Why Me?

Maybe I should stop to answer the question why I felt like I could or should write a book about the current administration. I am not a politician, an academic, a reporter, a current or former staff member, or even a relative of the president. I am just a citizen, like you, like all our neighbors, our co-workers. No less, but no more. I have the advantage of having been raised by a WWII veteran whose PTSD prompted me to learn about that war to gain insight into the man I saw, and the one I knew lived beneath that surface, and that gave me the confidence to tackle the core question I started with: is the country on the same path as Germany was 100 years ago? I knew the historical side of the equation as a result of that lifelong advocation but needed context and behind-the-scenes insight into the modern government I was trying to compare, so I read and watched whatever I could on the rise of the modern Republican party and Donald Trump as a politician. There was a lot of it. And it’s still coming. All authored by the kinds of people I listed above. People who are closer to the action or smarter than I. So why bother? Because the lessons they were trying to impart were ignored.

There were warnings from former administration insiders who had served with Bush and Obama even before Donald Trump’s first term, but the real landslide of material came out in the aftermath of his first term, which, let’s just face it, was a gold mine from that perspective. I’m sure all those historians, reporters and disenchanted former staff members thought they were doing a deep debrief (and making some money along the way) on a presidency that was unprecedented but thankfully over. The material was interesting reading too, I’ll freely confess. It would often read like a Beltway political thriller. Problem was, of course, it happened. But we’d survived it. And we could learn from it and get better at the business of American Democracy and shore up the holes in the processes that Trump had found and exploited. But did we?

No, we did not. I spend some time in my manuscript trying to reason how we got to Trump 2.0, The Revenge Tour. The economy played a large part, ironically, given where we are today, along with several other factors that are unfortunately realistic indicators of how divided we are as a nation in terms of accepting anyone who doesn’t look and think just like us. But still, what about all these warnings from people who knew and saw the dysfunction of the first term? My only conclusion was that outside of readers who were opposed to Donald Trump in the first place not enough people read those books or watched those documentaries. All the cautionary tales were lost on the right and the all-important “undecided” voter base.

I have theories about why. Reporters who turn their material into books are the most readable, but often rely on a lot of unnamed sources, so if readers are at all skeptical of the material, it’s easy to write off – if you will. Academics can be dry in their delivery. Mary Trump’s book about her uncle admittedly came off more like a retaliatory tell-all against the family who had misused her father and were not accepting of her than a deep psychological look at the making of a future would-be autocrat. There were some politicians who put themselves out there, but, again, it’s easy to dismiss them as bitter. Whatever the case was and is, all this wealth of material didn’t help warn us away from another Trump term, and here we are.

Of course, I wrestled with that fact as well: it’s happened. Donald Trump is in his second term. Is there any point in looking at it now? I felt and feel that there is. For one thing, it is likely a Trump heir apparent who will be the Republican nominee in 2028. The far right still is going to work to control the Republican party. To think it will all be over in a couple of years is naïve.

With the need still real, in my opinion, to look at American politics as it stands today, I was hoping I could bring a fresh voice to the conversation. A citizen’s voice. I’m in the fray just like the rest of you, trying to figure out how to afford groceries, worried about the future, but just as worried about the right now. Maybe if I present my take based on what I know about history and politics, along with what I learned about our present state, people will find my story relatable and take note. I sincerely hope so because there’s so much work to do together to right the ship of Democracy.