The Witness Chronicles, 1/6/25

The king is mad, long live the king

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

Tales of the Mad King, 2025

We’re in lalaland now and the stakes are as high as they get

Let the show begin.

There are many things going on right now that indicate just how much disarray we can expect in the incoming administration. It is not an exaggeration to say that though Trump has both houses of Congress he looks to be unable to functionally run the government. And that this unprecedented situation is entirely the product of Trump’s own core policy of division.

He set Americans against each other politically, but with his own Party he did the same, supporting extremist candidates determined to bring the functioning government down at any cost.

What they want to replace it with is anyone’s guess.

That policy of division was a brilliant core of Trump’s strategy but an extremely shortsighted one, because Trump is not a planner. His entire goal was to reach the Presidency again, not because he had plans to move the country ahead, but to satisfy his enormous ego and need for attention.

The problem with a sociopathic narcissist is they will take any attention, good or bad, as long as the limelight is on them. It is, quite literally, madness. And madness is what we have.

It’s important to note that this term has not even begun yet and we are only a few days into the New Year and already face multiple crisises. And they are not insignificant.

Even more alarming is the reality that if the American people wake up and realize we have a mad man for a President, there may not be much we can do about it given the current circumstances. A House that can’t even elect a leader or pass any significant legislation is totally incapable of dealing with an out of control President.

There is no indication they will ever want to. Unless Trump does something so insane, like starting a nuclear war, it is doubtful his supporters would ever act against him. He is a chaos actor, most comfortable breaking things and uninterested in fixing them.

This newsletter was created to witness what I think are the most consequential political events of our lifetime but it may well become a chronicle of the descent of our democracy, a democracy that has stood for 249 years.

It would be easy to give up and let these people tear our country apart. But democracy is just one of the things we would be giving up. Climate change is proving far more destructive to humanity than anything we have faced since the invention of nuclear weapons. It is only a free and open democracy that accepts the reality of science that can possibly turn that threat around.

So, who did we elect? A man who could care less about that threat, a man who believes extreme wealth will protect him and his friends from any consequences of global warming. If he believes anything, which is questionable.

I am reading a biography of Winston Churchill and in the mid part of his life, before WWII, he was in the political wilderness during the 1930s, watching Adolp Hitler build his Third Reich while the world looked away. The British people were paralyzed by willful indifference, indifference bolstered by a devastating war only twenty years earlier. The disease permeated the government and the populace and I see striking parallels with our times.

It’s that dire. The things I’m writing about are just the kind of events that added up to disaster back then in the form of World War Two, a war which killed as many as fifty million humans. We don’t face that kind of war but climate change could be equally destructive.

The lesson of the mad king and the mad dictator is how much damage one man (or woman) can do to humanity if they wield enough power and the people look away, pretending it won’t affect them. But WWII affected every person in every corner of the globe and global warming is doing the same.

And we elected a government that won’t even acknowledge its existence. We made this mess and we have to fix it, if it is not too late.

Tired of politics? I’ve revived my personal growth newsletter, The Remarkable, as a place where I can write about some of the good stuff in life. Check it out!

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