.

Joining in the attacks on institutions in Trump’s crosshairs because we disagree with their calculated survival strategy would be precisely the wrong way to stand up to the demagogue. I don’t know what the right steps might be for Columbia or Harvard or other MAGA targets; I do know, though, that the real work of combatting Trumpism comes in standing up for the institutions he would tear down.

The noted Yale historian Timothy Snyder some years ago published On Tyranny, a slender volume of mini-essays on 20^th century history.6 It puts forward an argument that is now sharpening my focus for what I will do in these coming three years and eight months. “It is institutions that help us preserve decency. They need our help as well,” he wrote. “They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”

Snyder, incidentally, has taken a leave from Yale and moved with his wife to Canada, rather than stay and watch at close range what he perceives as our nation’s slide into fascism. I’d suggest a better course for most of us is to stay and fight.

Reading Snyder, though, gave me this dose of reality: I need to pick an institution that matters to me — or maybe more than one — and do something to sustain it. Many of the programs and institutions we value are at risk in a society that is undergoing economic and structural tumult. So I urge you to make a similar reality check on your intentions.

Like this: If you value public education, work for good local school board candidates, and don’t let the MAGA forces pull books off the shelves. If you care about the arts, donate to your local symphony or choral ensemble or theater troupe. If you don’t like the manipulation of facts to fit right-wing narratives that characterizes Fox News, do whatever you can for your local public radio and TV outlets.

Volunteer at food pantries; the Trump administration has cut $1 billion in aid to anti-hunger groups.7 Help the local organizations that support at-risk youth; Trump is shuttering Head Start programs and laying off workers who have overseen child care, child support and child protective services systems.8 Give money — even a few bucks — to your favorite college or university; it’s not just the big-name schools that are getting whipped by Trump-drunk Republicans.9

What’s going on now in America is heart-breaking for many of us. But averting our gaze — that is, for any more time than we need to sustain our emotional health — is a retreat from our responsibility as citizens. We can convince ourselves that our quiet resistance is sufficient, or take pride in our clever or noisy pushback, online or in public, but the notion that we’re then doing enough is no more realistic than my delusion that the guy bringing me a burger and a beer won’t notice my white hair. It’s possible that I’ve aged a bit, and that we need to do more than complain.

No, we need to meet the unreality of Donald Trump’s assault on our institutions and norms by accepting the reality that we have some serious work to do. Our key institutions won’t protect themselves, nor will our democracy. Really, it’s our job.

9

https://www.aauw.org/resources/news/media/press-releases/100-days-of-the-trump-administration-a-relentless-assault-on-higher-education/

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TRAINING

DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS?

If you’d like some training in writing opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Our next class is Monday, May 13, at 4:30 p.m. Eastern

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too!

CLICK FOR INFO ON OP-ED CLASS

---

BONUS CONTENT

GET MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.

LINK TO REX'S WAMC ESSAYS

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”

LINK TO THE MEDIA PROJECT

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No grudge held about the recognition of my age: This is a swell place for a beer and a burger. (RS photo)

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex Smith

On what should be a nice spring day, this is what I’m thinking about. (Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)

My sweet mother, born in Indiana in the 1920s, taught me that a little gentleman should give flowers to someone he loves on the first day of May. When I was 8, I gathered a couple fistfuls of violets from our yard and delivered them in a tiny basket to old Mrs. Supple, who lived over our back hedge. By the time I was 10, I was giving May Day flowers to a little girl down the street named Virginia, whose affection for me, alas, did not outlast fifth grade.

Later I learned that there are many different observances of May Day around the world. I’ve twice spent May Day in countries with strong leftist political parties, surrounded by lively celebrations of International Workers Day, including speeches, rallies and parades. Only a bit of that happens in America — including a small but earnest demonstration that I stumbled upon this May Day in New York City’s Union Square. It was a sort of catch-all protest, featuring chants about topics ranging from the evils of capitalism to the abridged rights of Palestinians. There wasn’t a whole lot of energy in it, to tell you the truth, as if the crowd was too well-experienced in the customs of sign-waving and call-and-response protest. So on a spring day too lovely to rile even a partisan crowd to anger, I chose to stroll a few blocks over to a neighborhood bar I knew from decades ago. I sat outside with a beer and a burger, and I felt good.

News reports covered bigger May Day demonstrations elsewhere about what Donald Trump is doing to America. But I kept thinking about what was really the more significant observance for my interests this week, namely, World Press Freedom Day, which by act of the UN occurs each May 3. As it happens, I came into World Press Freedom Day fresh from seeing Good Night, and Good Luck, the nearly sold-out Broadway drama that just earned George Clooney a Tony nomination. It’s a story of brave journalists during the Cold War fighting to uphold their ethical standards in the face of efforts by the government to manipulate the truth.

Re-read that previous sentence, please, but omit the words “during the Cold War.” What you have, then, is the reason you, too, ought to observe World Press Freedom Day — because today, in 2025, we have a lot of brave journalists fighting to uphold their ethical standards in the face of shockingly bald efforts by the government to manipulate the truth, and they have stories to tell. You can find those stories everywhere.

From tough journalists under fire, I learned this week that Oklahoma is implementing a new high school social studies curriculum that requires students to be taught the debunked claims (i.e., lies) of President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Oklahoma’s new curriculum for public schools also will increase lessons from the Bible, and teach youngsters how the U.S. government is linked to specifically Christian values.

Also this week, from investigative reporters digging into secret government files, I learned about intolerably long wait times for mental health care in my state and how a foundation linked to a key health insurance company contracted by the state seems to be giving away millions of dollars without any public disclosure. Who do you suppose is getting what are essentially taxpayer dollars passed through a charity?

And this week I watched as the brave tradition of CBS News, so brilliantly depicted by Clooney and his Broadway colleagues, teeters on the edge of collapse. The billionaire owner of CBS’s parent company is negotiating with the bully of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over settling a frivolous lawsuit -- filed by the president quite blatantly to punish journalists for telling the truth. Of course, he also threatened to sue The New York Times for writing about his lawsuit in a way that displeased him.

This is not a normal springtime in America; it is a season in which free speech is under siege in what was once a nation with an envied reputation for freedom. Over the decades that I was a newspaper columnist and editorialist, I often wrote about World Press Freedom Day with a sense that for most American readers, it was an abstract matter: We, after all, had the luxury of a press whose freedom would be guaranteed for what seemed likely to be all time by the nation’s Constitution. In 2025, that no longer sufficiently protects us, because we are led by an administration that flagrantly slips past Constitutional boundaries, eager to vaunt its might to impress its advocates and cower its critics, never mind if it ultimately draws a rebuke from some courts with no enforcement powers. Intimidation is the tactic; suppressing truth is the point.

It was against that backdrop that I recorded my regular weekly commentary for Northeast Public Radio. While I usually link to that commentary at the end of this column, I’m going to share its text with you here. That’s because I’ve become convinced that the threat confronting us on this World Press Freedom Day is too important for me to not use every avenue I have — including here, in The Upstate American — to draw it to your attention.

I offer this in yet another context of May Day — namely, the universal cry of distress, signaling a life-threatening emergency. It’s derived from the French venez m’aidez, meaning “come help me.” I’ve done just enough sailing in big water to feel a chill at the very notion of a ship captain or pilot uttering the word “mayday.” But the seas we’re navigating are so troubled that the vessel of our freedom, the First Amendment, is taking on water.

Is it time to call mayday?

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If you’re about to get eaten by a shark, you’re not going to be thinking about the need to preserve threatened ocean species, right? It’s the sort of dilemma that often confronts us: whether to focus on an immediate threat or a long-term dilemma. And that’s where we who are concerned about the free press find ourselves these days.

I spent three decades running newsrooms, and more than a decade before that as a newspaper reporter, so you know that freedom of the press must matter to me. And it’s clear, I’d say, that the essential right to free speech — which underlies all other freedoms — has never been more at risk, from both immediate challenges and long-term threats.

We’re observing World Press Freedom Day. Actually, it’s several days of activities, which began Saturday. Each year, World Press Freedom Day spotlights the fundamental human right to freedom of opinion and expression. Right now, that’s at risk, in the U.S. and globally.

But as in many situations, there’s both acute risk and extended peril. World Press Freedom Day this year is focused on the latter — specifically, on artificial intelligence. Around the world, there are ongoing conversations about the opportunities that AI presents for press freedom: It can make information easier to access; it can enable more people to communicate across the world; it can speed how information flows globally.

But AI can also make big tech platforms even more powerful as gatekeepers of information by enabling them to filter and control what people see — which can reinforce biases and political divisions. It can be used to support censorship, to spread false information, to increase online hate speech.

