It began with a sinus infection. The staff at the urgent care gave me antibiotics to address it, saying nothing about the directive on the label to take a probiotic as well.

Three days later, it began. I won’t go into gruesome detail but let’s just say I very quickly began to wonder how there was anything left to go to the bathroom about. This went on for several days. Another urgent care. This time, they gave me a different prescription. I went to the pharmacist to have it filled. “This is just over-the-counter Imodium,” the pharmacist told me.

I was already taking that, which I had told the staff at the urgent care. So, I had paid $50 and gotten my hopes up for the urgent care to effectively tell me to take a lot of Pepto Bismol.

I called my doctor and scheduled an appointment. Then, a friend told me about his experience with Clostridioides difficile, or C diff. So I called my doctor back and told them I needed to make a decision: go to the ER now or wait until my appointment in the morning.

The first nurse told me something obvious if not particularly helpful: “If you feel bad you can go to the ER.” Thanks, I said, but what I was trying to determine was whether my doctor the next day would even be able to perform the tests needed to identify a case of C diff. She connected me to another nurse who eventually said that, no, my doctor probably wouldn’t be able to conduct the necessary tests to diagnose C diff. So, yes, I should probably go to the ER.

That evening I did, and after a few hours, finally felt like I was talking to someone competent and helpful: the ER doctor on shift at St. Joseph’s Candler in Savannah. But the entire episode — mild by comparison to some healthcare horror stories I’ve heard — was a frustrating reminder of how broken our healthcare system is. Luckily I have a primary care doctor, but if I didn’t I would have had to wait weeks or months to see one. The other option? Urgent cares. We see how well that went.

Yes, I should have know that I had to take probiotics with the antibiotics prescribed by the urgent care. But when I returned almost a week later complaining of stomach pains, diarrhea, the staff there should have sent me to the ER.

Finally, I made the choice that I thought was best for me after a week of serious stomach pain and 20 trips a day to the bathroom: go to the ER. I have insurance, so my bill probably won’t be huge. But the fact that these are the options for most people in this country is a lowdown, cryin’ shame.

***

As I waited to be seen at the ER, I scrolled news on my phone and saw that the Trump administration will kick as many as a million people off Obamacare for allegedly committing healthcare fraud. Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said they had found people who had allegedly committed fraud because they had never made a claim through their insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act.

Is that fraud? It doesn’t sound like it to me. This initiative of Vance’s “anti-fraud task force” will save American taxpayers $2.2 billion, Vance and Oz said on Tuesday. That’s about the same amount that Donald Trump made during the first year of his second term in office.

Vance and Oz also said they’re stopping brokers from selling Obamacare insurance plans. That’s in addition to the millions of Americans who are now paying much higher premiums as a result of Republicans’ halting of Obamacare subsidies. Oh, and then there are the 10 states — most of them dominated by Republican majorities in their legislatures and governors’ offices — that have refused to expand Medicaid, which would offer coverage to low income Americans.

My brief but frustrating experience these past two weeks with the healthcare system was one of a handful my wife and I have had in recent years. And I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m a relatively healthy middle-aged man who doesn’t drink or do drugs, eats a moderately healthy diet and exercises. (Yes, I still smoke, and yes, I know… The big quit is coming; I’m just not quite there yet.)

This experience revived a conversation we’ve had before about finding a concierge doctor. Again, luckily, we can probably afford that and it’s worth it to us to make our lives a little easier. I know more than a few people who have gone down this path, but it’s one that isn’t available to many Americans.

It also seems entirely unnecessary for a country as wealthy and powerful as our own. The fact that those in the upper-middle class and above can essentially opt out of all the frustrating madness of the American healthcare system and have their own, somewhat private doctor simply because they can afford it seems like an indicator of how broken things are, in addition to being one of those dystopian signs of late-stage capitalism.

But that’s where things have been going lately. There are plenty of news stories about the concierge doctor trend. A new private medical plan in Connecticut costs $45,000 a year. That’s a lot of money, but I bet you get great service!

