I’m 58, not old, but old enough. Old enough to remember when words like “duty,” “honor,” and “country” weren’t punchlines. I always believed nothing could break this nation. Not the Russians, not the Chinese, not terrorism or war or financial collapse. We were the unbreakable machine, flawed but functional, chaotic but enduring.
I’ve loved this country. Fought for it, defended it in arguments, believed in its mythos. I respected what it stood for, even when it stumbled. We always found a way forward. Always.
But I never imagined the slow death would come from within. That the downfall would be ushered in not by some supervillain or empire but by one bloated, bitter, self-obsessed failure of a man. A failed real estate grifter. A reality show host who got rich selling gold-plated garbage and snake oil to the desperate and the angry. A man with the emotional range of a toddler and the ethics of a cartel boss.
One man. That’s all it took.
He didn’t invent the rot he just saw it, named it, and made it proud of itself. Gave people permission to be worse than they ever admitted to being. And now the experiment’s on fire. Civility is a punchline. Truth is a commodity. And the flag doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.
We’ve survived wars, assassinations, depressions, 9/11, COVID, insurrections. But this? This is different. This isn’t crisis, it’s collapse. And the most terrifying part? Half the country’s still cheering.
All it took was one man. One hollow, hateful man who cracked the system wide open. And we let him.
Back in 2015, I remember watching him on stage, smirking, lying with every breath, promising things even he didn’t believe. But there was one thing he said that stuck with me like a bad tattoo: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” And he wasn’t joking. He was making a point. And we laughed. Or we gasped. Or we rolled our eyes. But he was dead serious.
Then he said he’d own the Republican Party, because they were weak, soft, spineless. And again, we didn’t believe him. But he kept his word. He didn’t just own them. He broke them, bent them over, and turned them into a cult. What once pretended to be a political party with ideas and platforms is now just a collection of cowards scrambling to stay in his shadow, terrified of mean tweets and red hat rallies.
He called their bluff, and they folded like lawn chairs in a hurricane. Every single one who claimed to stand for “values” or “the Constitution” sold their souls for relevance and a shot at staying in power. And now, there’s no Republican Party, just Trump, and those too scared to tell the truth.
And that’s the tragedy, isn’t it? He told us what he would do. We just didn’t believe he could pull it off. We thought our institutions were too strong, our norms too sacred, our people too proud. But the truth? The system was never designed to withstand a demagogue with no shame and a crowd hungry for vengeance.
He didn’t destroy America. He revealed it.
I don’t know where we go from here. I really don’t. We’re not just fractured, we’re fraying at the soul. The rot isn’t surface-level. It’s in the foundation, the wiring, the bloodstream. The corruption isn’t a few bad actors; it’s systemic, generational, calcified. It’s the lobbyists who write the laws. The billionaires who buy the silence. The media that sells us rage and distraction. The courts that claim neutrality while doling out injustice like it’s rationed air.
We’ve got leaders who speak in rehearsed apathy, smiling as the ship goes under. And too many people cheering them on because they’d rather drown in familiar lies than be saved by uncomfortable truths.
The worm is turning inward now. Eating itself. The body politic is in auto-cannibal mode, devouring its own tongue just to shut out the screams. And the worst part? Most of us are too exhausted, too numb, or too broke to fight back.
I don’t know how we fix this. Maybe we can’t, not in the way we think. Maybe the fix isn’t a vote or a protest or a new party. Maybe the fix is more radical. Maybe it starts with telling the truth, loudly and often, until the walls crack and the light gets in. Maybe it starts with refusing to play along. With choosing community over conformity, integrity over comfort.
Or maybe it doesn’t start at all. Maybe this is just what it looks like when an empire built on illusion finally hits the wall.
Read this on Substack where it first appeared — if you’re into that sort of thing.