And AI presents a financial threat, too, that could restrict the power of the free press. That is, generative AI tools reuse journalistic content without fair payment — which takes income away from the organizations that create original reporting, like newspapers and not-for-profit journalism organizations — and channels that money instead to tech platforms and AI companies. So the rich get richer, and those who are dedicated to giving citizens the information they need continue to crumble.

So you can see why World Press Freedom Day this year focuses on artificial intelligence. We need a thoughtful global approach to AI. But acting thoughtfully and planning globally are not at all characteristic of the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation these days.

And that’s the shark that’s circling: It’s Donald Trump, with his intentional and brutal attack on the core right of Americans to free expression and to a free press.

From gutting Voice of America and other beacons of journalism globally to barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t use the words he tells it to use; from pushing the FCC to investigate media companies based upon what they broadcast to threatening to subpoena and prosecute reporters who use leaked information; from moving to defund public media to filing frivolous lawsuits aimed at intimidating honest media coverage; from rewarding platforms that are essentially right-wing propaganda outlets to targeting law firms that represent media clients, Trump is showing how little he cares about free speech as a Constitutional right and a human imperative. And he is pushing America toward a darker future where what we know can be limited by what an authoritarian leader wants us to know.

So, yes, it's hard to focus on the broader concern about AI when the immediate threat is POTUS.

Reporters Without Borders publishes a World Press Freedom Index every year, and these days the U.S. isn’t in the top categories of nations with “good” or even “satisfactory” press freedom, countries like Canada and Australia, the U.K. and most of western Europe. No, press freedom in America is now rated as “problematic” — like most of South America and the Mideast — and falling.

There has been some pushback to Trump, and free speech advocates have scored some wins against the repressive regime in Washington. Courts have sided with AP and ordered their reporters’ and photographers’ White House access restored, and a judge forced Trump to reinstate more than a thousand people who work for Voice of America and other broadcasters. Among major media covering the White House, plenty of journalists are standing firm and reporting accurately about Trump even as the owners of their platforms try to make nice with the president to preserve the profits that his egomaniacal bullying put at risk.

But what we all need to understand is that the First Amendment is not self-reinforcing: Free speech has no army. Except for us.

We mostly don’t get energized about free speech until it’s what we want to say that gets targeted — until it is us who are being silenced or chilled. Trump’s overt hostility to facts and his disenfranchisement of honest media outlets encourage misinformation and disinformation — which presents a threat to democratic stability.

That’s why we need to stand up for independent media. It’s why we need to hold the Trump enablers’ feet to the fire. It’s why the immediate threat on this World Press Freedom Day demands our attention even more than the quite valid emerging concerns about AI.

That circling shark is hungry. The sea is choppy. And our freedom is at risk.

It is, then, a time to declare mayday? Or is it time to join those demonstrations, and do more — each of us — to bail water and save this ship?

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WHAT DO YOU THINK?

TELL US WHY PRESS FREEDOM MATTERS

This column argues that press freedom in America is imperiled by actions of the Trump administration, and it cites a few examples of reporting this week that underscore the value of a free press in America. Do you have other examples from your recent reading, listening or viewing that make you grateful for an aggressive press corps? Let us know, and we’ll pass them along.

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GET MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.

LINK TO REX'S WAMC ESSAYS

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”

LINK TO THE MEDIA PROJECT

ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex Smith

As our local point of embarkation makes clear, a label does not reality make. (Photo: stuckattheairport.com)

We live up the road from Albany, a city that its boosters complain has long suffered from an inferiority complex so severe that some residents call it “Smallbany.” We know what that sort of pathology does to humans: People with an inferiority complex tend to avoid challenges and struggle to set goals; sometimes they overcompensate with attention-seeking behavior.

I’m not one of the region’s detractors, mind you. I’ve traveled in 49 states and lived all over the country — the Midwest, the West, the Southwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast — and, all in all, I’d rather be here, in Upstate America. But if you want an example of what the region’s pathology does to us, consider the fact that our airport is called Albany International Airport despite the fact that — here’s where the overcompensation appears — the airport, in fact, has no international departures or arrivals.

The airport took on that elevated name a quarter-century ago, just as a new terminal opened, and I recall that there was for a short time a weekly flight from Albany to Toronto. But that schedule was scrapped not long after the ribbon-cutting, making the airport’s name as nonsensical as the notion that Toronto will soon be the largest city in our 51^st state.

Still, as a strategy among regional leaders to combat the Smallbany mentality, the airport’s name might be useful. That’s because of how the human brain is wired: We are programmed to give disproportionate weight to the first information we receive, data that we then use to make subsequent judgments. Psychologists sometimes call this the anchoring effect. Once an idea is embedded in our brains — like, say, that Albany is an international destination and a port to the world, as the airport’s name suggests — it’s awfully hard to get humans to accept new information, even when facts contrary to our predisposed notions are as clear as a spring morning.1

I’ve been thinking about the anchoring effect, because it’s about the only explanation I can summon for the fact that roughly 45 percent of Americans still think Donald Trump is doing a good job as president. It’s no small thing, granted, that Trump’s approval rating has fallen steadily during his first three months in office, so that a majority now disapproves of what he is doing.2 But the fact that so many people remain Trump supporters — despite weeks of chaos in policy and execution, despite so many campaign promises already broken — must be attributable to what might charitably be called a misunderstanding of who he is and what he’s about. People got an idea anchored in their brains about the man, and it’s hard for that to be shaken.

Even so, we seem to be nearing a point at which Trump is going to have to adopt the line attributed to Groucho Marx, “Who’re you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”3 Even the most devoted MAGA-head, whose understanding of reality is distorted by the likes of Fox News and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, must be finding it hard to reconcile their preferred image of Donald Trump with the reality of his failing, flailing presidency.

No, America’s slide toward authoritarianism hasn’t been reversed, nor has the global deterioration of our nation’s influence been stemmed, and we aren’t soon going to be free of the malicious cruelty of so much of what this 47^th presidency is about. But public opinion eventually catches up with even the most stubborn politicians, forcing them to modify their behavior. A groundswell focusing on this presidency’s failures could provoke even the gutless Republicans of Congress to follow so many members of the judicial branch who are standing up to Trump.

There’s reason to think, then, that Donald Trump’s best days may now be behind him. For many of us, any hint of relief is welcome. As reality buffets the illusion that is Trump’s image, there’s a bit of wind in the sails of the resistance. But there’s danger blowing in the wind, too.

Before he became a politician, Donald Trump had a business career that, as many New Yorkers recall, counted at least as many failures as triumphs. His companies filed for bankruptcy six times, and more Trump businesses shut down without declaring bankruptcy while owing millions of dollars to vendors, employees and lenders. Three of the bankruptcies were for casinos; in the first two alone, bankruptcy laws enabled him to evade $4.8 billion in debt obligations. He borrowed $245 million to buy the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, rebranded it as Trump Airlines — with new gold fixtures in the bathrooms! — and then, after two years, defaulted on the debt and gave up the company. Other failed Trump ventures included efforts to sell Trump-branded vodka, fragrances, mattresses, steaks, bottled water and board games. Also going belly-up: Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgages, the GoTrump.com travel site, Trump University, Trump Tower Tampa and the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue.4

But, you say, the guy became a billionaire, so doesn’t that show his business acumen? It would, except that his apparent success was built on a string of financial shams that began with some $400 million of family money, as the Pulitzer-winning reporting of The New York Times revealed seven years ago. “In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” the Times reported.

That was published before a New York jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, and before a judge ruled that the Trump Organization violated the state’s fraud laws, resulting in a $400 million (unpaid) fine and Trump being barred from being an officer or director of any corporation in New York. No wonder The New Yorker declared him “a reckless conman.”5

But that’s not the impression of Donald Trump that took hold in the minds of millions of Americans who first encountered him through his 1987 ghostwritten book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, or through the reality TV series The Apprentice, which ran for 14 seasons on NBC. Both presented him as a successful business mogul — decisive, insightful and charismatic.

Unsurprisingly, then, one-third of Trump voters last year told pollsters that they supported him because of the “economy” or because “he is a good businessman.”6 They weren’t deterred by the fact that the multibillion-dollar tax cuts he pushed through during his first term didn’t deliver the growth he promised, nor that the tariffs he imposed then didn’t yield the promised factory jobs. Influenced by right-wing media, some 77 million voters chose Trump — a narrow but decisive popular vote margin of 1.5 points over Kamala Harris.

If Trump were in fact a sharp-witted business leader, he would be unlikely to install unseasoned sycophants like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel in crucial positions; he wouldn’t impose hastily-concocted policies like massive tariffs and then pull them back quickly; he would understand that credibility matters not only in human relations, but also in international affairs, as the decline in America’s standing internationally over the past three months has revealed.