As I was dealing with and trying to self-diagnose my malady this past week, I also tried to keep up with work. That meant reading a lot of news and paying attention to what congressional candidates are saying about a variety of issues. One statement stood out among all the rest.

Responding to news that Vance had told congressional Republicans in a closed-door meeting to simply mention the name of Michigan’s Abdul El Sayed in order to scare voters about far-left candidates, the doctor and candidate for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats said that he didn’t care what Vance said, and that he was focusing on issues that affect Americans.

Instead, El Sayed said that he would continue talking about “gas, groceries, and how hard it is to see a doctor.”

I nodded my head in vociferous agreement when I heard the remark. Maybe there are Republicans on the trail talking about the many and obvious problems with our healthcare system, but I haven’t seen that as much as GOP candidates fear-mongering about “Communists.”

The reality is that every single American has a version of the story you’ve read here today. Many, many Americans have several such stories. And many Americans have even worse stories about their interactions with the healthcare system. Republicans can say they’re trying to fix all of this, but they’ve never really said exactly how they’ll do it.

Trump is trying to lower prescription drug costs. But Republicans have never formulated any credible plan for insuring more Americans, or for making healthcare less expensive and more equitable for low income Americans and the working class.

I know it’s not as bad here as it is in other parts of the world, but I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. The Republican plan for healthcare, based on the experiences in my lifetime, appears to be entirely market-driven.

Republican voters can continue to believe their party is working toward a solution, if they choose. But I know I’m not alone in navigating our healthcare system and thinking, “This is the best we got?”

At a certain point, even conservative Americans might be forced to look around them at all that is broken and reckon with the fact that Republicans have no plan to fix it, that their ideological drive to make government as small as possible is also making it ineffective to the point that it’s actively harming how our society functions.

Under Trump, Republican voters might even have to conclude that their party is actively trying to break things. And they’re breaking things not for the benefit of Americans who need to see a doctor, or afford a decent quality of life, but for the wealthiest people and most powerful forces in our society.

To not conclude this after taking part in virtually any part of the American healthcare system is to purposefully ignore the realities of it. And for God’s sakes, don’t get a sinus infection.

***

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In my first year in what was once called “the newspaper business,” the city editor of the paper gave me my weekend assignment.

I was an intern, and weekend assignments were always pretty bad — some fluff story about a local Boy Scout troop raising money, or a casserole cook-off. It was not the type of stuff a youngish, hungover reporter with a Nelson Algren complex wanted to spend a Saturday writing about. If anyone under the age of 25 is reading this, I know it must make me sound pretty old, but this was only 16 years ago, and this was the way it had been for a long time.

So, on one of those warm-but-crisp Midwest autumn mornings, I drove my grumpy, hungover ass out to Canton, Illinois for a September 11 memorial event at a local church. The editor — who I think would call himself a Reagan Republican but was also a committed truth-telling journalist with Hunter Thompson quotes on his wall — had joked with me about the event, which featured a monster truck and dirt bike jumping.

“Ask the pastor what dirt bikes have to do with 9/11,” he told me. I thought he was joking. Maybe he was not.

At the entrance to the event was a mangled piece of steel from the World Trade Center that, during its demise, had formed into the shape of a cross. People solemnly looked at it as they entered a field near the church.

We billed the event as a “unique” 9/11 memorial. I took the pastor’s words about how the historic attacks that had occurred just nine years earlier were part of the reason that Americans should accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and folks who picked up their Sunday paper had a nice little story to read.

But the strange and, to me, troublesome blending of church and state — not to mention the religious iconography of what was, again, to me, a horrific tragedy that was nonetheless a historic event that had absolutely nothing to do with God and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy and its impact — was not lost on me. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a terrible, violent shock to Americans. But they did not come completely out of nowhere. And on that day at the church in Canton in 2010, we knew that. By then, we had come to understand why the 9/11 attackers did what they did, as wrong and evil as it was.

