Trump Is Not the Problem.

Okay. So, yes, he is a major problem. But he's also a symptom

I was listening to Donald Trump’s predictably nasty and incoherent babbling after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his unconstitutional tariffs last week, when I realized that while I loathe him, he isn’t the biggest problem in his country.

The bigger problem is the system that created him.

No, I most emphatically do not want him to be a martyr, but if the shade of Sauron took him away tonight I would feel sort of like the inhabitants of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany must have felt when the U.S. army showed up. But there are 77,303,567 people we should really be far more appalled by.

That is the number of people (other than Trump himself) who voted to return the monster to the presidency on Nov. 5, 2024. They voted for him instead of a smart, savvy and experienced woman who was the right age for the job, and was the most experienced and qualified alternative they had.

They voted for him even though they had lived through four years of his chaos and mismanagement of the pandemic along with pretty much everything else.

They voted for him, even though the much-maligned Biden Administration had given them peace, full employment and prosperity. True, Biden did a very poor job communicating his administration’s successes.

But why would anyone think Trump II was likely to be better for America?

The only answer I can give is that people have forgotten what this country has always stood for, even if we often failed to live up to our ideal. They had lost their reverence for this nation, the Constitution, and the presidency and our history.

Some have never understood the delicate miracle that was this country at all. Certainly the Democrats, and anyone else committed to democracy, have done a piss-poor job explaining this and defending democracy and decency.

So what do we do now?

What’s most needed is a long-term plan for the future, and an immediate plan to reinvent and revitalize the Democratic Party. The vast majority of Republicans are either part of the cult or cynically in bed with the fascists.

Many people felt in 2017 that Donald Trump was a bizarre anomaly, and all we had to do was throw him out, and politics in America would soon return to normal. Well, we did toss him out, and guess what? We got him back. A worse version.

Which proves that the Democrats are failing to connect with people. Yes, we need to do everything we can to defeat MAGA as completely as possible in the midterms. But that won’t be enough.

We have no guarantee that America and American democracy will survive Trump’s second term. But if we get another chance to save our nation, we have to be ready to offer massive change. The only two potential candidates I see who have the potential to be the change agents we need who have the intelligence and experience to do the job are Pete Buttigieg and AOC — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has grown immeasurably in office. We are not going to win people back and get young people excited again with candidates like J.B. Pritzker or Gretchen Whitmer or even Gavin Newsom. We need someone who can excite and inspire a new generation, and cut across generational and gender and traditional lines.

That candidate should be under 50, and a bit edgy. We need to start thinking about that yesterday. It is time for a new American political revolution, a bloodless one, or at least a New Deal. One that will make old boomers like me a bit uncomfortable, perhaps, but inspire us at the same time.

We now have laboratory proof of what happens if we DON’T change.

So let’s get to work. This country is too young to die.