This is not us.

Will someone tell that to the Danes?

Signalgate would be funny if it’s weren’t so freaking scary. The cabinet, by design, is filled with people who are stunningly un- or under-qualified for their jobs. Intelligent people do not accept positions they are not able to do. So either the current cabinet members are not intelligent or perhaps they are stricken by a viral strain of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It appears that people in the rest of the world aren’t laughing anymore. To be honest with you, neither am I. Like so many of you, I am just weary of this whole political moment. It’s barely been three months since Trump fake-took the oath of office, yet the randomness, aggression, and speed with which he is upending our government comes straight out of “Dictatorship For Dummies.” The idea is to overwhelm and shock us to the point that we begin to believe we are hopeless and helpless, at which point we are conquered. Tyrants of history have demonstrated that it works.

With the Trump regime, even the events that were NOT intended to mess with our minds end up messing with our minds. Only it isn’t just our minds getting messed with. For Denmark, America has gone, in three short months, from being an ally to being a disgruntled ally, to being an adversary. The rest of the world is learning that it has to do more than simply make up for America’s lost contributions to the free world. It has to turn on a dime and defend itself against America as an adversary.

From my point of view, Europe has been long suffering and more than patient with us. We’ve always had the challenge of dispelling stereotypical tropes about “the ugly American” in the eyes of Europe. Now, we don’t just look ugly — we look hapless at best and soulless at worst. To Denmark, we look like everybody’s “evil ex.” We’re the ones they thought they knew until, out of the blue, we betrayed them.

The impression we leave

Last night I listened to Rachel Maddow interviewing Rufus Gifford, the former U.S. ambassador to Denmark. He was crying foul at the Trump regime’s portrayals of Denmark as a “bad ally.” More heartbroken than angry, Gifford identified what Europe sees as the worst part of this whole thing. From over there, they are mystified about why we are tolerating what Trump and his mouseketeers are doing to our government and our country.

In all honesty, I share their bewilderment. For the past decade, I thought somebody (Mueller? Congress? Courts?) would surely spring into action when Donald Trump battered the guardrails of our democracy and freedom. Although there are lots of courts blocking Trump’s actions temporarily, America has yet to disgorge Trump, MAGA, and the alt-right tech bros from our seat of government. From a distance, it looks like Americans just don’t care about any of our traditional allies or about America itself.

Of course, they’re pissed. When passenger jets flew into the twin towers, our allies rushed to our defense. They helped us fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, they showed up when we needed help with wildfires, and they’ve been extremely polite while we flail around with Trump.

After listening to Rufus Gifford, it hit me that here is a problem we can do something about.

Are we fighting or appeasing Donald Trump?

You’ll notice a couple of things about the words I now choose. I’ve started saying “Trump regime” instead of “Trump administration.” Whatever they may be doing in the executive branch, it is certainly not administration. I am also starting to call our current experience what I believe it really is: a revolution.

This is my first revolution and I’m learning as I go. I don’t know how these things usually work. I’ve often said that if anyone was going to rescue us, they would be here by now. But I may just be impatient. Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet. To read about other revolutions in history, it seems like things just suddenly happen at a pinpoint in time. For the people who lived through it, though, that’s not what happened. What happened to the “good Germans” of Nazi Germany is that they slowly boiled away like the proverbial frog in the pot until they were impervious to Hitler’s atrocities. A lot of us can now relate to that from our personal experiences.

The ones who SHOULD protect us from Trumpism is our legislative branch of government. By all that’s right, holy, and legal, they should have banished Donald Trump in disgrace at his first impeachment. When that didn’t happen — even when they impeached him again! — the judicial branch should have brought Trump to justice for his crimes and mistreatment of his office. The wheels of justice turn slowly and Trump managed to eviscerate them in the game of Beat The Clock. Finally, the voters — the people — could have spared the world what we’re going through today. But — once again — we failed.