Many Americans had also created a Christian-nationalist legend out of the attacks — a story that resulted in otherwise reasonable, perhaps more secular people, supporting or accepting a variety of authoritarian themes that continue to shape our society. Out of fear and anger, many Americans — for a time, myself included — went along with the nationalist fervor that followed 9/11, having little or no idea of its grave repercussions.

It wasn’t my job that day to explore these haughty topics, so I wrote up something that avoided any of that potential controversy and instead described the scene, got some quotes, and framed the event as one community’s way of remembering the fallen. We used to joke in the newsroom that anniversaries of events only really mattered when there was a five or a zero at the end of them. No one cared about the 59th anniversary of D-Day, for instance. But you better make a big splash on the front page when the 60th rolled around.

That muscle memory still resides in me, which is why I’m remembering that day in Canton on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and thinking a bit more about what it means.

***

By now, we know that the surveillance state that came in the wake of the attacks has become a daily part of our lives. The expansion of federal government and executive power has grown to a point that it seems there’s no going back. On September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even exist. Now, it’s the largest federal law enforcement agency, with unbelievably sweeping powers to spy on and apprehend citizens and noncitizens alike. Under Trump, the vast powers initially granted to DHS out of our desire to never allow an attack like 9/11 to happen again have reached their inevitable, authoritarian scope.

DHS is now a fully-fascist paramilitary organization that answers only to Trump and Christian nationalist forces in our government. Even under Democratic presidents, its power has expanded well beyond its original intent. Left unchecked, the agency will continue to expand its presence in everyday American lives, further threatening the liberties of even native-born men and women.

But DHS isn’t the only example of the authoritarian shift in American society. That shift was relatively slow at first and threatened primarily those here from Muslim countries, but has expanded to focus on anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of patriotism that has now expanded to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a white, Christian-nationalist vision of American life. Under Trump, this dynamic has only accelerated.

Following 9/11, the nation developed what I call the automatic hero complex. Under this framework, we collectively agreed to grant all first-responders the title and stance of heroes. It didn’t matter whether they were firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center or a paramedic in Peoria. They were heroes. But that designation began to apply more to police than anyone else. With this granting of hero status, we also gave away some of our collective skepticism of the power of police.

American law enforcement has used this permission structure to collect more and more funding from cities and states, and more acquire surveillance and investigative powers. Perhaps most obviously — because we can see it with our own eyes in the gear and dress of the average police officer — American law enforcement has become almost absurdly militarized.

The attacks of September 11 helped to shift the public’s perception of being a cop, which data shows is less fatal than being a roofer, to men and women who are risking their lives on the frontlines of wars against evil in their own communities. In reality, they’re often just writing traffic tickets.

***

The great irony of 9/11 is that what began as a response to a war against us has become our own war against ourselves. Yes, 9/11 has been used as justification for our forever wars across the globe. But twenty-five years on, one of the unavoidable realities of our response to the attacks is that the American right has decided that as much as half the country is fundamentally anti-American for being skeptical or critical of the powers of law enforcement and right-wing government that have grown since that day.

Those who question or criticize the American right’s vision for the nation are effectively viewed as enemy combatants in this war.

At times, our post-9/11 war against ourselves has mostly been a culture war in which Republicans and conservatives decide who is, at heart, an American and who is not. But increasingly under Republican governments, the war is entering the physical realm, turning hotter.

Without a societal shift away from the authoritarianism of the American right — sweeping election wins for moderates, significant policy changes at the national, state and local levels, a rebuke of authoritarian belief systems and behavior at the community level — this war is only going to get hotter, and our decline will accelerate.

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If there is a single statement that sums up what American life can feel like under President Donald Trump’s second term, it may be this: “We control everything.”

That’s what Trump said Wednesday during a speech at the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library. Trump is correct in some ways — it certainly does feel like the president, his authoritarian regime, and its enablers possess vast control over the government, the economy, and the media. But like all fascist movements, this power is brittle. Trump and his people may feel like they control everything because they live in a hyper-curated echo chamber where even the remotest dissent from anyone within their ranks is not allowed, but their movement is broadly unpopular.