And there’s this: Sophisticated business leaders understand the intangible value of goodwill — something a business has that isn’t tied to specific physical or financial assets, but that is a key component of a company’s overall valuation. The concept of goodwill — created by such factors as customer loyalty, reputation in the marketplace and future prospects — is a concept taught to first-year M.B.A. students. Goodwill matters to a nation, as well. Trump ought to understand that, though he does not have an M.B.A. Yes, that degree is granted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump’s alma mater, but his degree is B.S.

Really. I didn’t make that up.

It may be tempting to think that millions of Americans supported Trump in three presidential elections because of a mass delusional disorder — a mental condition that leaves an individual unable to tell what’s real from what’s imagined. But I’d say his success, rather, reflects an eagerness among Americans to imagine that he might be the kind of a leader they want. When Henry David Thoreau wrote, “This world is but a canvas to our imaginations,” he was suggesting that we each develop a sense of reality based on our own preconceptions.

We Americans want our leaders to be bold and brave, and Trump can lay claim to that: He does what he wants to do, consequences be damned, and his gutsy response to being shot last summer gave him a sheen of bravery that might erase the cowardice revealed in behavior such as his constant kowtowing to Vladimir Putin.

But we also want competence in government, at a minimum. And in the emerging failures of so many moves by this administration, Trump supporters are reluctantly confronting a reality that must challenge the anchoring effect that has sustained the president’s popularity. Many will defend their original beliefs, notwithstanding what they’re experiencing, because that’s what our brains tend to do. But eventually facts catch up with myths, and some facts are becoming hard for even Trump backers to ignore:

Markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth, then gone up and down wildly. Inflation is picking up, along with the threat of recession.

America has alienated most of the nations of the world, including our nearest neighbors and longest-standing friends.

Trump’s vow to quickly end the war in Ukraine devolved this week into a plaintive plea, “Vladimir, STOP!” on social media, and his approach to the Gaza war — a massive real-estate deal requiring the forced relocation of two million unwilling people — has won not a whisper of support from any other nation.

China, often cast by Trump as America’s most dangerous foe, is emboldened, filling the void left by the Trump-ordered U.S. retreat from life-saving support globally, and clearly holding the upper hand in negotiations over tariffs.

Federal judges — including many appointed by Trump — have knocked down his executive orders almost 100 times. Trump’s efforts to curtail the federal bureaucracy have mostly fizzled, while upending the lives of tens of thousands of public servants.

Some of his targets are finally starting to stand firm in the face of threats, including big law firms, universities and elected officials.

Even on immigration, the issue that was arguably Trump’s strongest advantage, a majority of Americans are now rejecting the administration’s unconstitutional over-reach.7

There is potential danger in how Trump and his supporters face turmoil and setbacks. Last week, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley told Dana Milbank, the insightful Washington Post columnist, that Trump’s chaotic presidency is unprecedented in U.S. history. “What we’re witnessing with Trump is just raw vengeance and belittling fellow Americans,” Brinkley said, “and creating a tinderbox situation that makes people feel we’re in a neo civil war that could go sideways at any moment.”8

This reality is beginning to sink into the consciousness of even the most avid Trump supporters, and it is pervasive among the independents who gave him the presidency and who hold the key to the 2026 midterm elections. As facts come smack up against preconceived notions of Trump, some powerful disillusionment will surely take hold. Will anchored beliefs become uncomfortably dislodged? Or will the faithful and their leader over-compensate by embracing even more extreme measures, with Trump continuing to insist that only lying eyes see problems in his approach? Eckhart Tolle, the German-born self-help teacher, has often focused on the peril of self-delusion. “Emotional suffering is created in the moment we don’t accept what is,” he wrote.

There’s no turnabout on the horizon as the 100-day mark of the second Trump presidency approaches. Many of those who backed Trump’s re-election are beginning to feel uncomfortable with the results of what is nothing less than an American catastrophe.

There: We’ve named it. No re-branding can change the harsh reality confronting us all. We can only do our best to tolerate what we must, resist what we can, and endure. And so we shall.

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If you can’t sing the hymn, make music some other way. Likewise, do what you can for America. (Photo by Michael Maasen on Unsplash)

Let me tell you, first, about Lirt Bolt, which is not the name of a company that manufactures steel fasteners and locks, though that would be a reasonable guess. No, Lirt Bolt was a guy I never knew, but whose simple habit so impressed my father that you’re reading about it today, some 90 years later.

Born in Virginia in the 1880s to a family with a dozen children, Lirt lived most of his life in a tiny central Indiana town called Lapel. About a dozen years before I was born, my dad became the young minister of the church in Lapel where Lirt Bolt was a regular Sunday presence.

Decades later, my dad told me about his arrival in Lapel, and why Lirt stood out: Hymns were a major part of the worship service, but Lirt could not sing. Mind you, only about 1.5 percent of the world’s population actually can’t hear differences in pitch, tone and rhythm, a result of what scientists call congenital amusia. Lirt wasn’t in that category, but he insisted that his voice was awful. Still, he didn’t want to miss the joyful experience of joining in the congregation’s music-making. So he whistled.

Lirt whistled in church in an era when churchgoers tended to sing the old hymns enthusiastically, if not always melodically. But above all the voices raised in renditions of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” say, or “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” folks in that little Indiana church could hear Lirt Bolt whistling the tune. He was a good whistler, my dad recalled.

Lirt thus created a real-life parable for everybody who witnessed what he did, underscoring by his example that each person could contribute in their own way to the shared experience of worship. So what if he couldn’t sing? Lirt Bolt did his part to make a joyful noise.

It’s a story that has lingered in the recesses of my memory, emerging somehow this week as signs emerged of growing resistance to the Trump administration’s radical wrecking-ball approach to American government and civil society. At a time when we need the strength of millions to counter the malevolence of a powerful leader and his minions, it’s appealing to consider the story of a guy who found his own way to participate in something he considered important. It’s what we each need as we scout around to find our answer to Trumpism.

In his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky writes, “Everyone is responsible to everyone for everything.” The line is engraved in the entry hall of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, a reminder of the moral imperative to care for the beings who share the planet with us.1

Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric and the brutal acts that have marked his return to the presidency make this much clear: The notion that we share a responsibility for each other is antithetical to Trumpism. A fundamental selfishness underlies decisions by the earth’s richest nation to pull back from projects it had committed to uphold — with a miniscule fraction of its wealth — to help save millions of people from starvation, for example, and to help shield the world from the worst effects of human-caused climate change. There is cruelty in the administration’s attacks on transgender youth, a lack of respect for the law in its unconstitutional exercise of executive authority and a sloppy disregard for human consequences in the manipulation of economic policy to match one man’s ignorant whims.

Dostoevsky’s words on responsibility reflect his religious faith as a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, but all the world’s major religions have similar expectations of believers: They demand kindness as a character trait and care for the poor as a priority of society, and they assert that humans deserve justice and fairness. Those imperatives clearly conflict with Trump administration directives, a fact that’s sadly irrelevant to a lot of Americans who claim to be people of faith — notably, adherents of evangelical Christianity, which is now less a religious movement than a political cult.

Trump’s sanctimony is a fraud, as many nonpartisan believers have noted. Citing scripture, Pope Francis has characterized Trump as “not Christian,” and has called his massive plan to deport migrants a “disgrace.” But scripture matters less to believers in the Church of Trump than, say, the so-called Law of Responsibility, which states that we are each solely responsible for everything we are, have and achieve. That sense of self-reliance appeals to those who see aid to the poor, support for racial minorities and comfort for immigrants as rewards for laziness, and view U.S. pledges to protect foreign allies as expensive distractions from Trump’s declared America First plan.

One of the honored sages in Jewish history, Rabbi Tarfon, who lived 19 centuries ago, explained the imperative to action that arises from Jewish law. “It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world,” he wrote, “but you are not free to desist from it, either.”2

To many of us, the task of bettering the world seems further from our grasp now than at any point in our lifetimes. Every day’s news carries more reports of outrages committed at Trump’s decree: people being investigated, threatened and deported because of something they said or believe; federal programs aimed at improving Americans’ health and safety being abandoned; efforts to assure that justice is applied evenly regardless of race, sex or national origin being virtually criminalized; families’ financial security being nearly wiped out due to the president’s sophomoric approach to the economy.

We’re buffeted by this onslaught of immoral acts, and it all threatens to overwhelm us. We are in only the opening weeks of the Trump administration, after all; there’s plenty of time for things to get worse before we’ll have much of a chance to make them get better.

Yet there are plenty of people who are even now taking on the task of resisting Trump, reflecting Rabbi Tarfon’s view: while it’s not our job to fix everything, we must do what we can to make a difference. Like Lirt Bolt, the non-singer who found his own way to make music, we need to each undertake the work of citizenship that is within our reach.