You can see why Canadians and Europeans might start to think that America, Land Of The Free, is dead and too dumb to fall over. Maybe we are — but maybe we’re not dead yet (™ Monty Python). Here’s a bit of evidence:

• Town halls across the country, in red and blue states alike, are drawing enormous crowds. The crowds shout “DO SOMETHING!” and “DO YOUR JOB!” Demonstrators have disrupted Republican town halls to voice opposition to Trump's policies, including budget cuts and actions by Elon Musk's so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” For instance, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) faced protests during a town hall in Asheville, where attendees criticized his support for Trump.

• The Democratic Party leaders, bless their hearts, are reacting to Signalgate in appropriate and apparently effective ways (for a change), resulting in bipartisan congressional calls for an official investigation of the incident. Moreover, Democratic leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Tim Walz are going into Republican congressional districts and holding “empty chair” town halls with public attendance in the thousands.

• People are protesting. In February 2025, thousands of demonstrators participated in protests across all 50 states under the 50501 Movement, which stands for "50 protests, 50 states, one day." These protests addressed a wide range of grievances, including immigration policies, transgender rights rollbacks, and controversial proposals like forcibly relocating Palestinians from Gaza. A massive world-wide protest march against Trumpism is scheduled for April 5, 2025.

What else can we do?

I was asked by one of my more faithful readers (and I paraphrase), “Why us? Why can’t someone under the age of seventy fight this fight?” She echoes my own frustration. When I see footage of protests, what I mainly see are a lot of gray heads. In one sense, it was mainly baby boomers who created or acquiesced to the conditions in America that set the stage for Donald Trump. If it’s our mess, it’s reasonable that we should have to clean it up. On the other hand, we are feeling the limitations of our aging bodies and general lack of preparedness to fight in a revolution.

But there’s something we CAN do. We can make ourselves visible to our European neighbors. I don’t mean the governments, I mean the people that live there. People in Denmark should know that we realize we are not OK and are doing something about it. We can show them that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance do not speak for us and that Elon Musk wrecking the government is illegitimate in our eyes.

We’re going to be very lucky if other nations do not write us off completely. They already know they can’t count on us to keep our promises. Now they’re starting to liken Trump to Vladimir Putin. They’re afraid they can no longer trust us with their intelligence. While we continue to flop around trying to quash the revolution, we need the world to know that Americans are principled people of character and conviction. The thousands of us at marches and protests are not “ugly Americans.” We are a people in crisis, yes, but we are not abandoning our ideals and our place in the world.

What it all means

I keep on saying we will remain in this branch of hell until we find the courage to confront the contradictions in American democracy. We’re famous for our “….all men are created equal…” Declaration of Independence. But our Constitution enshrines inequality in its worst manifestations. At a time when most men of means held African Americans captive as slaves, the Constitution counted each enslaved person as 3/5th of a human being.

While amendments and legal interpretations have sought to mitigate these inequalities, significant structural gaps remain:

• The Electoral College enables minority party candidates to gain and hold power over the wishes of the majority of voters.

• Gerrymandered congressional districts help serve that same purpose.

• The apportionment of senatorial seats undercuts true democracy. For example, North Dakota’s two senators represent a population of just under 800,000. California’s two senators represent a population of over thirty-nine million.

When I went through public schools in the 1960’s, we were taught that America’s democracy was the best in the world. The truth is, we’ve never had a true democracy and we’ve always known it in our hearts. Those government programs being chainsawed by Elon Musk were created in the first place to mitigate the fact some of us are more equal than others.

Our structural inequality, my friends, is what’s at the root of this whole entire megillah. If it were otherwise, Donald Trump would not have been ushered into the White House in 2016. Republicans in congress would not have tolerated flagrant corruption and abuse of power. Half of America’s citizens would not believe that immigrants and trans people are to blame for their problems.

My own struggle is to figure out how to talk about that in ways that are actionable. But until that gets sorted out, the rest of the world needs to know at least that our hearts are in the right place.

Song of the Day

“America” — Simon & Garfunkel

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Keep on keepin’ on,

Cindy