That’s because it’s obvious to anyone who is not a committed member of this movement that Trump and his people are no better than the corrupt Washington insiders they were elected to ostensibly replace. The Epstein stuff, the war in Iran, the constant self-dealing, the wasting of taxpayer dollars on frivolous construction projects to feed Trump’s ego — there remains a large swath of conservative American voters who look at all of this and, at minimum, will decide to stay home in November. Some of them may have even had enough of the corruption, waste and incompetence of Trump’s second term to go out and vote for Democrats.

This group of voters will doom Republicans for one very simple reason: it is becoming quite clear that Trump and his people are getting obscenely rich off the backs of everyday Americans. Deluded by the belief that the white rage that fuels their fascistic policies on immigration gives them a free pass to loot the government, Trump, his family, and his administration have developed a massive blind spot that is preventing them from seeing what’s coming.

But it’s coming, and that’s because of very clear and obvious things like this:

What you see here is the result of deep reporting from Reuters, showing that Trump and his family’s crypto ventures are nothing more than a scam that enriches those at the top. In a way, this graph perfectly illustrates American life under Trump because it shows the decline of the many — and the rising prosperity of the few.

Making gobs of cash is as American as apple pie, as they say. But this is something different than your run-of-the-mill, hyper-capitalist cash grab. As president, Trump has enacted policies that have helped the crypto industry gain a foothold in global markets. (He’s also directly helped other industries in which he is heavily invested.) The crypto company run by Trump’s sons, World Liberty Financial, has benefitted from investments from the United Arab Emirates, a regional ally, and the founder of Binance, who Trump pardoned.

These are the exact type of swampy, jet-setting conflicts of interests that fueled Trump’s political rise. Now they’ll help usher in his movement’s downfall.

Still, instead of this being a universally-accepted understanding of the perversion of American values that it is, a solid third of the country sees nothing wrong with the profits Trump, his family, and the world’s richest people have made directly as a result of Trump’s election to his second term.

But a recourse is probably coming — this time in the form of a sweeping rebuke of Republicans in November.

***

Trump, the billionaires who populate his cabinet, the tech industry titans that have cozied up to Trump’s authoritarianism, and anyone and everyone who has access to the president and is cashing in on federal government contracts are the few who have gained massive profits since Trump took office. Americans making less than six figures a year are no better off — at best. There is simply no amount of immigrant fear-mongering that can make up for the fact that the lives of working class Americans look no better now than they did before Trump took office.

Of course, this should have been obvious to them from the very start, but we’ll have to take what we can get. The many millions of white, working class voters who will likely stay home in November will do so because they will have finally learned that Trump doesn’t actually give a solitary fuck about them. Between now and then, Trump will probably only make this dynamic worse.

The golden age is not already here and it is not coming because it never was. It’s here for Trump, his family, and the richest people in the world — but not for me, you, or any of the white working class masses who thought that kicking out immigrants would solve all their problems. By November, if deportation levels keep going the way they are, there will hardly be any undocumented immigrants left to blame.

That’s why, in recent days, you’ve seen Republicans shift to a new scapegoat: “communists” running for office against less left-wing Democrats. Trump has called these “communists” — also known as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or just plain old Democrats — the “biggest” threat the United States has ever faced. Bigger than World War II, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Trump has said.

This makes the leftists currently winning elections across the country just the latest “biggest threat” of the Trump era. China, Mexican immigrants, immigrants in general, the news media, Democrats in Congress, judges — all have had their turn as the biggest threat facing the nation. After 10 years of proclaiming whatever person or entity Trump was able to focus on for more than 10 consecutive minutes the “biggest threat,” what are Americans to actually believe?