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A lot of us are groping for a response that might be equal to the breadth of Trump’s assault. David Brooks, the eminent New York Times columnist who has rather outgrown his conservatism in the Trump era, this week opined that what we need is “a comprehensive national civic uprising” in “one coordinated mass movement” that can counter the president.

“Trump is about power,” he wrote. “The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.” And to create that, Brooks suggests, we need “one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.”3

Fine. And where might that coordination begin? Brooks offered no ideas.

I think it can only emerge organically, from the seeds planted by individuals. Consider some of the ways that ordinary Americans are already doing what they can to make a difference.

Earlier this month, more than 3 million Americans showed up at rallies in more than 1,300 communities across the country to sound off against the Trump administration. The success of those demonstrations has inspired organizers, so this weekend there are more events planned in what’s called the 50501 movement — which stands for “50 states, 50 protests, 1 movement.” Simply showing up is, in these instances, an act of patriotism.

Meanwhile, some heroes are finally emerging from Trump’s demand for money and submission from the legal establishment, and responding to his effort to humiliate and reshape higher education. A few big law firms are resisting the bullying that has prompted some firms to promise Trump hundreds of millions of dollars of free legal work. And Harvard has set a standard for resistance in the face of Trump’s threats to ruin higher education, fraudulently touted under the guise of combatting anti-Semitism.

Some noted conservatives are speaking out against Trumpism, and a number of judges are standing up to insist on the rule of law even as Trump seems eager to provoke a constitutional crisis by ignoring their rulings.

Finally, let’s not overlook what we might call the spiritual leaders of the resistance, including Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who had the audacity during a prayer service in January to implore the president to be merciful, and Cory Booker, whose 25-hour speech on the first day of this month turned the Senate floor into an unlikely scene of moral resolve.

These visible players draw news coverage, and they can inspire others to stand up for the principles of our democracy that Trump has put at risk. But the groundswell that Brooks suggests we need awaits the action of millions of people — and that’s where we all come in.

We need to bear in mind the words of Edward Everett Hale, the influential 19^th-century writer and clergyman, a potent advocate of the anti-slavery cause, who urged his countrymen to join in the campaign. “I am only one, but I am one,” he wrote. “I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” 4

When we stand up for not-for-profit organizations doing good work in our communities — with financial support or volunteer hours — we are bucking the destructiveness of Trumpism. Increasingly, the well-being of Americans is being protected not by their government, but by the likes of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Earthjustice, and Habitat for Humanity. Here’s how we make a difference: Find at least one group making a difference on an issue you care about, and do what you can to help.

Too, we need to support the organizations contributing to our quality of life that are now at risk due to federal budget slashing. Arts groups, humanities councils, social service charities and schools all are facing unprecedented financial pressure. In many cases, it will take a resurgence of small-scale donors to save these services.

One more place to turn: We must step up to combat Trump’s ongoing assault on journalism. Local news organizations that care about our communities are reeling from financial losses caused by the digital revolution, and also from Trump’s assault on the very idea of independent journalism. If you aren’t a subscriber to the truth-tellers in your community, you should become one today.

And, of course, we must continue to apply pressure to our elected representatives, to insist that they stand up to Trump’s ego-fueled grab for power.

Of course, even if we do all of these things, Trumpism isn’t going to crumple anytime soon. But in whatever way we can, we can each make a difference in the resistance. If we can’t donate, we can volunteer; if we can’t do direct action, we can be advocates.

It’s the lesson of old Lirt Bolt, who whistled because he couldn’t sing: He could still be a part of the music. Likewise, we all must be a part of the effort, and make sure that we, too, are heard.

We’re far from the hoopla of the nation’s bicentennial, but that doesn’t mean we should give up hope. (Photo on Unsplash by Matt Busse)

Here’s a whopper of a word that you probably haven’t used lately, or maybe ever before: semiquincentennial. You might want to practice saying it aloud, because it’s how the U.S. government officially refers to our nation’s coming 250^th anniversary. You could also call it a bisesquicentennial, or a sestercentennial, English being a language of migrant terms — all Latin, in this case, though not of the sort now being deported by our government.

But in deference to the fact that you don’t know who they’ll come for next, maybe we should just call it America’s Bigly Birthday, to fully respect the guy who is likely to be our president, still, in 2026.

Surely it’s not because of the word’s clumsiness that we don’t hear much about the semiquincentennial. Could it have anything to do with fading pride, or hope?

For those of us who were around for the nation’s bicentennial, the contrast is striking: 50 years ago we were already deep into a years-long celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. By the spring of 1975, the American Bicentennial logo was ubiquitous — on license plates, coloring books, patriotic trinkets, government vehicles — and patriotic observances were being staged in communities all over the country.

It wasn’t an easy time. America was still absorbing the social upheaval of the 1960s, trying to recover from an unpopular war that divided us, coping with the shock of the nation’s only presidential resignation. Yet there was a sense that we had emerged from the recent turmoil with our values intact, and that the nation’s future would be better. We were eager to celebrate what we understood to be our glorious 200-year history.

These days it might be hard to find people who embrace such an optimistic view. Is the difference between then and now that we’ve developed a more honest understanding of our nation’s past? Grown more uncertain about its future? Absorbed more anger about what’s going on right now? Or are just too damn embarrassed about our government to want to wave a flag?

Maybe for all of those reasons, we’re clearly not gearing up to celebrate America as enthusiastically as we did a half-century ago. Many of us will find it hard to full-heartedly honor a country that is today governed by increasingly anti-democratic forces, that is squandering its role as a protector of freedom globally and a leader of nations with mainly honorable intentions. Could MAGA folks and progressives these days even get together long enough to plan a celebration of the nation’s founding?

Yet there are ways in which, surprisingly, we might be better positioned than we imagine to reaffirm the course that our nation’s founders imagined when they launched the American democratic experiment in 1776. Maybe we have more resilience than seems apparent at this moment — and maybe, then, there will be more than we expect to celebrate in 2026.

Oh, there’s a lot to complain about if you’re a thoughtful American, and plenty that deserves our attention more than wondering about how we mark one particular Independence Day. This week we witnessed the specter of a president capriciously plunging the entire world into economic uncertainty; ordering that the government’s power be brought to bear against more of the people and institutions that have offended him or that stand against his drive for unbridled power; and continuing to dismantle both the economic stability and the cultural framework that have for decades marked this civilized society. What Donald Trump and his enablers are doing is truly awful — it is weakening America, at home and abroad — and we need to devote our energy to fighting it. Yes, that’s certainly more important than worrying about how we mark an anniversary that’s 15 months away.

But partying isn’t what I’m talking about. If I indulge in a bit of reminiscence here, it could help illuminate both how we might begin to recover from this treacherous moment and where we may be in that recovery process when we celebrate America’s 250^th.

This week I shared a sentimental dinner with three old friends I made during that Bicentennial season. We got together at a restaurant in Washington, the city that brought us together all those decades ago. Back then, we were young people working for a reform-minded member of Congress, one of the 92 Democrats freshly elected to the House in 1974. They were called “Watergate babies,” because their election — an off-year landslide for Democrats that set the stage for Jimmy Carter’s White House win two years later — was seen as a repudiation of years of scandal and economic decline under Republican leadership.

It was a fraught time in America. During that 1974 election season, I was the editor of a tiny daily newspaper in a Corn Belt county seat, where the biggest controversy wasn’t Richard Nixon’s resignation in shame that August, but rather the fight to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. People said the ERA would allow men to use women’s bathrooms and would mean that men and women would compete against each other on sports teams. Do those worries sound familiar today? (One more question: Can somebody please explain this American fixation on rest rooms and gender purity?)

In the couple of years leading up to that election, we had worried that the president was surrounded by “yes-men” who wouldn’t restrain his darker tendencies, which was eventually proven true when top White House officials went to prison for their Watergate offenses. We had warned against unchecked executive power after Nixon imposed a freeze on all wages and prices, undermining generations of conservative rhetoric about the nation’s free market system (and eventually, when the controls expired, leading to disastrous inflation and joblessness). When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, Americans were revolted by the sense that the nation’s stated standard of equal justice for all had been forever weakened.

Some months after that election, the newly-elected congressman from our mainly rural district in northwestern Indiana, Floyd Fithian, asked me to come to Washington as his press secretary. He was a good man, a clear thinker and a hard worker. I stayed for four years, handling both press relations and some legislative matters, before returning to journalism. My staff colleagues both in Washington and in Indiana were mostly, like me and like a lot of congressional aides today, young and energetic.

Over dinner this week, as we shared memories from decades ago, I was reminded of the nation’s bicentennial celebration: On the 4th of July, Washington hosted a huge parade, and that evening perhaps a million people came together on the National Mall for what was said to be the biggest fireworks show in history. “The mood of the crowd was that expected at a family birthday party — cheerful and relaxed,” The New York Times reported the next day. I recall walking through the huge and diverse crowd at dusk on my way to a rooftop celebration hosted by one of this week’s dinner companions, where we watched the fireworks burst in midair over the Potomac. It was long after midnight when I made my way back across the Mall, which by that time was nearly empty.

