If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

      I subscribe to the Washington Post. Because it is an excellent newspaper. So much so that, for years, when Amazon would come under fire for some lapse — employees collapsing in sweltering warehouses, or forced to wear adult diapers because they weren't permitted bathroom breaks — I'd dilute my contempt for the company by thinking, "Well, at least Jeff Bezos funds the Washington Post."
    Not complete forgiveness. But partial mitigation.
    Yes, when Bezos refused to endorse Kamala Harris, and showed up at Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump's ring, I was alarmed, and considered cancelling my subscription. But the Post is still an important news source. Once the snowball of rationalization starts rolling downhill, it grows and grows.

     Then at the end of February Bezos announced that the newspaper's editorials would now be exclusively "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Which is akin to the paper announcing in 1938 that its editorials would emphasize two main values: the need for people in the Sudetenland to be reunited with their German brethren, and the importance of Japan having access to Southeast Asian oil. In essence, the paper would now climb on a chair, bang two garbage can lids together and shout "Hurrah for Trump!" on its editorial pages.

     Honestly, I was taken aback. But still kept my subscription. Out of habit at this point.

     Bezos was joined by others — Tim Cook, from Apple. And of course Elon Musk, who stepped away from running X, nee Twitter, and SpaceX, and being the richest man in the world, to become Trump's right hand man.  Wielding a chainsaw — literally and figuratively — carving apart the government that we who are not billionaires so often rely upon to keep our lives from going down the toilet. I know that I soon will be leaning heavily upon the Social Security system that I have paid my hard-earned money into since I was 16 years old and scooping ice cream at Barnhill's in Berea. How will I live after the cash I expect from Social Security is diverted into the already bulging pockets of billionaires?
    Nor am I alone. You don't need me to tell you what a confusing, frightening time this has been, with entire offices of government shorn away while Trump tries to trash one Constitutional right after another by executive order. Here birthright citizenship, there 20 million Americans cut from the voting rolls by ginning up artificial barriers for them to clear on their way to the ballot box. The First Amendment will be next.
    Friends ask me how to resist. What small, ridiculous symbolic act they can perform to ... what? Register their displeasure in the great cosmic record keeper in the sky? Utter a bleat of unease as we all are stampeded over a cliff by our mad shepherds? Raising our voices. If only the czar knew. "I've got the solution, Natasha — we will inform him of our displeasure, through the sincerity of our protest!"

    In your dreams.
    Then clarity came to me. Of course. If you can't beat Trump, join him. Everyone else has. Bezos. Cook, Musk. Better men than I. More successful men. They obviously know something I don't. I may never be privy to their secret, successful thoughts. But I can emulate their actions. Indeed, I must.  

     So wear the red hat, if that will please him. And if you can, mouth the slogans too. Isn't that how Winston Smith ends up at the end of "1984." He loves Big Brother. Love Donald Trump. It's possible, right? It must be. Look how many people do it. Half the country, almost. Half the Congress, by a whisker.
     I mean, the man has done good things, right? Fast-tracking the COVID vaccine. You have to give him that. Saved millions of lives. And moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. That showed those Palestinians! His whole feint to cleanse them from Gaza and turn the territory into some kind of opulent resort. Is that really madness? Or genius? It'll be genius if it works, and as for the Palestinians, well, better off relocated to Jordan than slaughtered by the Israelis. 
    I could go on. Getting rid of the penny — that was a frustration of mine for years.  Trump axed it in a stroke.  Annex Greenland — why not? All the cool superpowers are doing it. China snarls like a junkyard dog, straining to sink its teeth into Taiwan, Russia gobbles up Ukraine. Greenland has all the earmarks of the ideal victim — nearby, defenseless, already cringing, waiting to be kicked.
    Yes, certain actions of Trump's are ... problematic. Shit-canning science by throttling the National Institutes of Health, for instance, and yanking back federal funding for universities that permitted overly-enthusiastic pro-Palestinian protests. But doesn't science typically thrive under some kind of oppression? I mean, look at Galileo. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church was in full swing in 1633, and still Galileo still used his telescope to gather evidence supporting the Copernican heresy of the earth revolving around the sun. What a great moment in the history of science, when the instruments of torture set out before the great astronomer. "E pur si muove," Galileo said. "And yet it moves."
     Okay, okay. That probably never really happened. But isn't that yet another gift that Donald Trump gives us? The gift of wonderment, of being able to embellish a world which, let's be honest, is often just too pedestrian and bland for our purposes? To be freed from the chains of fact, from the constant concern of did this happen or did that happen or does this word mean this or that, or is this action legal under the Constitution? Sweep all that bother away and just trust him to know what's best for us.
     It feels good, right? Freeing. After years of being in the losing opposition, that's a mighty appealing thought. To be on the winning side, for once. And don't Democrats seem to know it? Just by the way they sulk and scratch themselves, staring at their thumbs while the nation is terraforned into a dictatorship before their very, unblinking eyes? Who wants to be on their team anymore, mealy-mouthed little cowards without the courage of their own convictions. Story of their lives, losers who sat on their hands while their better qualified candidate lost an election — ooo, her laugh annoys us, we can't vote for her! — and are now sulking in a corner while the country is torn apart and rebuilt as a totalitarian state. 
     I for one am sick of it. So a change of course. There's no price of entry, no charges of hypocrisy. Half of Trump's cabinet are men who in 2016 were declaring him the greatest threat to the Republican Party since John Wilkes Booth. Nobody is so rude as to clap the Secretary of State on the shoulder and ask him what happened to all that "Little Marco" business. If anyone did, he would look them square in the eye and tell them that Donald Trump is a just and forgiving master, and once you bend the knee, the past is forgotten, at least until you cross him in any way or just aren't useful anymore.
     A decade's worth of columns, slandering Trump? I abjure them and apologize and — poof! — they are gone. Not really written by me. Mislabeled by balky software. Or if they were written by me — and who can be certain of anything anymore? — they are tissues of error created before I'd seen the light and fully understood the scope and majesty of the man. Now fluttered away on the wind, vanished. They never existed. We are living in the new world now. Times change, and we change. with them. 

    So all hail Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, gloria mundi in excelsis. I'm only sorry it took me this long. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have seen the light. It's a beautiful thing. Come join me. Because those of us who dwell in truth — and truth is whatever Trump says it is, today — we hate to be alone. Or even questioned. Really. Our confidence is that great that any form of dissension burns like thermite. You see how easy it is to shed the past and face the future, boldly, to win through surrender. Join me. Right now, by clicking here. Or else.