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Even some of Trump’s supporters understand that, at a certain point, you can’t just keep claiming that everyone else is ruining things for the president you elected to make your life better. After 10 years of this, and with Republicans in control of “everything,” even some Trump voters will begin to question why it is that Trump can’t seem to make things better for the white working class. Then, those voters might catch a glimpse of some news that Fox or their algorithms aren’t feeding them. Something like, since taking office in 2024, Trump’s net worth has doubled, from $2.4 billion to $6 billion.

Even some Trump supporters who would otherwise brush this off with, “he’s a businessman” won’t be able to countenance the news of Trump’s obscene profits during his second term.

They elected him to make the country richer, to make them richer, not himself. Recall that, from the beginning, one of Trump’s biggest selling points was that he couldn’t be bought — he was already rich, so he wasn’t in it for the money. Tens of millions of Americans elected him on this very idea. Now, even with the powerful forces of right wing media and Trump-slanted social media algorithms, they won’t be able to avoid the truth that Trump has bilked his voters and everyone else to the tune of godly sums of money.

Some of these Trump supporters will feel lost and confused. And in that moment they’ll have to decide between what are really the only three choices in life: freeze, fight or flee. The ones who freeze simply won’t show up in November. The ones who fight will buy the new line about “communists.” The ones who flee will come to the other side or go farther to the right.

The MAGA movement will end because of its greed, hubris and brittleness. They don’t actually control everything — at least not yet. Trump and Republicans’ constant lies about election fraud are proof of this: they don’t have complete control over elections because that’s not how our founders set it up — but they sure do want that control, and are doing everything they can to try to get it.

That’s another reason they’ll lose in November. Not only will lots of Trump’s people stay home — bored with his nonsense, fed up with the corruption, the lies about Epstein, or the war he started — but many, many millions of Americans who aren’t particularly politically engaged will come out of the woodwork to stop what is the actual biggest threat to American freedom: Trump and Republicans themselves.

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The older I get, the more efficient I seem to be at many things. I know there will be a time in old age when this is not the case, but hopefully by then some of the many things I am required to spend my time on will have passed.

One of those requirements is having to pay a lot of attention to what elected officials say and do. Maybe I’ll always have to spend what I estimate to be a solid 40 percent of my time doing this, which, combined with general news consumption and my own investigations and stories, becomes more like 60 percent of the minutes in a day.

But I have a child now, and a house that needs some work, plus my book is out, plus I’m feeling a bit squishy so I’m at the gym relatively frequently, and I like to play music as often as possible, ideally every day. Family, friends, recovery, paying bills — life gets busy and fast.

So when it comes to paying attention to the many, many things our elected officials say and do, plus the consequences of those actions on people who often don’t have the power to do much about it — like immigrants dying in awful conditions in facilities across the country — I have to be efficient.

Luckily, people like Donald Trump and just about every single person around him makes what they do and how they do it incredibly obvious.

Just days past his latest corrupt gambit — the advertising, marketing, and grift-filled spectacle that was UFC Freedom 250 — Trump is on to his next corrupt project or stunning failure, depending on how it shakes out.

The details of the deal over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and ending our war there are out and they’re not great, at least politically for Trump. He basically just blew hundreds of millions of dollars — and wasted the lives of 13 American service men and women — on a war that didn’t need to happen, and is now preparing to ink a deal that is no better than the one Barack Obama made with Iran a decade ago.

But Trump, who has spent his life incorrectly believing that he is smarter than every single person in the world, blew up Obama’s deal under the guise that it was a cash-laden handout to Iran. Now, Trump is about to give Iran even more money — not to mention the blood and treasure we’ve expended in our war effort. (Dead American soldiers are just the start. Our munitions reserves are incredibly depleted thanks to Trump and Pete Hegseth’s unnecessary and relentless bombing. Plus, soldiers and airmen are now run down after having spent months screaming across the region in service of Trump’s military adventurism, which he has openly said he’s bored with.)

But it’s not just that Trump’s deal with Iran does nothing new, or that it’s cost us much more than the previous one did, it’s that, like everything Trump touches, it’s probably entirely corrupt.