Feeling patriotic that warm night, I decided to visit the Capitol. Security wasn’t as tight then as it is now; with my congressional staff ID, I was allowed to wander through Statuary Hall and into the Rotunda. Looking up, I stared at a 4,664-square-foot painting that hangs some 15 stories above the rotunda floor, The Apotheosis of Washington. It depicts the nation’s first president seated in the heavens among figures of mythology, flanked by the goddesses of liberty and victory.1

There, in the symbolic heart of our democracy, on the very bicentennial of the nation’s birth, I was awestruck by my comfortable pride in being an American.

It's a moment I have recalled often in recent years, always with a growing sense of sorrow at how deeply disappointed we have grown in what the United States has become. The American Psychological Association reported late last year that 77 percent of Americans consider the future of the nation a significant source of stress in their lives.2 Even so, our sense of pride is hard to shake: two-thirds of Americans still say they are extremely or very proud to be American — which, while sturdy, is down from the three-quarters who boasted of that pride early in the 21^st century.

As the turmoil of the Trump presidency begins to be felt, however, opinion is shifting. Trump’s approval rating has dropped in the days since he first announced sweeping tariffs, with most voters saying his moves will hurt the economy in both the short- and long-term.3 In coming months — as voters absorb the reality of sharp cuts in popular programs, and as Trump fails to deliver on his promises to control inflation while reducing taxes and cutting spending dramatically — the mood of voters likely will turn even more sour. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics this week predicted that Democrats would win control of the House next year.4

In some ways, then, it’s beginning to sound a lot like 50 years ago: A president surrounded by loyalists who won’t restrain his worst impulses, an economy in stress, a sense that justice for all is a slogan that doesn’t really apply anymore. Could we be poised for a political shift, then, in our semiquincentennial year?

Over that dinner and a couple of beers this week, one of my office-mates from that post-Watergate period on Capitol Hill offered a confident assessment: “It’s going to be 1974 all over again,” he said, predicting a powerful rebuke of the sitting president in next year’s midterm elections.

It’s sweet to consider the potential to hold the White House to account, a likely consequence if Democrats win control of the House. But there are hurdles that must be cleared if that’s going to happen.

First, we must recognize that we’ve become a nation of people who voice little faith in its future, regardless of which party is in power. That offers an opportunity to organizations and candidates who can credibly present a contrast with the status quo. At the end of last year, just 19 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the right direction — a huge opportunity for advocates of change.5 Of course, nobody is going to create a work of art showing today’s leaders ascending to stature among the gods, but success usually follows those who present a positive vision. The American philosopher William James is widely credited with saying, “Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

Second, we need to recognize that the 21^st century media landscape means that many citizens don’t receive credible information about what’s going on — so that, unlike a half-century ago, public opinion won’t necessarily shift as circumstances do. Fox News and its imitators do their best to suppress information that’s critical of the president, and online influencers gave Trump extra help last year. But that dynamic will surely be complicated as economic difficulties created by Trump policies begin to affect everyday lives. To encourage reality-based decision-making by voters, we must support news outlets that respect facts — especially the emerging ecosystem of non-profit journalism, including the public broadcasting outlets that are on the verge of losing government funding.

Third, while political success doesn’t always follow campaign money, it usually does — which means that both donations and activism are essential to electing a new Congress. Last year, 94 percent of the House races and 88 percent of the Senate races were won by the top-spending candidates.6 Even so, hard work matters: While the congressman I worked for in the 1970s got a lift from the post-Watergate tide, he had engaged in a five-year quest to oust a bad incumbent. The time is now to begin working on behalf of under-resourced candidates, so they will be poised to take advantage of likely rising voter resentment of Washington’s failures.

It’s not that we should welcome the adversity presented by Trump’s malfeasance and the complicity of the Republican-led Congress. But neither should we fail to take advantage of its effects. Winston Churchill, whose inspirational leadership sustained England during World War II, summed it up well with a reference to that notion of optimism, purportedly saying, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Which, then, is where we might ideally find ourselves now: to be motivated, rather than downtrodden, by the ineptitude and cruelty of what’s coming from Washington. If the national mood is sagging, it’s our challenge to present a different vision. Indeed, the gift we must help deliver to the nation around the time of its 250^th birthday is just that: a rebirth of hope.

After all, the word semiquincentennial means, literally, that we’re halfway to our 500^th birthday. So it’s a word based in optimism — which is what we must bring to the fight if we hope to win. I want to again feel that comfortable patriotism, and celebrate it at this perilous time in our history.

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Plants collaborate, and they figure out how to survive. There’s something in that, right? (Photo by Chloé Leblanc on Unsplash)

Daffodils are poking up all around our neighborhood, and just in time: We all need a bit of cheering up. But beyond their usual happy report that spring is at hand, the little yellow trumpets this year seem to offer more than that — even, maybe, a suggestion of how we’re going to get through this Bleak Season of Trump.

No, a flower can’t wave a protest sign or work to un-elect a weak-kneed member of Congress. But plants communicate, it seems, both to other flora and to we fauna, and they create networks of collaboration that we might do well to emulate.

Botanists tell us that daffodils, for example, release organic chemicals that attract such pollinators as bees and butterflies, whose survival may depend upon that invisible invitation to pollenate. They’re also the garden’s security guards, producing lycorine, a bitter-tasting compound that is toxic to squirrels, voles and mice, critters that might otherwise devastate neighboring plants.1

Scientists have been studying this kind of collaboration among plants since Darwin’s time. Research has uncovered the presence of fungal networks in the soil that enable plants to share nutrients and send warnings about pests and diseases. They have found symbiotic electrical signals linking one wounded plant species to another. Two years ago, scientists at Tel Aviv University published a paper concluding that plants under stress emit sounds that are “airborne and informative.”2

All of which suggests an agenda for stressed Americans: Push useful information out into the world. Collaborate. Nurture and protect each other. Survive and thrive through even the toughest of seasons.

Lately there have been signs that the carnage of President Donald Trump’s first weeks back in office is reaching the awareness of even the most stubborn MAGA enthusiasts, piercing the shield of propaganda that Fox News and other right-wing media deploy to protect him. Meanwhile, among the still-shellshocked opponents of Trump, there is a rumbling of the kind of response we will need if we hope to prevent a multi-faceted disaster.

To be sure, nothing will undo the vast range of Trump destruction — the gutting of aid programs that have kept millions of people around the world alive, the abandonment of plans to fight devastating climate change, the loss of American leadership in the free world’s contest with repressive regimes, and, most recently, the economic turbulence that everyone knew would follow his reckless launch of a global trade war. The stock market seems to be in freefall. Heckuva job, Donnie.

All of that only begins to describe the chaos that a mentally troubled and morally deficient American president is bringing to a world that was already on edge. We’re also witnessing his attack on higher education, his repression of LGBTQ+ rights, his attempts to distort the truth of history, his manipulation of the tax code so that wealth inequity will actually grow. This week New Jersey’s Cory Booker delivered a 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, a heroic if ultimately symbolic effort to spotlight Trump-induced American ruination, and even in all that, he surely didn’t get all of it.

None of the tumult will diminish anytime soon, though, and some of it will change America and the world forever. It’s 576 days until the midterm congressional election, where we have a chance to restrain Trump’s impulse to devastation; it’s 187 weeks until we will get to vote for a new president. There will be plenty of hardship to tolerate between now and then, a lot of mess to clean up as we go along and, hopefully, some comfort to be extended to the people most hurt by what Trump is doing (with, let’s be clear, the shameful acquiescence of his party).

But there are rumblings of resistance in America. It will do us good to take note of them. Because as surely as the daffodils signal spring, these first signs of effective pushback remind us that we are not helpless or hopeless.

We have some choices to make and chances to take, and a fight to wage. But we have to pay attention.

Consumer confidence has been tumbling this year, and by the end of March the Conference Board reported that it hasn’t been this low since January of 2021 — the month, not incidentally, that Donald Trump moved out of the White House after his first term. We can only speculate where the figure will stand even at the end of this month, as we begin to take stock of the impact of Trump’s tariffs.3

More than money woes worry Americans, though. A national poll last month of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that nearly two-thirds have more fear than hope about the future of the nation’s democracy. Fully 7 in 10 blame politicians for that; 6 in 10 mentioned the negative impact of money in politics. Notably, those proportions were shared alike by young people who considered themselves Republicans, Democrats and independents.4

But it’s not just the kids: Oxford University’s annual World Happiness Report, a survey conducted in collaboration with Gallup and the UN, reported last month that Americans’ happiness had continued its decade-long decline, dropping in the latest report to 24^th, its lowest-ever spot among the 140 nations surveyed. The happiness of our citizens – living, let’s remember, in the richest country of the world, with security and comfort unparallelled in history – now falls below those in nations at war (Israel, no. 8), or fighting poverty and organized crime (Mexico, no. 10) or experiencing harsh weather (Iceland, no. 3; United Arab Emirates, no. 22).5

How do we explain the broad unhappiness of Americans? Mark Williamson, the head of the non-profit Action for Happiness, told NBC News that it likely arose from the “ongoing challenges around cost of living, economic uncertainty and political polarization.” He added, “We have also observed an increase in anxiety in the population.”

