We knew it would be bad, but…

      We knew it would be bad, very bad. It turns out it’s been worse, much worse.

      We had read about Project 2025 and we had remembered the first term, the botched Covid response, the vengeful actions, the comic buffoonery and the ridiculous incompetence. But now, almost exactly half way through Trump’s first year—just one-eighth of his term—our worst fears already have been greatly exceeded. There’s so much we couldn’t possibly have imagined. It has been so much worse.

      We could not have imagined that masked, often unidentified, men, working for our government, would snatch unsuspecting college students off the streets.

      Or that those masked, unidentified men would grab children going to school or grab mothers out of cars, leaving their children alone. Or that they would stake out Home Depot to grab workers or kidnap a high-school student off the street.

      It was beyond our imagination to believe that people with established lives in the United States would wind up in a gulag in El Salvador or a jail in South Sudan or a concentration camp amongst the alligators in the Everglades.

      We surely failed to imagine that this country would have its own home-grown secret police, its pseudo-gestapo.

      We had no faith, of course, in Congress, but we thought, foolishly in retrospect, that the Supreme Court might ultimately protect us. We didn’t grasp the idea that the new administration would unashamedly defy decisions by lower courts it didn’t like. And we could not have predicted that the Republican-dominated Supreme Court would have granted emergency relief to the Trump administration all fifteen times it asked for it.

      How innocent we were.

      We didn’t envision that a president of the United States would extort major universities, like Columbia, and withhold more than 2-billion dollars in research funding from Harvard as punishment for not aligning its policies with the current views of the Trump administration.

      We couldn’t imagine that major corporations, like CBS, would pay millions to grovel at the president’s feet and that prestigious law firms would make payoffs to buy protection, as if they were dealing with a mafia don.

      Republicans have been talking about eliminating the Department of Education for a while now. But could we have imagined that there would be no agency to administer student loans or student lunches. That FEMA, with hurricane season on the way, would be gutted, along with NOAA and NASA.

      How could we have expected the shuttering of USAID and the almost-complete ending of foreign humanitarian aid—and the consequent likely death of millions of children worldwide?

      Some pardons might have been expected, but who would have thought that—on the very first day of the new administration—all those who had mounted a sometimes violent insurrection, who had attacked our Capitol, would be pardoned?

      Did any of us consider the possibility that birthright citizenship, fully guaranteed under the Constitution, would be at risk?

      That a Fox News weekend host, with a history of excessive drinking and domestic abuse, would be placed in charge of our military? That a nutty conspiracist with a worm in his brain and a bevy of cockamamie ideas would be placed in charge of our health?

      We knew that Elon Musk would be looking for “efficiencies,” but could we have imagined that a gang of young techies would be allowed to run rampant through the federal government: firing and sometimes unfiring and sometimes firing again masses of longtime civil servants on whims--yet somehow failing to save all that much money.

      Was it possible to foresee that Trump would fire all independent oversight officials and agency watchdogs, and institute loyalty tests for civil servants, all while stripping security clearances and government protection to punish critics?

      Who could have envisioned the immense amount of outright corruption—out in the open, completely blatant—that we’ve seen so far, just six months in? Could we have imagined the blatant use of crypto startups, in particular, as a way for business people here and abroad to funnel money to, thereby gain access to, Trump and his family.

      We knew there’d be chaos, but the on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, maybe on or off again, tariffs have taxed our ability to comprehend. Trump’s bizarre and mostly counterproductive tariff machinations have also clearly lessened other countries’ faith in the reliability of the United States.

      Indeed, could we have imagined that it would have been possible for one man—and his oddball cronies—to have in half a year so badly tarnished the reputation of the United States around the world.

      We had, of course, been warned, we had warned ourselves, but the first half year of the second Trump Administration obviously was not foreseeable, not even to those who had foreseen the worst.

      Now, we can only wonder: is even worse yet to come?