I recently purchased a 2025 calendar from the local dollar store. I am marking each day on the calendar with a big “X” as I count down the next two weeks. This is my way of accepting that which I cannot change and not succumbing to the fantasies that will be sold, with increasing fervor and mania, by the hope-peddlers and hopium sellers to an increasingly afraid and desperate public. Donald Trump will take power for a second time on Jan. 20. Trump’s return to power and his election for a second time should have vanquished naïve beliefs in the fundamental decency of the American people and the eternal nature of American democracy. Alas, I doubt that it has. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her solemn election 2024 post-mortem essay at The Guardian, “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.”

During these next weeks, Americans who believe in real democracy, the rule of law, pluralism and human decency will experience a range of negative emotions. These emotions will be greatly amplified once Trump takes office and in the (at least) next four years while he is in power. These negative feelings and emotions may become so severe that numbness and learned helplessness take over; this is the outcome that pro-democracy and other Americans of honor and conscience must work very hard not to succumb to permanently during the long Trumpocene.

"We can no longer find solace in the fact that there are more of us than there are them. That’s the most frightening thing of all."

To that point, public opinion polls and other research in the aftermath of the 2024 election show a consistent pattern of frustration, a belief that the country is heading in the wrong direction, a crisis of faith in the country’s institutions and a significant number of (white) Americans who possess authoritarian values and endorse Trump’s strongman politics and personality cult.

"Trump will lead a nation very different from the one that booted him from office four years ago," Max Burns warns in a new essay at The Hill, noting that "since then, millions of Americans have told campaign pollsters that they place a personal allegiance to Trump above their belief in the Constitution":

The number of people willing to consider alternatives to democracy is at a level last seen during the crises of the 1930s….It doesn’t take a political science expert to realize that the America Trump has in mind can’t coexist with democracy — and that Trump’s most committed voters don’t actually want to coexist in a constitutional democracy

[….]

The frightening reality of 2025 isn’t that Trump might attempt some end-run around the democratic process. It’s that he may not need to. Both the MAGA faithful and Trump-leaning independents are still racing rightward in terms of what they’ll excuse from a Trump administration. If Democrats think they........

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