Really. Can’t imagine why we would be anxious.

Three-quarters of Americans say gun violence is either a major problem or a moderately big problem. Six in 10 say healthcare costs cause them “a great deal” of worry, the same level of concern that more than half of us say we feel about inflation, federal spending, the budget deficit and Social Security. Hunger and homelessness and the way income and wealth are distributed also worry almost half of us.6

Those statistics were reported only days ago, but it was before masked agents started seizing people off the streets and deporting them to foreign prisons, before Social Security offices started closing down, and right about the time that top federal officials used an insecure chat space to discuss an imminent military attack with a journalist on the line.

It will be interesting, then, to survey public opinion that takes into account the latest news, including Trump’s voluntary attack on individuals’ retirement accounts — which is an admittedly personal way to view the imposition of tariffs at a level not seen since the 19^th century, when imports moved by steamship and factories relied upon the brawn of unskilled workers rather than the production of scientifically-engineered nanoscale circuits.

So yes, we have reason to be troubled. Fortunately, experts have suggestions for individuals who feel overwhelmed or helpless. They tell us to try relaxation techniques — meditation, deep breathing, spending time outside. We are urged to set boundaries for our work, so that we’re not overwhelmed by responsibilities that can lead to burnout. They suggest a healthy lifestyle, including getting plenty of exercise and taking time to eat well.7

And the experts say, especially, that we need connections. Maybe we find that among supportive acquaintances and family members, or perhaps through community service groups or a church. It’s not only for the music that I sing in a fine choral ensemble, by the way; it’s for the people in the group, too. Maybe you would find human connections in an organization doing political work — making your engagement both therapeutic and useful.

So we understand some of why we are upset, and some of what we need to do to combat that. But in this season of hope, there’s also this: Indications are emerging of the first cracks in Trump’s edifice of American chaos. Take heart.

In a time of distress, we can be grateful when we come across “small reasons for modest optimism,” as former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich described them in an essay he wrote a couple of days ago. Reich is as sharp-eyed and experienced an observer as we have in contemporary affairs, so his list was worth noting.

Among Reich’s reasons for optimism were the first votes cast in this Trump term, which didn’t bode well for the Trump-Musk team. On the day before Trump unveiled his disastrous tariffs plan, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal to the state’s top court over a Trump-backed conservative who got a $20 million cash infusion and some personal campaign appearances from Elon Musk. They also re-elected a Democratic state schools superintendent by a wide margin over a MAGA candidate.

There’s also the simmering resentment among ordinary citizens, not only in areas where Democrats predominate. The few Republican members of Congress who venture into public forums with their constituents keep bumping into angry crowds, and Democrats have begun to hold sessions in districts where the elected representatives are afraid to show their faces. Is that what is prompting a few Republicans to openly defy the president, notably in voting to overturn the tariffs on Canada?

And there’s a sense that the seemingly lumbering force of the opposition — including Democratic officials in Congress and elsewhere — is stirring, exemplified by Booker’s monumental speech. Reich notes that the notion that protests haven’t kept pace with what greeted Trump’s first term isn’t accurate, anyway: a study found that twice as many street protests had occurred this year as at the same point eight years ago. More than 1,000 protest events were scheduled this weekend, in all 50 states.

In all, there are plenty of signs that the slight majority of Americans who elected Trump – by just 1.5 points over Kamala Harris, let’s recall – is eroding. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between March 30 and April 1 found that 43 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance in office, and 53 percent disapproved. Let’s see how that number moves as Americans confront trillions of dollars of lost value in a bear market, and a prediction from the Federal Reserve chair that Trump’s tariffs will send up prices and slow down growth. And let’s see how that movement of citizen sentiment affects action Capitol Hill.

Nobody can be glad for the misery that seems to be moving more Americans toward a reckoning for Trump. But if misery there be, let us take a bit of comfort, anyway, in the fact that its cause is facing consequences.

And let’s join in making sure it happens. With a bit of self-care and collaboration, we can both sustain ourselves and engage in the fight that is necessary against the damaging excesses of Trumpism. There will be plenty of setbacks, but there are signs of growing hope and an emerging course for the resistance.

Which reminds me of those daffodils. I hope they last. Those of us who live in places like Upstate New York are familiar with “false spring” — the term we use when a spurt of warm weather fools us into thinking winter is over. It happens most years: Plants begin to bud, animals move about and humans put away snow shovels, only to be shocked by a return to days or weeks of cold. This year the chill has been hanging on; forecasters say we’ll still get down into the 20s this week.

But the warming is inevitable. And when summer comes it will seem all the more sweet for what we’ve endured. We’ll get there.

Sometimes there’s a lesson in how we tell a story — like when a banana warned of economic distress. (Photo by Rodrigo dos Reis on Unsplash)

A corner of the brain called the visual cortex stores not only images but also some of the context surrounding what we remember seeing. That’s apparently why a bunch of bananas has in recent days triggered my heartbroken fixation on the loss of candor, capacity and restraint in American politics.

To understand how we get from brain science to a tropical fruit to politics — a winding path, I concede — we will need to recall the mostly forgotten story of a witty bureaucrat who a half-century ago briefly brought the banana into the national conversation about economics. Maybe after reading this, you too will come to see a banana as not just a banana — for a while, anyway — but rather as a mark of how far our government has fallen from the ideal of honesty and competence that we ought to expect and demand.

My visual cortex jumped into action the other day because, as it happens, a bunch of bananas was poking out of the grocery bag in my car as I was listening to a podcast that laid out details of what people are calling Signalgate — the sloppy inclusion of a prominent journalist in a group chat where, over several days, 18 top Trump administration officials used a non-secure messaging channel to discuss plans for a military strike on Yemen. It was a shocking security breach, though the Trump administration is doing its best to paper over what’s actually a scandal while pretending that it was the journalist who did something wrong.

And so my brain somehow mashed together the sight of those bananas in the bag with Pete Hegseth laying out in a Signal message exactly when the first bombs would fall, and JD Vance complaining that an attack on the Houthis was “bailing out Europe again” — since it’s mainly European shipping lanes that the Houthi attacks have been disrupting — to which the square-jawed and abundantly-tattooed Pentagon chief eagerly agreed, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”1

Actually, “pathetic” is an apt description of the hypocrisy that excuses this awful incompetence, as the White House has done, since this is a crowd that vilified Hillary Clinton for the much less consequential act of using a private email server. Clinton never disclosed battle plans that might have enabled eavesdropping enemies to blow American pilots out of the sky, you know, as Hegseth did; she did not suggest that the president she served didn’t understand the issue at hand, as Vance did.

Unfortunately for Clinton — and fortuitously for the Trump Amateur Hour Signal Corps — control of Congress often determines the consequences of ineptitude in the executive branch. So the relevant committee chairs in the House and Senate so far seem disinclined to do anything much about Signalgate. Plus, the eager Trump tub-thumpers of Fox News are uninterested in reporting anything critical of Hegseth, their former weekend host colleague, or anybody else involved in the right-wing administration that was brought to us by the most damaging immigrant in American history, Rupert Murdoch. (Where was Trump’s wall when we needed it?)

But let’s not forget the journalist who illuminated all this: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. We ought to note his admirable restraint in not immediately publishing what he had uncovered until he was sure it wasn’t a hoax and wouldn’t endanger national security. But that didn’t stop White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt from calling him an “anti-Trump hater” — mild criticism, perhaps, in the context of her boss’s prior labeling of Goldberg as a “sleazebag,” “con man” and “slimeball reporter.” (Sidenote: How far we’ve come from the shock of discovering on the Watergate tapes that a president might speak coarsely.) From the MAGA point of view, one would think that failing to notice such a notorious figure in a consequential conversation about sending American forces into battle would draw at least a scolding from the boss. Trump seems to lack the guts.

But the president wants to say less about this, clearly expecting the story to blow over. And he may be right, if only because it’s hard for news consumers to keep track of the daily outrages emanating from the 47^thpresidency. To note a few in the days after the Signal story broke: Trump announced an inflationary 25 percent tariff on cars and auto parts imported from Mexico and Canada; Vance and his wife traveled, uninvited and unwelcome, to Greenland, which Trump has threatened to take by force; Trump extorted $100 million worth of free legal work from an elite law firm to avoid an executive order punishing it for prior representation; the administration cancelled funding for dozens of studies into potential vaccines for future pandemics; federal agents seized foreign-born graduate students at Tufts and the University of Alabama in a further crackdown on free speech.

