The more time I spend working my way back through the early days of this site, the more struck I am by how little the underlying tune has changed.
Looking back at a sampling of posts from those first four months of musing over my morning coffee, the worries back then were genuine enough. But the stakes today feel entirely different—bordering on treason, at least the way I see it. The sheer disregard for the rule of law, the brazen raiding of the treasury, and the daylight trading of favors, contracts, and pardons are all symptoms of what folks in power will do to keep their grip on the ladder. And it’s hard to find comfort when the nine people tasked with reining in that excess are the very ones who green-lit it in the first place.
Not long ago, a relative who voted for Donald Trump asked me what qualities Kamala Harris had that made me think she was qualified to lead this country. After all the back-and-forth, my answer came down to a simple, honest truth: “Because she isn’t Donald Trump.”
I wanted to turn the question around and ask how anyone could look at his first term and still see a qualified leader. Yet as we talked—a conversation they started to try and understand my perspective—it became clear they didn’t have much real confidence in their own choice, either. And still, they’d pull the lever for him all over again.
So here I sit on the porch with a fresh cup, feeling an odd, unsettling nostalgia for the days when our biggest national headache was the sheer incompetence of a President rather than absolute immorality. Who would have ever thought I’d look back on George W. Bush with something resembling fond relief—even while knowing full well his years were the first heavy steps down the road that brought us here?
