Happy Juneteenth! On a day that honors delayed justice and hard-won freedom, it's worth remembering: history doesn't just repeat—it often rhymes with a darker verse. Back in 2015, I warned about the disturbing echoes between Trump's rise and a past we swore we'd never repeat. Today, that warning feels less like a cautionary tale and more like a prophecy ignored.
OK then...
I was just wondering, in this blog I started back in 2010, what's my earliest mention of the guy who has taken up so much of the air in the room, nationally and internationally: Donald J Trump? I found what I think is my oldest blog on him.
On November 20, 2015, I published a blog titled On Mein Führer Donald Trump and American Mistakes. He wasn't yet POTUS45, hadn't yet been elected until November 8, 2016. It was written in the wake of Trump proposing a national registry for Muslims—an idea that echoed a disturbing historical precedent. It marked the beginning of his descent into overt authoritarianism, a path he’d been edging toward his entire life, though most of us hadn’t yet recognized it.
At the time, some dismissed the comparison to fascism as hyperbole. Much as we heard for year when making an accurate observation of Donald Trump that "You're just a Trump hater!" Or, "You have TDS!" A condition I quickly pointed out when I got sick of hearing, that only a Trump supporter can acquire Trump Derangement (or Delusion) Syndrome.
But here in 2025, after a failed coup attempt, a Supreme Court stacked for ideology, and threats of authoritarian project plans like “Project 2025,” it’s clear the warnings weren’t extreme—they were early. This isn’t just about Trump anymore. It’s about how many Americans welcomed or ignored the transformation of our democracy into something far more fragile.
In 2015, I wrote about Donald Trump’s call for a Muslim registry. It sounded absurd. Un-American. Even surreal. Yet I knew history well enough to recognize the shape of the storm. Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t just bluster—it was blueprint.
Fast forward to 2025, and the warnings have aged like radiation. We didn’t just flirt with authoritarianism—we invited it in, gave it a beer, and handed it the nuclear codes. Twice.
Trump didn't need to gaslight the nation all at once. He did it slowly. Through birther conspiracies. Through cries of "fake news." Through flattery of dictators and contempt for allies. Through normalizing the idea that cruelty is strength and truth is optional. And far too many nodded along.
I once asked: What if Hitler never killed anyone, just “managed” the dangerous people? It was a rhetorical stab in 2015. But in 2025, it reads like a thesis statement. Trump didn’t need death camps. He had executive orders, stacked courts, and loyalists ready to purge agencies of dissenters under the banner of “Project 2025.”
We told ourselves a businessman could run the country better. But a nation isn’t a company—it’s a people. A messy, sacred, volatile people. You don’t “optimize” a democracy by streamlining rights or outsourcing humanity. You govern it with care. With checks, balances, and inconvenient truths.
Instead, we got a CEO of cruelty, and a political class so addicted to power that they let him gut the very idea of a republic.
And here we are.
Back then, I wrote a satirical list of wars worth fighting:
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A war on ignorance (Kill Fox News, open schools).
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A war on fake wars—on drugs, on immigrants, on “woke.”
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A war on abusing the First Amendment while silencing the rest.
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A war on those who call social progress a war on them.
That list hasn’t aged. It’s matured. Because we now live in a country where banning books is patriotic, where gerrymandering is a survival tactic, and where voting rights are eroded with surgical precision—all while we pretend it’s just “politics as usual.”
What’s changed most is how open it all is now. They’re not hiding it. They’re declaring it. Project 2025 lays it out in detail: fire civil servants, centralize executive power, dismantle protections for marginalized groups. This isn’t theoretical. It’s planned.
So yes, I was angry in 2015. But in 2025, I’m alarmed—and exhausted.
But not finished.
Because if we ever stop naming the danger, we start accepting it. And authoritarianism thrives on silence.
We still have a chance to change course. But let’s be honest—it’s no longer about stopping Trump. It’s about rejecting the America that wanted him. That still does. But also, acquiring them back into the fold, as Trump, will not last.
We can’t afford to keep mistaking the performance of strength for real leadership, or mistaking cruelty for conviction.
We need a war—not on people—but on complacency. On indifference. On historical amnesia. Actually, I despise that "we need a warn on..." nonsense and I've spoken on that before, often.
It’s the language of overcompensation. Of a culture that can’t solve a problem without militarizing it. We don’t need more wars, metaphorical or real. What we need is resolve. Memory. Collective responsibility.
Part of our problem today is too many exaggerating too much. IF we just all tried to be accurate and deal only in facts, so much of our disabled culture would rectify almost instantly. That very phrase “war on …” betrays the deeper illness: we’ve taught ourselves to communicate through exaggeration.
If we could all take a step back—strip away the spin, the fearmongering, the tribal loyalty—and just deal in facts, honestly and consistently, so much of our broken culture would begin to self-correct.
Reality is hard enough. We don’t need to distort it to make our point. We need to face it, together.
Maybe it’s not a war we need, but a reckoning. A willingness to face what we’ve become—and what we still might be, if we finally grow up.
Because if we don't fight that, we’ve already surrendered.
Compiled with aid of ChatGPT
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