All of those actions, you may note, depend upon an expansive view of presidential power — a remarkable shift for an administration of the Republican party, which once advocated limited government and raised voluble defense of the Constitution. A president calling for global expansion — to give America control not only of Greenland, but also Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza — is at odds with even Trump’s own campaign calls for withdrawing America from foreign conflicts. Trump’s protectionism sharply diverges from the historic Republican advocacy for free trade, which was party orthodoxy from at least the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.2 Reagan, we might note, also opposed a border wall and advocated amnesty over deportation for undocumented immigrants.3

Which underscores how radical the Trump regime is, rather than truly conservative, and how widely its incompetence is spread. All of this stands in sharp contrast to the man who brought the banana to the discussion of economic policy, which you surely recall is how we began this conversation.

If Americans in the 1970s had been able to peer forward to the presidential campaign of 2024, they might have been envious of the economic record that the Biden administration brought to voters. It would surprise them, surely, to imagine that many pundits would blame inflation for the Democrats’ narrow loss to Donald Trump, because the reality of inflation 50 years ago was quite a bit more harsh than today’s.

It's not that high prices weren’t a justifiable concern for American voters last year, with the inflation rate during Biden’s four years in office averaging 4.95 percent. It’s just that by historical standards, that’s not so high: It is just 0.27 percent higher than the average inflation rate during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, more than a full point below inflation during the term of Richard Nixon and two points less than inflation during Gerald Ford’s short tenure. But of all the presidents since World War II, it was Jimmy Carter who wrestled with the highest average inflation rate: 9.85 percent.4

Carter had come into office after the lethal mix of stagnant growth and inflation — the portmanteau is “stagflation” — that had led Nixon to impose wage and price controls. To help him fight the economic battle, Carter turned to a brilliant and blunt Cornell University economist, Alfred Kahn, and asked him to take on the role of what came to be called “inflation czar.” Valedictorian at New York University at age 18, Kahn had earned a doctorate at Yale and then turned to teaching, which he loved in part because of the chance it gave him to engage directly with people and grapple with hard issues to find truth.5

Kahn had for a few years stepped away from Cornell to head utility oversight for New York State, where he had begun a process of deregulation. He had spent the first 16 months of Carter’s term launching airline deregulation as head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, where his work was so effective that it changed approaches to business regulation in other sectors and even other countries. After his death in 2010, The Economist noted that Kahn’s “adventures with airlines led on to the freeing of the trucking, telecoms and power industries.”6

With no bureaucracy reporting to him and only the power of persuasion, Kahn was an unusual force in government. An eager performer — he was a baritone, and loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan — Kahn was engaging and candid. This sometimes got him in hot water. Asked once by a reporter if he could defend the size of the defense budget, he replied with a single word: “No.” He conceded that his projection for economic growth “isn’t worth the air it rides on.” When he called Arab oil producers “schnooks” in the middle of the oil embargo, the White House made him retract it.

Notably, Kahn couldn’t bring himself to lie to reporters. Late in his life he recalled an incident when he hadn’t responded fully to a journalist’s questions. “And I remember feeling so bad about it,” he said, “that I went back to the reporter and said, ‘I fudged to you, and I'm really sorry because as a rule I never try to mislead anyone.’”

But some remember him most for what happened when he warned honestly that if inflation continued to soar, there was the possibility of “deep, deep depression.” Carter was reported to be furious and to have demanded that Kahn purge “the D-word” from his use. So, Time reported, Kahn began to say instead, “We’re in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.” 7

Funny. Point made: the man wouldn’t lie for anyone.

Objections quickly came from banana producers — what, they demanded, did bananas have to do with a depression? — prompting Kahn to obligingly change his code word to “kumquat.” He wasn’t trying to hoodwink anybody; he was using humor to make a serious point that he couldn’t bring himself to either ignore or lie about.

Kahn’s government job came to an end when Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, whose early tenure led to a recession that finally brought prices under control. So America got neither banana nor kumquat, but it lost a truth-teller from public service.

Can anyone imagine a public official like Alfred Kahn nowadays? The fans of Donald Trump cite his engaging speech — which, linguists have noted, has the patter of stand-up comics, and which he often claims is suffused with truths that other people don’t offer.8 But Trump is not “candid” in the sense that Kahn was — that is, not if that term is defined as including “honesty.”

Trump is, in fact, a habitual and relentless liar, at a scale unprecedented in American history. The Washington Post Fact Checker team counted 30,573 false or misleading statements during his first term in office, including 503 on the last day before the 2020 vote. As time went by, he became more unmoored from reality — averaging about six false claims a day in his first year in office, then 16 a day in his second year, 22 in his third year and 39 in his final year.

That impressive record of mendacity seems unlikely to stand, though. He has turned more recently to whoppers, like the myth that immigrants were eating family pets in Ohio. There has been a lot more: Voters did not give him a “massive mandate” (reality: he won by just 1.5 points); 21 million people did not enter the U.S. illegally during Biden’s term (there were only half that many border arrests, many of them people crossing more than once); Trump has not “stopped all government censorship” (tell that to the universities he is bludgeoning); and there was no program to send $100 million worth of condoms to Gaza, a claim Trump made after initially saying the figure was a mere $50 million (the former number, extrapolating Post calculations, would rain 3 billion condoms on an area roughly double the size of Washington).9

Lying so extravagantly on such matters suggests untrustworthiness in any realm. And it has broader effects: The Society for Personality and Social Psychology notes that lying at such scale can erode trust in society generally.10 When seen at the apex of society, lying becomes a more widely accepted practice, leading people to assume that others are lying. That makes it more unlikely that people will trust the institutions of society. And the loss of trust is one way that whole societies break down.

This suggests that the lackadaisical response of Republicans in Congress to the Signalgate fiasco is a result of the casual relationship with truth that has become pervasive in the Trump era. That’s not to say that we didn’t see lying in politics before; political ambition has always been a motivation for exaggeration and falsehood. Under Trump, however, falsity has become foundation for policy.

Thus, U.S. Agency for International Development programs to provide food and vaccines to children in poor countries are abandoned as “misguided and fiscally irresponsible,” and millions will die. Thus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises to “make America healthy again” and then announces plans to cut 20,000 health agency jobs, reflecting his longtime proposals to halt all infectious disease research for eight years and focus on Vitamin A and diet as an alternative to the measles vaccine. Thus, immigrants without documentation are deported to foreign cells under the pretense that they are violent criminals, with no showing of that being true.

And thus officials at government’s highest levels, whose roles entrust them with the task of protecting our lives and our nation’s values, carelessly dabble in a dangerous breach of security, then claim against all evidence that there’s nothing to see here, folks, so keep moving along.

And, really, it’s Europeans who are pathetic?

I often find hope these days more in great fiction than in fact. Consider one of the books that the MAGA faithful love to ban, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by the native American writer Sherman Alexie. The novel’s protagonist, a middle-schooler trying to fit in, at one point warns himself, “Of course, you can’t lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.”11

Maybe someday the stink of Trump lies and their widespread infection of his cohort will be enough to disgust Americans, and the pushback will bring change. Then, we have to hope, smart and honest people might again show up in public life — like the guy who brought a banana to his discussion of economics, because he couldn’t lie about what he believed. We’ll smile. We will be ready for that day.

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If only we had as much confidence in our government as we do in the return of our little friends in spring. (Photo by Omar Mena for Unsplash)

There comes an evening about this time every year when my wife summons our pup Roscoe and me to join her in a walk through the dark to a bog that’s a couple hundred yards up the road. As we get near, there’s a rising sound of buzzing and chirping that’s by now familiar: It’s the season premiere of the peeper and wood frog chorus, presented by choraliers just awakened from their winter torpor to sing us into springtime. Their performance is as regular as the moonrise.

This year the cacophony was especially welcome, maybe because it reassured us that some things remain steady and predictable. Buds are appearing on some branches, too, and on the ground there are blossoms of tiny snowdrops, the hardy early risers of the amaryllis family.

We’re grateful. The season’s change seems to be something we need just now, when so much is no longer so dependable.

It’s impossible to predict which part of the immense damage that Donald Trump is bringing to America and the world will be most lasting. But we will no doubt long regret the loss of our nation’s reputation for reliability and stability, which will unquestionably outlast the 47^th presidency.

Consider the abandonment of Ukraine and the accompanying overt hostility to NATO, the foolhardy trade war that will upend the economies of our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and the abrupt dismantling of aid programs that have kept millions of people alive in impoverished nations. It’s hard to imagine how any country will ever again consider America to be a dependable ally. If, somehow, Trump is followed by, say, a decade of sturdy leadership, will the mistrust and hostility that now greets us abroad even then be abated?

