As we enter this new unchartered phase of American democracy, everyone has a theory about how Donald Trump won a stunning comeback victory. The one thing we keep hearing from voters and pollsters, it was the economy. Specifically, the price of groceries. Inflation had come down. Unemployment is at an historic low and wages are up. But it wasn’t being reflected in the supermarket aisle. People were fed up. Trump had the answer they wanted to hear, across the board tariffs and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

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Everyone expected it to be close. All the polls showed a dead heat. It was about the “Battleground States” and the “Blue Wall”. It wasn’t close. It was a blow out. Trump supporters are delirious over having their guy back in charge. The rest of the country is stunned that the country elected the most dangerous man in America. The list of bad things about Trump is very long. Racist, misogynist, liar, incoherent, convicted felon, power hungry, fascist and let’s not forget, Hitler admirer. The Republicans have flipped the Senate and appear to be holding the House. What could the next four years bring?

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“…it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.” This is from Marine General John Kelly who spent a year and a half as Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff. He was one of Trump’s closest aides who saw him on a daily basis. He is one of over ninety former officials who worked for Trump who now warn he’s not fit to be president again. Kelly has spoken to the New York Times. It’s frightening and we should all pay attention. Kelly says Trump would govern like a dictator, and he has no understanding of the Constitution or the rule of law. He made admiring statements about Hitler. Trump said more than once, “Hitler did some good things, too.” He had contempt for disabled veterans and for those who died in battle calling them “losers and suckers.” Kelly said Trump is a fascist who admires dictators. Kelly fears Trump would make good on his promise to use the military against Americans. “He just doesn’t understand the values-he pretends, he talks, he knows more about America than anybody, but he doesn’t.”

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It’s one month away. We are anticipating it. We are fearing it. We are hoping the madness will end. It appears it’s going to be close. And we know one candidate is a very sore loser. The presidential election will be one of the most consequential in our lifetime, maybe in our history. It certainly has been one of the most bizarre. An incumbent president stumbles so badly in a debate, he’s forced to withdraw from the race after insisting he wouldn’t. His vice president becomes the Democratic nominee just months before the election. She will be the first female president in our history if elected. And, oh, she’s a woman of color. Her opponent is a convicted felon and faces serious charges in three possible additional cases, and has been the target of two assassination attempts. One that came within an inch of probably killing him. Welcome to American politics 2024.

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Flying. We all do it. We take vacations. We fly for business. It’s one of the most unpleasant experiences we put up with to get where we’re going. The only other experience I can compare it to is going to the hospital for surgery. Which is something no one looks forward to. For both surgery and flying you have to arrive hours before you receive the service you’re actually paying for. You have to go through what can be an embarrassing personal experience. At the airport, you have to go through security which can require removing shoes, belts, everything in your pockets. Your carry on bag is x-rayed by a TSA agent looking for creams or lotions or threatening objects that you could use to hijack the plane, and you have to remember to leave your ammunition at home. You can be picked for a random check. The agent sticks a metal probe into you bag and starts digging through your stuff. It can make you very uncomfortable.

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The story goes that Ernest Hemingway was challenged with a bet to write a story in six words. Not a good bet. Hemingway supposedly wrote, “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Hemingway went on to write six word sequels. But upon closer examination of history, there are serious doubts about where the story really came from. A story in the Spokane Press on May 16, 1910 recounts a story that originally appeared in 1906 about the death of a baby. Hemingway would have been seven years old at the time. The grieving mother wrote an ad selling her child’s clothing. It read, “Baby’s hand made trousseau and baby’s bed for sale. Never been used.” Through twists of history the story was attributed to Hemingway thirty years after his death.

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In a New York Times opinion piece, former CBS News anchor woman Katie Couric is lamenting the departure of current anchor Norah O’Donnell from the anchor chair after the November election. CBS News has announced she will be replaced by two men, John Dickerson a long time CBS News correspondent and analyst who has worked for 60 Minutes and WCBS-TV anchor Maurice DuBois. Dickerson is white. DuBois is black. Three top executives on the program will be men with Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, having overall responsibility for the newscast. CBS says it’s planning to make the newscast different. It will cover stories with a 60 Minutes feel with regular correspondents.  It will use WCBS-TV meteorologist Lonnie Quinn to do weather stories. It sounds to me like it will look more like a local TV newscast.

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In the summer of 1964, I was getting ready for my first year of high school. It’s a significant event in every kid’s life. New school. New building to navigate. New friends to make. Nervous about being accepted. Teachers who are going to be tougher than those you left behind in elementary school. I walked to elementary school. I had to take a city bus to high school. I was entering maybe the toughest phase of life, teenage years. Now, our oldest granddaughter is getting ready for high school next month. Her first fourteen years now seem to have gone by in flash. We tried to be as big a part of her life as possible, even though she spent eight years living in Texas. Visits back and forth and FaceTime were a big help. Now she lives close by, but I fear she will be moving away.

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I’m staying in, I’m staying in, I’m staying in, I’m out. The crisis the Democratic Party and Joe Biden created going into this critical election was a mistake of historical propositions. It’s never happened before and was entirely preventable. When Lyndon Johnson dropped his possible re-election bid in March 1968, he could see the crush of the Vietnam war was too much to overcome and it wasn’t one month before the Democratic convention. Simple math told Biden and party leaders he would be eighty-two years old at the start of his second term and eighty-six if he survived it. Biden could have gone out a hero after the 2022 elections when Democrats did much better than expected. Biden did accomplish a great deal in undoing Trump’s mess and getting significant legislation passed. He could have come out and said it was time to pass the torch to a younger generation of candidates and may the best candidate win.

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As shocking as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is, the violent images of his political discourse raised over the years have burst into flames. We will soon find out what the motives were of the twenty-year old with the high power rifle. He most likely should never have been able to get his hands on that gun. But this is the America we live in. Guns inspire some of us and terrify most of us. We’ve allowed them to become ingrained in our culture. No one should ever justify violence, political or otherwise. But Trump has used violent images over the years to arouse his followers and built a personality cult that many ordinary citizens and the leaders of the Republican Party have embraced like moths to a flame.

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