Waiting For A President To Die

Isn’t there a better way to resist the regime?

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Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash; crop and greyscale applied by author

In the Before Times, Americans who screamed at injustice or marched in the streets for basic human rights and dignity were the unheralded patriots of a nation born with great promise but built on the shoulders of men and women in chains.

Some were rare visionaries who knew they were the children of an empire that cleansed itself of anyone who stood in the way of its railroad tracks and industry, but they clung to the hope of its promise.

When Americans rebelled against an undeclared war while simultaneously demanding equal rights for women and people of color, they sensed that an unarmed revolution would change the country forever. It felt good.

They felt an uneasy pride in that one “good” war that redrew boundaries and buried dictators into the salts of the earth, and found a home for Jews, who lost six million souls to a pathological tyrant who tried to create a perfect and perfectly Aryan race.

Few people gave much thought to the displacement of Palestinians when resettling Jews after World War Two. Even fewer expected to see all of Gaza turned into rubble and rebar and crushed hospitals and the burial ground for countless young bodies. Nobody entertained the possibility of a genocide at the hands of a Zionist megalomaniac.

Everyone rallied around the Israeli flag because history demanded that we never forget, a lesson that, ironically, a Zionist tyrant is erasing from memory.

When the aftermath of that one “good” war gave birth to new authoritarian regimes that our nation used as proxies for a new kind of warfare, some raised objections, and this, too, was good.

Despite an occasional rousing objection, though, the wars continued because the economy needed to be fed. Few of us noticed the subtle changes that our forever wars impaled into the bones of our nation. Objections began to fade as the dynamics of our wars changed.

We were happy when soldiers were no longer spat upon when returning home from war, but were instead celebrated by jets flying over stadiums, because the wars became wars of righteous vengeance instead of proxy wars fueled by Cold War politics.

As the wars morphed to conquests for oil and resources instead of vengeful retaliation, nobody much noticed. The celebrations continued. Kuwait and its oil were ours, safely in our fold.

We built huge military bases in places like Bahrain and made uneasy alliances with tribal leaders who, fifty years prior, lived in tents and, outside of their orgies in Monaco, were now commanding their women to cover their faces and step forward only when called.

We invented a reason to invade Iraq and killed 100,000 or so of its people. Nobody from the U.S. counted the dead, so the precise number remains unknown. This is our natural preference.

We cheered when U.S. Air Force warthogs blasted retreating Iraqi troops in the open desert, and laughed at the ineptness of foreign soldiers, not considering the possibility that a new generation of disaffected Iraqis would respond in the form of new terror groups like ISIS, which shocked Americans with their brutality.

Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, aka Warthog, one of the deadliest strafing machines ever piloted. Image by By Master Sgt. William Greer, U.S. Air Force — https://www.flickr.com/photos/usairforce/5711148476/in/photostream/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61587687

On the domestic front, we relished our new sushi restaurants and coffee houses. Some of us snubbed our noses at Starbucks and instead proudly displayed our Peet’s Coffee mugs year after year, decade after decade. I’ve regaled my friends with more than one story about my days sitting in one of the original Peet’s coffee houses in Berkeley.

I never gave much thought to Peet’s becoming part of one of the largest food conglomerates in the known universe, one that has been accused of child labor in Ghana and deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)¹ so severe that it reduced the elephant population from hundreds of thousands to hundreds.

We supported our co-ops and community health food stores while General Foods and Mondelez (Kraft Foods) gobbled up our favorite small health food brands.

Nature’s Grains (fictional) became Kellogg’s Nature’s Grains. Almost nobody blinked at these transformations. We proudly waved the boxes of quinoa bought from international food conglomerates that ravage the world’s farmland.

As we near a stage that many of us call late-stage capitalism, which has marched relentlessly forward since the Reagan years, we find ourselves in a state of panic as we realize that we are in late-stage democracy, too.

But, like late-stage capitalism, this fall from grace didn’t happen overnight.

Many of the achievements of the Before Times occurred as a result of old-fashioned lobbying and a determination on the part of a somewhat politically left to become accomplished machinists who methodically gained mastery over the gears of government, largely unaware of an opposing movement determined to push the country in the other direction.

This opposition, after seizing the highest court² in the land with gifts and bribes, finally took a victory lap with the Citizens United case, which institutionalized dark money.

Progressive policies required decades of relentless and steady work to produce results such as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and environmentalism as a legitimate goal of government.

Environmentalism became important enough to the body politic that a Republican, Richard Nixon, created a government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, to enforce a set of regulations designed to protect it.

Did it take Lake Erie catching fire for Nixon to think about the environment? I don’t know. I’m not inclined to page through the history books to determine exactly how this Overton Window developed. Does it even matter?

