America chose an explicitly dangerous Donald Trump. What price will we pay?

An American flag is flown upside down during an anti-war rally near the U.S. Capitol on September 29, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

Today feels like a new America, an America I don’t recognize. One that makes no sense. One who has given up on the promise of our great country. One that I fear now. One that makes me cry.

We have transformed ourselves from the shining city on the hill into a monument to the grotesque, an experimental empire about to be destroyed in a madness of our own making.

Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2016 was terrible and ushered in all kinds of national shame, scandals, destructive policies and political violence, but his defeat in 2020 left us convinced that America realized it had made a mistake and had corrected its mistakes corrected. course and the nation would resume its course toward the exceptionalism that has defined us for more than two hundred years.

This is different and arguably worse. In 2016, no one knew exactly how Trump would govern — or whether his incompetence continually hampered his worst instincts and prevented him from enacting the most damaging parts of his agenda.

Not anymore. This is a new and much more dangerous Trump, bent on revenge and with the support of a conservative movement that has turned him from a morally bankrupt real estate mogul and reality show huckster into a deity. Those allies have spent the last four years committed to ensuring that he can implement whatever terrible thought pops into his head, and whatever other radical policies they want.

Trump has told us all this, and he has been frighteningly explicit about what he will do this time as president, especially in the final weeks leading up to yesterday’s election.

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He will try to wipe out every undocumented immigrant “bloody” and violent mass deportations. He will build concentration camps. He will institute ideological screenings for legal immigrants and end birthright citizenship.

He will end the prosecutions he faces for inciting a January 6 coup and illegally hoarding classified documents. sic the Ministry of Justice on his political enemies. He will forgive his violent supporters who ransacked the Capitol in 2021 to overturn an election he lost and attempted to assassinate members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president.

He will use the army for that violently suppressing dissent and capturing “the enemy within.” which equates to anyone who criticizes him. He will deploy soldiers taking over cities controlled by Democrats.

He will replace the civil service and its minions to ensure that there is no resistance to the implementation of his policies, no matter how un-American or unconstitutional, and to dismantle the government from within.

He will supervise the implementation of a national abortion banundoing the will of Arizona voters And other states – many of them dark red – that voted decisively to guarantee the right to abortion.

We have transformed ourselves from the shining city on the hill into a monument to the grotesque, an experimental empire about to be destroyed in a madness of our own making.

He will appoint insane anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to monitor public health.

He will focus on transgender peopleespecially children, and try to do that too erasing their existence from American life. He will Aggressively attacking LGBTQ+ rights.

He will impose 1,000 percent general rates that will cost the average American family an additional $3,954 per year Eliminate 1.4 million American jobs.

He will abolish the Ministry of Education And withhold funding from American schools that teach truthsBe it the history of racial inequality in the country or the existence of gays and transgender people.

He will withdraw from NATO And Give Vladimir Putin the green light to attack our NATO allies. He will Ceding Ukraine to Putin and abandoning a critical ally in the fight against the Russian dictator’s desire to restore the Soviet Union.

He will abolish policies aimed at mitigating climate change and accelerating the use of fossil fuels driving America further into crisis with increasing droughts, deadly heat waves, dangerous winter storms and increasingly intense and frequent hurricanes. He will roll back incentives for electric vehicles, which are a key part of reducing carbon emissions.

He won’t do anything to stop gun violence, but will instead focus on existing policy such as expanded background checks and regulating ghost guns.

He will remake America in his fascist image.

Arizona will be the epicenter of any deportation effort, tearing families apart. We just passed a constitutional right to abortion that will override federal action or make it irrelevant. Our increasingly scorching and endless summers will become more extreme, with more deaths, higher energy bills and less water. Our indigenous brothers and sisters, who have been prioritized by the Biden administration in a way never before done in America, will once again be pushed aside and, at best, ignored.

And Americans can’t seem to wait. Arizona and every other battleground state voted for Trump and decisively gave him a second term. My colleague recently wrote about it the deeper meaning of the ‘promise of America’ that Kamala Harris invoked during his campaign.

But that America is not the country we live in today. This America is cruel and brutal, uninterested in equality or justice, but instead focused on indulging its basest desires.

I hope my children inherit some semblance of that “America Promise.” But I’d be lying if I said I believed that would be the case at this point.

But the greatness of America has always been our resilience and our commitment to truth and justice. We may not be in favor of those ideals right now, but I have to believe that we will find our way again.

If we don’t, there won’t be much of a country left worth saving.

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