It is increasingly hard to envision a way forward for America that is not dominated by the dangerous and delusional. The country has gone past the embarrassment of the obvious — US President Donald Trump and his henchmen are all woefully unqualified for the public trust they occupy. They are practiced liars who blithely regurgitate a steady stream of verbal vomit, and they seem devoid of the historical, cultural and moral framework necessary to design and implement even the most basic public policy response to the challenges of the day.

Instead, there is a torrent of purposeful malfeasance and lawlessness. In the last few weeks, Trump delivered an utterly unhinged speech to the UN General Assembly, ignorantly lectured America’s women on the dangers of taking Tylenol during pregnancy to avoid giving their children autism, ordered the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey in the face of internal Department of Justice resistance and then empowered an unqualified henchman to carry out the threat, and then suddenly “brokered” the initial phase of a ceasefire in the genocidal war in Gaza that he had fueled since taking office. Now, he continues to order broad military incursions into American cities run by Democrats, and continues to order that the US military engage in a deadly game of shoot the moving boat in the Caribbean Sea.

As if that weren’t enough, in a historic moment not to be missed, Trump, a draft dodger, delivered a mindless and rambling monologue to a live audience of the military high command that was so unlearnedly chilling that even America’s warrior chiefs were left in silent disbelief. Then, just to make sure that the daily drumbeat of disaster goes on, Trump shut down the very government he promised us he would lead to greatness and has now added additional layoffs in critical federal agencies to the growing human cost of that shutdown.

Throughout this performance, as with all that has preceded it, there has not been one single moment from which anyone should have been able to glean an ounce of competence, credibility or concern for those whose lives are negatively impacted by the chaos. Nor, it should be noted, has there been a single moment of accountability for anything. This is an utter institutional failure to address an existential threat at the helm of the nation. It is not the enemy within that is the greatest threat to the nation; it is the singular figure at the top and his henchmen who are the threat to all of us.

America’s politically charged shootings

Even if we were to assume that a significant portion of the American electorate finds each day of the Trump regime unthinkable, there are well over three years left to go. Since there is no short way to catalog the epic failure of governance in America since Trump’s arrival on the national stage, perhaps it would be instructive to focus on the disgraceful failure of the Trump regime’s “governance” to confront the ongoing US epidemic of gun violence. The Trump regime’s cozy relationship with those who produce and bear the armaments that kill seems incontrovertible. To be sure, with gun violence all around us, it must have been quite a challenge for the author of Trump’s early-morning social media rants to drum up a little empathy and perhaps a relevant public policy initiative or two when there are radical, left-wing forces keeping America from realizing its greatness. Then, the gun violence hit home.

Whenever there is a substantive discussion of gun violence in America, that discussion seems to beget even more gun violence. But let me be clear at the outset so that no one misunderstands: I am opposed to violence of any kind. I abhor the gun culture at the heart of so much of the violence in America. I have opposed every American war in my lifetime and the inherent violent deaths and devastation that each war has brought to distant shores. I am opposed to the death penalty and any other form of state-sponsored killing.

At a very basic level, I cannot watch children suffer for the violent sins of their elders. I also do not do thoughts and prayers. I do not encourage others to mistake their thoughts and prayers for meaningfully confronting the violence in our midst.

Yet, despite my concerns, one deranged and disillusioned young man, Tyler Robinson, shot and killed another young man, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, whose ideas he disliked and whose often despicable beliefs may well have contributed to his own demise. Two more young lives have been lost or thrown away by America’s gun culture and the instant reckoning it produces. This time, when it hit close to Trump and his sycophants, Trump went on the rampage, all but inviting more political violence from his armed supporters. Nobody seemed to want to say the obvious out loud. If you lie loudly enough, someone will hear you. And someone will be next.

In this context, there is a clear and dangerous hypocrisy. Black and brown gun deaths are a part of the fabric of the nation, seemingly producing a steady stream of corpses buried with hardly a public note. Yet the gun death of a single White Christian nationalist from Trump’s inner circle brought forth a posthumous Medal of Freedom and shady messaging that those responsible will pay.

Young voices fall silent

Amid all of this, it baffles me how so many in America can remain on the sidelines and so many empowered megaphones can remain silent for so long. But mainly, as a college student of the 1960s, it boggles my mind how so many of the nation’s young adults can ignore or avoid the inevitable long-term consequences of the governance deficit that looms larger every day. There is hardly an organized peep from the privileged young on campuses, in large law firms, in corporate America or within the financial and technical sector. Even when the benefits of their privilege are threatened on a daily basis by Trump and his merry band of White Christian nationalist thugs, mum’s the word.

As an illustration to today’s young adults, my generation is the beneficiary of the decades-long excellence of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Many youths seem either unaware of or indifferent to the denigration of this once-proud federal government institution. Its downfall started with Trump’s COVID-19 response in his first term. Now its disintegration has accelerated thanks to Trump and his anti-vaccine sidekick, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr., in his second term. So if you or your kids get real sick from what would have been an easily controllable or preventable disease, maybe you will think back on the good times you had while avoiding resistance to the demise of the CDC, not to mention the destruction of the federal infrastructure that helped so many of us daily.

I wish that this new national journey from dangerous incompetence to moral abdication, to failed institutional response to inexplicable indifference, were simply a bad dream. But it is not. Although there will be protests aplenty, their impact will be fleeting without a collective commitment to aggressively confront the assault on good governance at the heart of Trump’s perfidy. While “No King” is a hopeful metaphor, resistance leadership will need more than a slogan to inspire a collective and sustained response.

Some of you believe that I cannot see what good is left in the nation. That is not completely correct. I can see those few who are joined in the active struggle for an America that looks something like the oft-cited “beacon on a hill.” But that beacon, if it ever existed, now serves as a dim reminder of what is being lost.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.