What we know is that everyone, aside from a few early rageaholics who were the precursors to those who’ve usurped the Oval Office, agreed that the environment was a mess and that pollution was likely to change the planet’s climate.

Concerns about the costs of healthcare were dramatic enough to inspire that same Republican president to propose a national healthcare plan.

Similarly, Ronald Reagan left office with this praise for immigrants:³

I’ve been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one — a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea.

The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.’

When Reagan famously referred to America as the city on the hill, he wasn’t thinking of a walled city, or one filled with armed federal troops.

In one of his earliest speeches (1952), he said:⁴

“I, in my own mind, have always thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land. It was set here and the price of admission was very simple: the means of selection was very simple as to how this land should be populated. Any place in the world and any person from those places; any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here.”

Reagan neglected to mention that populating the continent required ethnic cleansing and its Trail of Tears, but his views on immigration remained consistent throughout his career. In 1986, he signed an immigration reform law that granted amnesty to three million immigrants.⁵

Reagan, of course, was no friend of the left, but his was mostly an economic dispute. He was wrong, but his belief in supply-side economics was genuine.

He lacked awareness, always a fatal flaw in any political leader. I doubt he was aware or would have acknowledged that the massive military buildup he initiated was a form of industrial policy and that the corporate welfare it spawned was intrinsically evil when it began its long, 40-year march to ending social welfare programs in the United States.

Many of the pieces leading to our current condition may have been installed by him, but it wasn’t a grand conspiracy. That came later, as the dark money warriors gained control of the Supreme Court through groups like the Federalist Society and the oligarchs who fund it.

Bill Clinton began the journey of killing what little there ever was of leftist thought in America when he pushed free trade Republican agreements onto a wary nation. These agreements were probably inevitable once Chinese power brokers discovered how easy it was to exploit labor through capitalism.

China was bound to become an economic power once it discovered capitalism. Nobody tapped Richard Nixon on the shoulder while he was opening up the gates to China and said, “Hey, Dick, you’re opening Pandora’s box.”

Someone was also destined to pay the price for lost jobs. That someone turned out to be the Democratic Party, but it could have easily gone the other way. Free trade was a bipartisan decision. Most everyone cheered it on.

What became a Pandora’s Box for the United States was manna from heaven for the 500 million or so Chinese who were transformed from peasantry to a middle-class lifestyle nearly overnight.

If there is a morality lesson here, it is that perhaps the American people should congratulate themselves for helping enable this impressive achievement. Despite abuses against its workers that include child labor, the improvement in Chinese lives is unprecedented in scale.

Instead, though, many Americans engaged in a mission of Asian hate that persists.

Perhaps it would be more useful to appreciate the contribution of China’s scientists to our universities than it is to chase them home. Our demeaning volleys of Asian stereotyping and gaslighting have chased away professionals, researchers, doctors, lawyers, and thinkers who are unlikely to return.

Perhaps rather than cry about China’s success, we should tell ourselves, “Job well done,” and adapt to the change with more grace than what allowed us to twice elect a suspected pedophile as our president — a man who was, very possibly and probably, involved in a multibillion-dollar sex trafficking ring that was perfectly willing to traffic children.

Perhaps instead of complaining about border security, we should embrace the sweat of those eager to do work we won’t.

Try telling a recent immigrant what a terrible place America is. Let me know how that goes. Even now.

Abiding by our change in thinking towards immigrants has anointed a man whose flaws as a human being are so legion that when someone posts one word of derision on social media, everyone knows who they are talking about.

There is no question among anyone but the most morally blind what this human is about, that he is devoid of any sense of honor, empathy, or human kindness, that his egress leads to a static destination of grievance and self-pity, no matter when or from where it originates.

A man without a natural smile, a man who never changes, is very possibly a man without a soul, unless demons walk among us.

So now, we’ve moved beyond the point of, “What now?” We didn’t ask that question often enough when Kamala Harris was charming us during her happy confabs. We didn’t want to consider the terrible alternative to her victory, so we didn’t plan for it.

We didn’t notice that her celebratory gatherings of eager followers were mostly women until the final vote showed us why that was so.

When I joked to a younger male friend that attending a Kamala rally would be an instant ticket to meeting a woman, he smiled sheepishly, presumably because he had other things in mind, like most of his peers.

And here we are. Stuck in an endless loop, waiting for a president to die while we feed our echo chambers of rage to the point where it is now a growth industry here on Substack and elsewhere.

My inbox is full of rage headlines over the newest absurd or malevolent attack by a regime that was brought back to life after lying for several years on the floor like a clever, slightly wounded animal that convinced us that it was more gravely wounded than it was.

