who could have believed all this?

On the Saturday before the 2016 election, a good friend, also named Neil, died. He died before all … this.

He was an educator, a student of history, and extremely well-versed in the American story. And I wonder now, today, if he were somehow miraculously to come back, somehow to materialize in front of me right this moment, how could I possibly explain what has happened over the last decade? How could I explain what has happened over the last week?

How could my friend, who like the rest of us lived through wars and McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the first man on the moon and the Kennedy assassination and the advent of computers and Nixon’s fall and the Miracle Mets and so many other unprecedented events, how could he imagine the unparalleled occurrences of these Trump years?

Neil, I would say to him, after we had hugged and sat down to meaty hamburgers — my friend loved his beef — yes, we somehow elected the buffoonish failed real estate charlatan Donald Trump in 2016. His term was, predictably, erratic and scary and awful, with attacks against the legitimacy of the press and the judiciary and the withdrawal from a host of international agreements. All expected, maybe. All terrible, definitely.

But then, near the end of his term, a pandemic — the worst in a hundred years — ravaged the United States (and the world, too), and Trump denied it was happening as tens of thousands died and then suggested ingesting bleach as a tool to deal with it. Beyond imaginable.

Soon after, and perhaps because of how he mishandled the pandemic, he was defeated for reelection in 2020. And, my friend, you won’t believe this — but he reacted to that electoral loss by repeatedly denying it had happened. He tried to intimidate election officials into changing votes. He fomented an insurrection where his supporters attacked the Capitol, looking to hang his own vice president, on live television seen by the whole nation.

You’re making that up, right? I’m certain my friend would say. That happened in our America?

Not only did it happen, but instead of being impeached for it and convicted and thrown out of office, and put in jail, Trump finished his term and was, incredibly, elected again four years later. And immediately pardoned all those who had attacked the Capitol and its police officers and had trashed the citadel of American governance.

Neil would say, of course, this must be a dystopian novel, yes? Not what really happened. Couldn’t be.

No. It happened. And there’s more.

Once Trump got back in office, I’d tell my friend, he allowed the richest man in the world and a batch of his callow interns to run unfettered across the entire federal bureaucracy. He appointed a series of fellow unqualified loyalists and TV hosts to the highest positions in government so they could, in essence, destroy it. Among those appointments was an anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict with a worm in his brain chosen to lead our nation’s health department.

And that might not have been his worst appointment.

A sci-fi movie? A black comedy? Neil would ask. Oh, so much more, I’d say.

Within the first year of taking office again, I’d tell my friend, Trump alienated all our country’s long-time allies by, among much else, placing punishing tariffs on dozens of countries, then retracting them, then imposing them again. He threatened to make Canada the 51st state. He undermined the independence of the Federal Reserve and the Department of Justice, cut funding to universities and for cancer research and slashed the federal work force.

And then came the really bad stuff: he attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president. He sent troops and an unrestrained immigration force of highly armed masked men into cities across the country, terrorizing the populace and abducting citizens and noncitizens alike. They killed protestors. They shot others. Teargassed crowds. Snatched 5-year-olds.

In front of all the leaders of the western world, he acted like a vengeful Mafia boss, a bumbling one at that.

His military attacked shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, killing more than 100 people whom he alleged were smuggling drugs. His so-called justice department pursued prosecution of those few elected officials who dared to criticize the acts.

He threatened to take Greenland by force from a long-time ally and issued threats to Cuba and Mexico and Iran and Colombia.

He lied and lied and lied–openly, without remorse, without even a tiny modicum of shame. Or even, maybe, awareness.

A bad ‘B’ movie? Neil might wonder. Stuff like this couldn’t happen here in the real U.S.A. Could it?

It happened here, I’d say. It’s still happening. What also happened was the absolutely brazen, in-your-face corruption, the blatant selling of the presidency, the greedy taking of bribes domestic and foreign, the issuing of Trump crypto coins and the destruction of part of the White House and the plastering of his name on the Kennedy Center.

And, hey, our supposed national symbol of dignified rectitude publicly gave the finger to an auto worker and told him to fuck off.

Hard to believe, my friend might say. Presidents don’t do that.

Harder to believe, I’d respond, that we have been ruled for the last year by a senile, psychologically disturbed narcissist and convicted felon who has sold our national soul to the highest bidder.

Wait a minute, Neil would interject. Surely, officials — politicians and business leaders and important institutions — they would have stood up to these obvious outrages and brought an end to them, right? Americans wouldn’t tolerate it all … would they?

Some elected officials and prominent people occasionally “expressed concern,” I’d tell him. There have been protests. Regular people have gathered in the streets. But pretty much everyone and every institution with the ability to actually do something about what has been happening just let it go. They stood by and let it happen — or outright facilitated it. They enabled the destruction of the United States as a relatively benevolent democracy.

Of course, then it occurred to me: how could someone who hasn’t actually been here for the last 10 years imagine what has taken place, when we — who have spent the decade nervously doomscrolling our phones or watching television in disbelief or feeling aghast when reading newspaper headlines — we still can’t fully imagine it?