That’s because the deal promises $300 billion in funds to rehabilitate the Iranian infrastructure we destroyed. The exact language of this bullet point in the deal says those funds will come from both the United States and “regional partners.” That’s vastly more than the $1.7 billion promised by the Obama administration as part of the previous Iran nuclear deal. If you don’t think that those in Trump’s orbit and probably Trump’s own Trump Organization will somehow find a way to profit off all those billions of dollars, you haven’t been paying attention.

Every deal Trump has made during his second term in office has financially benefitted himself, his family and their companies, or the slew of business interests still held by members of his cabinet. The Iran nuclear deal, if it holds, will be no different.

The scale of the Trump administration’s corruption is historic. Sunday’s birthday blood match, in previous times, would have been an impeachable offense in and of itself. Trump’s corruption perverts and harms rules, norms and laws like a steamroller every single day. It will continue until someone puts a stop to it. Republicans won’t do this. It will be up to Democrats, hopefully starting in November, to begin a second reconstruction project that ensures no future presidential administration will be able to get away with all that Trump has.

Trump as president exists for a lot of reasons. Among them is the obvious fact that Reconstruction failed following the Civil War. Since then, a shifting coalition of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and hyper-capitalist forces have successfully been able to flourish. The systems under which they’ve done so must end in order for a truly democratic republic to continue. The reforms of the Watergate era were a start, and something similar — albeit much more aggressive — must start taking shape now. If not, the historic corruption of Trump will become the norm, not the exception. At that point, people like me probably won’t even be able to make a living. And all of us who aren’t inside the system of corruption and influence will work in service of it.

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For as long as the internet has been around, there have been people willing to say terrible things online. It used to be that many who expressed racist beliefs and other markers of societal regression did so anonymously, and that’s certainly still the case. But take a scroll through the Facebook feed of just about anything these days — including, most certainly, your local TV news station — and you’ll see members of your own community openly espousing racism and hate.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers no longer feel pressured to keep these beliefs under wraps. They are open with it, and clearly feel there are no consequences. Increasingly, they’re right.

As I’ve gone about talking to people about my book, which has now been published, people have asked me variations of a question: what’s different about America now compared to when I began my career as a newspaper reporter more than a decade ago? If I had to pick a single word to describe a driving factor of the widespread decline the book covers, it would be shamelessness.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers have been emboldened over the last two decades to openly espouse beliefs that many of us grew up believing were in the past. They do not feel shame in displaying their ignorance and racism. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in an era where things like the Civil Rights movement were generally viewed as good things. The people who believed otherwise, I was led to believe, were on the margins of our society. I don’t know if I can say that anymore.

Savannah Mayor Van Johnson does an admirable job combatting the hate and racism that fills the comment sections of his Facebook posts on any given day. Like a lot of us, he might be better off ignoring those comments more often, but I understand why he feels the need to confront them head-on.

His feed — plus that of hundreds of local news outlets across the country — is inundated every single day with people saying things that should result in getting them ousted from polite society. But they’re not doing so anonymously — they’re doing it under their own names, often proudly linking themselves and their racist comments back to their employers.

Maybe some of these folks get a talking-to by their boss at the local car dealership where they work. Maybe some of them even get fired for saying obviously racist shit on the Facebook page of their town’s mayor, where their profile lists them as being employed at businesses whose bottom lines rely on, you know, not being openly racist. But many more of them face no consequences. And why should they? Over the last 10 years, we’ve watched as some of the most powerful and influential people in American life have expressed racist beliefs on a daily basis.

In this type of society, why should anyone be fearful that such comments will have consequences in their own lives? Many of the things that many of us were led to believe would result in dire consequences no longer apparently do so, especially for those at the top, like Donald Trump. Wanton corruption, open racism, abject ignorance — all of these things have led to more success and power for Trump and his vast network of Americans who support these degrading behaviors or are profiting from them.

How do you turn around a society where such behavior is rewarded? That’s the underlying question that will be answered by November’s elections.

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You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

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I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.

And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.

Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.

Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.

Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)

Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.

All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.

***

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Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me t…

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