I have spent my adult life a student of political science, public affairs, foreign policy, and governmental administration. Way past my undergraduate days of the 1960s and the confines of my long-term vocation in local government, I tried to keep up with contemporary lines of political, economic, and cultural thought. Twenty plus years behind the lectern required it. The number of scholarly texts and publications comprising my library are well into the hundreds. As a result, my understanding of the nation’s democratic republic has never been based on the popular political nuance of the moment. Even the widest swings between the left and the right, the country historically has been able to right the ship, balance power, and conduct the public’s business. However, in just two brief comments, Susan Glasser has summed up my biggest fear, my biggest disappointment in my fellow Americans that have allowed the very foundation of our system, be dismantled. Our primal lesser-selves have more than been exposed. Consumed in the righteousness of one’s cognitive biases and the lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance, many may not have even looked. The bigger tragedy is in regards to those that did, but chose not to see.
Stephen G. Harding
“Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump
did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other
people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test,
there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.”
“The problem here is that taking stock of all that Trump has done in 2025
means confronting the new reality of an America where the raw and arbitrary
exercise of power for its own sake is both possible and permissible. It can
happen here, we now know, because it is happening here.”
Susan B. Glasser
Staff Writer
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trumps-golden-age-of-awful
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Well said Steve. How would we in the US feel if another country conducted a significant military action in our nation’s Capitol to arrest someone accused of a crime in their country? And worse, spoke about how they were taking over operation of our country!
And shall we talk about today’s action in Venezuela?
And shall we talk about today’s actions in Venezuela? Pat Robertson
Given what took place today, the unprecedented has now become the “precedented.” God, please bless America.