It was given new life by boys posing as men, and by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his purchase of a presidency that fell out of his grasp through a combination of nihilism, greed, and overreach.

Our rage has brought us little more than a smart ass California governor using climate-ravaging AI to create goofy memes that mock the maniac in the Oval Office, but, like most tools of the resistance, it hasn’t and won’t move the needle.

The 40% or so of American voters that form the wall of American grievance sustaining the regime remains a steady count in the polls, like a stubborn medieval fortress that our flaming artillery of rage hasn’t penetrated for ten years.

So, we look for a weakness in the wall, and all that we come up with is death.

His death.

It’s the only way out.

Because those who resist the current regime aren’t as unstable as those on the right, nobody calls for his assassination, partly because it’s amoral, and partly because it would result in bedlam and an ugly martyrdom he doesn’t deserve.

What the suffering masses yearn for instead is death by natural causes, so they cling to every story about swollen ankles and the occasional stumble on his way towards Air Force One. When his puffed head looks three sizes larger than the month prior, we murmur and chatter excitedly in our social media posts.

“He’s close! He’s close! Is it almost over?”

We look for signs of dementia (they’re everywhere, so this is easy), uneasily wondering if this is the day, conveniently forgetting that our Uncle Herbie lasted twenty years in the same kind of condition thanks to the miracle of modern medicine.

This is no way to defeat a regime.

But the nation won’t last four years with him at the helm, either.

What is a nation on the brink of failure and authoritarianism to do when a vast part of it doesn’t want to do anything?

I spoke to a close Black friend of mine here in Atlanta who despises the man but says in response to questions like this, “We ride it out,” because his people have done that for 500 years.

For many people, those oppressed by the same policies that many of us say make this nation great, this is business as usual. Nothing to see here.

The difference is mostly about white liberal tears.

That said, in the Before Times, those white liberal tears helped usher in things like a start on civil rights and environmentalism.

The Before Times were innocent and idealistic, far removed from today’s reality.

Lately, though, liberal tears have offered little beyond internecine warfare and a cottage industry of complaints and calls for paid subscriptions (yes, such as mine) that remind many folks of daily emails from an emasculated Democratic Party seeking contributions. And a whole lot of anguish.

Little in the way of actual solutions has emerged.

Today, governors in Democratic states are on the backs of their heels trying to think of ways to fight off the regime’s recent threats to occupy their cities, and coming up with few answers in the face of a compliant Supreme Court that is now owned in full by the Federalist Society.

The rest of the Democratic Party seems emasculated, for the most part, except for a few heroic voices.

Immigrants continue to be shuttled⁶ to unknown, far-off, war-scarred lands. Classical violinists are seized,⁷ then disappear. Few of us object or notice as we brawl on the internet over the nuances of response or simply try to whip up enough money for rent as tariffs drive up the price of our Peet’s coffee and home construction grinds to a halt.

Government agencies are stripped clean, their workers’ lives ruined.

So we wait for him to die, refusing to consider that he might not, that he might not even die politically, because the great wall of grievance remains at 40%. Not even higher prices threaten to topple it.

Not even stories of orgies with children seem to shake the foundation of this wall and the bizarre religious cult that fosters it.

So we wait.

And do nothing meaningful.

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Notes

This story first appeared earlier this week in Medium’s Rome Magazine.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. to, Contributors. 2012. “American Multinational Confectionery, Food and Beverage Conglomerate.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 5, 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondelez_International#Deforestation.

2. The Federalist Society’s War Against Americans

3. American Experience. 2019. “Reagan’s Farewell Speech.” Pbs.org. American Experience. January 22, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reagan-farewell/.

4. Dakota, Heart of. 2019. “We Are Blessed to Live in America!” Heart of Dakota Christian Homeschool Curriculum. June 29, 2019. https://www.heartofdakota.com/2019/06/29/we-are-blessed-to-live-in-america/.

5. Saluja. 2025. “When Reagan Gave Amnesty: Remembering the 1986 Immigration Reform That Legalized 3 Million People.” Salujalaw.com. 2025. https://www.salujalaw.com/when-reagan-gave-amnesty-remembering-the-1986-immigration-reform-that-legalized-3-million-people.

6. Grumbach, Gary, Marlene Lenthang, and Rebecca Cohen. 2025. “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Taken into ICE Custody, but Judge Blocks Deportation for Now.” NBC News. August 25, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ice-check-in-rcna226866.

7. lebrecht, norman. 2025. “Utah Orchestra Violinist Is Seized by Trump’s ICE - Slippedisc.” Slippedisc. August 21, 2025. https://slippedisc.com/2025/08/utah-orchestra-violinist-is-seized-by-trumps-ice/.