Author's Note: Reflections on Watching a President Unravel in Real Time
I was not planning to write this piece over Easter. I had intended to spend a few days away from the screen, away from the news cycle and the relentless machinery of American decline that has become the background noise of all our lives. I failed. Donald Trump made sure of that.
His Truth Social post landed in the early afternoon on Easter Sunday. You’ll have surely read it by now: the profanity, the threats, the mocking invocation of Allah directed at an Islamic nation whose infrastructure he was promising to destroy. I read it a few times, because I assumed I had misunderstood something. I had not. The President of the United States, on the holiest day in the Christian calendar, chose to threaten war crimes against Iran while sneering at the Muslim faith. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. Praise be to Allah.” And a very happy Easter to you too.
We have been writing about Trump for years and are well accustomed to the provocations, cruelty,
