Let’s not pretend anymore. The rot is deeper than Trump. The grift is bigger than Trump. And the heartbreak is more complex than red hats, golden toilets, or rigged golf tournaments at Bedminster.
The question I keep asking myself—through the static of Fox News propaganda, the MAGA rallies soaked in fury, and the complicit silence of too many—is this: Am I angry and heartbroken at Donald Trump and his contemptuous hijacking of the American presidency for profit and power? Or am I more furious at the Democratic Party, that once-proud vessel of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Obama, for letting it happen – for being, time and again, the party of too little, too late, too timid?
Because let’s face it. Trump is a symptom. An opportunistic virus in a nation weakened by decades of cynical deregulation, decimated journalism, and a political class that forgot how to fight for working people. Trump didn’t create the vacuum of trust. He exploited it. He filled the void left by both parties, but especially by the Democrats who believed that dignity alone would save democracy.
Dignity doesn’t win street fights.
While Trump and his henchmen (yes, henchmen) turned the presidency into a 24/7 infomercial for Trump-branded grift, the Democratic Party sat wringing its hands, worrying about process, decorum, and the elusive bipartisan handshake that never comes. They tut-tutted at the vulgarity, issued subpoenas that went ignored, and wrote elegant speeches no one in the Rust Belt heard.
So, yes, I am angry at Trump. The man is a moral and ethical void, an empty vessel into which poured the worst impulses of American greed, fear, and racial resentment. But I am also angry at the Democrats, the so-called resistance, the technocrats, and the think-tankers who thought they could beat authoritarianism with white papers and podcast interviews.
The truth is, America needed fighters. It needed truth-tellers with guts. It needed a Democratic Party that saw the stakes as life and death for democracy. Instead, it got polite admonishments while Trump sold the furniture, looted the treasury, and gaslit the nation into forgetting the difference between reality and spectacle.
Watergate taught us that the system only works if people in power are willing to sacrifice comfort and career to defend the republic. Today, too few have been willing to do that. Not in the Republican Party, not in the Democratic Party, not in the boardrooms, and certainly not in the media that gave Trump billions in free airtime because he made ratings sing.
So, I ask again: Who am I angrier at?
Maybe the most honest answer is both. Trump, the would-be king, and the feckless court jesters who allowed him to crown himself.
And maybe—if I’m brutally honest with myself—I’m angriest at us, the people, for allowing the con to become the culture.