It's not just the view of the United States from outside that has changed. How might we Americans ever assume that our government’s institutions and policies might outlast a single executive? After all, if a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by a president can be disregarded by the next president with barely a whimper from Congress, as we’re seeing just now, there’s no reason to imagine that respect for the continuity of law will magically return when Trump blessedly leaves the scene.

Thus the whole process of governing is fast becoming dispensable. What goes on in the Capitol increasingly seems farcical, anyway, since many members of the legislative branch seem to be engaged in a performative imitation of lawmaking — as though their main job is to show up in the media as either a claque or a critic of the man in the White House, effectively auditioning for a chance to host a podcast or a cable TV show themselves after their days in elective office have run out.

Does this sound cynical? I hate feeling cynical about my government. I’ve been a proud patriot since I was a little boy growing up in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. As a young man, I worked in government for four years, never losing the stirring in my heart as I climbed the steps to a side entrance of the Capitol. A visit at sunrise to the Lincoln Memorial still leaves me misty-eyed, and I’ve been known to quote without provocation the words that encircle the frieze under the dome of that other great Washington cathedral to democracy, the Jefferson Memorial: “I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Now we are led by an ignoble and unstable president who is eager to exert tyrannical control over our minds and personal behavior. He wants us to accept that some Americans because of their gender incongruence must be barred from the full privileges of citizenship, despite laws protecting their civil rights. He demands that universities block students from hearing views that diverge from what he considers appropriate, notwithstanding First Amendment protection of free speech. He says that judges who rule against him should be thrown off the bench, and that lawyers who fairly represent those who disagree with him should be jailed, the independence of the judiciary and the right to counsel be damned. He has called for the execution for treason of military leaders who affirmed allegiance to their constitutional oath over their loyalty to him.

In all this, Trump is upending what we have long assumed to be the bedrock values of American government. He is a dangerous, unsteady man, and while his career both in business and in politics foreshadowed this untrustworthiness, the peril he now presents is in his reshaping of America in his own image — to be a nation just as erratic and capricious as he is. How can America ever be steadied, then, and its course returned to something even vaguely trustworthy?

Trust in all major institutions has been declining worldwide for years. Edelman, the global public affairs firm, has for a quarter-century issued an annual Edelman Trust Barometer report, and the 2025 version, with data from an online survey of 33,000 people, is especially troubling: More than 6 in 10, it found, hold a sense of grievance — a belief that government and business serve narrow interests and thus make the lives of ordinary citizens harder. Grievance of that sort is eroding trust in all institutions, Edelman concluded, leading 4 in 10 to say that they approve of hostile activism: violence or property damage, spreading disinformation or attacking people online.

The loss of trust involves not only government, but also business, the church, media, non-government organizations and academia. But there’s a particular responsibility for government in this, because it alone has the breadth to reach people on a national scale and the credibility that attaches to being a creation of the people it governs. Significantly, Edelman reported that the trust index in the United States was fifth from the bottom among the 28 nations it surveyed.1

Here's one reason why this matters so much: Only if a government is trustworthy will citizens willingly comply with its policies and practices. Unless we trust that our fellow citizens will join us in accepting the limits imposed for the benefit of all, why would we?

That is, there won’t ever be enough IRS agents to police tax law compliance; the nation’s revenue stream depends upon citizens voluntarily paying what’s rightfully owed. You can carry that thought through to even such mundane matters as traffic enforcement: We stop at a red light not only because we worry that police might be watching, but also because we trust that government has rightly decided that controlling intersections keeps us safer. That’s why we don’t need a cop on every corner.

Of course, even the most effective and fair governments led by well-intentioned public servants deserve skepticism. That’s healthy and necessary: Scrutiny and questioning of government are the anchors of good journalism and the fuel of political campaigns. Acting upon that sort of healthy dubiousness is how citizens make sure their government meets their needs.

Without valid data, though — that is, without knowing what’s really happening — citizens can’t make good judgments about whether government is meeting their needs and hopes. As Stanford University political scientist Margaret Levi has observed, “When citizens perceive government as serving their interests, they consider government trustworthy.” Inept government thus breeds distrust.2

That’s why we are so hurt not only by Trump’s destruction of government, which is rightly distressing well-informed citizens, but also by the fallacious attack on our government’s capacity that preceded it. For the latter, you can thank the rise of trashy journalism — yes, I’m talking about Fox News and its imitators here — and by the refusal of social media platforms to effectively police misinformation. Too many Americans are losing access to the information that might convince them that Trump’s careless tyranny demands resistance; too many are likewise swayed by attention-craving entertainers who pervert reality in pursuit of a profit-generating audience.

In fact, the distortion of truth by major information platforms is key to Trump’s trampling of America’s traditional dependability. It’s well-informed citizens who are most likely to be horrified by what’s going on in Washington, and those who pay less attention to the news who are most supportive of Trump. Reuters/Ipsos polling just before last year’s election revealed that by wide margins, Trump supporters misunderstood key facts about crime, the economy and the border. Trump is in the White House today because of his firm grasp on the affection of so-called “low-information voters,” and most of them remain his fierce advocates.

So as University at Berkeley economic professor J. Bradford DeLong put it just after the voting, “we need to figure out what to do about an information ecosystem that hoodwinked millions of people and turned our politics into a clown show.”3 DeLong probably regrets that wording just now; if it seemed vaguely funny in late fall, the reality of Trump’s second term can only be viewed as tragic here in the spring.

The nostalgia of an aging journalist isn’t what you’re reading here — though I do, of course, hope for a time when honest reporting might again reach all corners of the American electorate. But nobody should be wishing for paperboys on bikes to toss yesterday’s news onto our neighbors’ doorsteps, nor for an avuncular newscaster to summarize “the way it is” for most of us each evening.

What we do need, though, is an urgent effort to create a better-informed electorate in the digital age. Here’s what we need: First, a fight against disinformation; second, a resurgence of support for good journalism, and third, effective advocacy by citizen groups. Together, those steps can begin to restore a dependable government to a deserving nation.

Digital disinformation — spread by enemy nations, bots and individuals — is rampant, well-documented most notably by an Aspen Institute blue-ribbon panel report four years ago. The Biden administration quickly bungled efforts to attack the problem, in part because, ironically enough, it was met with a disinformation campaign claiming it was really an effort to stifle conservative thought.4 Since then, social media platforms have kowtowed to Trump and abandoned efforts to moderate content; presidential pal Elon Musk is himself, of course, the major source of disinformation on X. The plentiful and damaging lies that overrun the digital world will diminish, then, only if digital consumers apply market pressure. The Silicon Valley bosses who are more eager to coddle Trump than please customers present us a golden opportunity: We need to remind them of the power of an energized marketplace. We await only an organized effort to enlighten them.

The opportunity in journalism is likewise poised for progress. Great reporting is alive and well in America, but it needs to reach more households. A growing ecosystem of nonprofit journalism is now at work in all 50 states, filling in the gaps left by the economic ruin that the digital revolution has brought to most advertiser-supported newspapers. The new newsrooms are publishing strong journalism that holds the powerful to account at all levels of government, and they’re gaining skills in reaching audiences. But they need philanthropic and community support if they are to counter the hate-mongers and prevaricators of the digital and broadcast right. (Disclosure: I’m a board member of two fine nonprofit and nonpartisan news organizations, New York Focus and Adirondack Explorer.)

Most importantly, citizens of good will need to step up to support community organizations that are taking on the task of doing good in a society where government is in retreat. We are only beginning to see the negative effects of the Trump destruction of the public sector — including the faltering of medical and mental health care for veterans, the attack on higher education and the withdrawal of funding for social services, healthcare and arts and humanities programs. There are worthy groups around the country still fighting for those who need the help that our right-wing government won’t give them. So pick your passion and do something: Fill in your energy where government’s failure is leaving gaps.

And, of course, there’s this: Get involved in your local political races. We must rebuild our increasingly disabled government from the ground up.

We know that this is the start of a long haul, here at the beginning of this benighted presidency. It’s like what those of us who live in northern zones feel as winter begins, knowing that we’ll face some tough days before spring returns. Of course, those of us who love seasonal change are already recalling winter’s beauty with a bit of longing at this time of the year. Likewise, the effort to counter the worst effects of Trumpism, which seems an uphill climb just now, can yield some rewarding days in the months and years ahead — and, in the end, some real satisfaction as our work gives way to a more dependable and trustworthy government.

Really, it’s our only option now, don’t you think? We’ve endured harsh winters, most of us, and we can do this, too. Spring always returns, and with it the joy of hearing the peepers and frogs. Listen, and keep hope alive.