America: Born Again?
A little light, I hope, and some fake history as a reminder that it is always darkest just before the dawn.
“Let them eat cake.” (« Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. »)
Coined in 1765 by French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to symbolize the French aristocracy’s disregard for those who could not afford bread.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
President Donald J. Trump’s response to a reporter’s question about whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to strike a trade deal with China.
Americans celebrated their country’s 250th birthday back in 2026 by recalling the politics of the Revolution, but the American Revival that started slowly then had more in common with the French Revolution than it did with the events of 1776.
The rigged 2026 midterm elections, reduced voting rights, Republican cowardice and partisan court decisions allowed Trump to maintain his chokehold on both houses of Congress. Still, the roots of the American rebellion against his growing autocracy were primarily economic, much like the seeds of France’s rebellion against the aristocracy.
A combination of factors, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United and other court decisions, the rise of a powerful billionaire technocratic elite, the failure of federal and state tax laws to close loopholes, rising interest rates and prices, growing under- and unemployment and a proliferation of shady financial schemes and government corruption triggered economic and political unrest.
“By the mid-2020s, an American economic and political aristocracy had emerged that bore a remarkable resemblance to France’s 18th Century Second Estate,” Dr. Benjamin Dover of the London School of Economics wrote in his 2035 book Kairotic Moments. “In addition to a near monopoly on economic and political power, both lacked the slightest concern for the tribulations of their respective Third Estates, though they comprised more than 90 percent of the population in both countries.”
There was at least one important difference: While French aristocrats were able to conceal much of their privileged lives from their countrymen behind castle walls and inside vast estates, 21st Century technology made even their more reclusive successors’ wretched excesses visible to everyone.
“It was easy for taxpayers struggling to pay for housing and health care to see the rich and famous prance around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in attire that cost more than a store clerk earned in six months,” said Prof. Rufus Leaking of the Harvard Business School. “To make matters worse, old money notions such as modesty, duty and good taste had given way, as they did during the first Gilded Age, to the idea that if you have got it, flaunt it.”
Trump craved his own gilded age, but unlike the Vanderbilts and Morgans, he made the Oval Office a tacky gilded cage and built his arches, ballrooms, battleships and other narcissistic monuments on public property, often using taxpayers’ dollars.
All species of the media, endlessly in search of audiences, applause and the revenue they brought, were only too happy to broadcast and celebrate the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Drawn for centuries by the mantra that “if it bleeds, it leads”, websites, blogs and all species of social media, real and artificial, also dwelled on how the wounded American democracy was giving way to a new oligarchy that resembled Trump’s idol Xi Jinping’s China more than Thomas Jefferson’s or even Ronald Reagan’s America.
Evidence that some Americans had abandoned all hope was abundant. The populations of Boston and New York shrank as American emigres fled to Ireland, Portugal, Costa Rica and Italy. Intimidated by Trump’s bullying, timid national and many of the few principled state and local leaders gave up trying to combat rampant corruption and gerrymandering at home and the abandonment of Ukraine, Taiwan, NATO, and the Baltic States, as well as international agreements on climate change, public health, technology regulation and more.
Time found that the damage Trump did to America could in time be mostly repaired. His destruction of America’s relations with its longtime allies was irreparable.
What much of the national media, which had become as elitist as politics and economics, missed, however, was that out in what was dismissed as “flyover country”, unrest was brewing.
In fairness, a growing number of local news outlets, many of them relative newcomers such as the Baltimore Banner, the Texas Tribune and the New Bedford Light were filling some of the void left by the extinction of local newspapers and global wire services. Their reporters noticed, in the words of an old song: “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”.
For one thing, at many swing state polling places in 2026 and at more in 2028, there was a man with a gun over there, usually a masked Immigration and Customs officer claiming to be looking for illegal immigrants but mostly telling voters they had got to beware.
Those scattered Fourth Estate outlets, whose reporters and editors lived and worked among the people they covered, noticed a less visible rebellion against the Second Estate slowly beginning to take shape.
Beyond the sight of official Washington and the national media, glimpses of it began to appear in religious services, in supermarket checkout lines, in high school and college hallways, at unemployment offices and gas stations and hospital emergency rooms, in school board and zoning commission meetings and local elections.
“What began to arise in the mid-2020s was a loose alliance that crossed almost all the conventional age, demographic, geographic, occupational, religious, racial, gender and other lines, in fact all but the ones that isolate the Second Estate,” said political scientist Amana Peppridge of Williams College. “Even most elements of the First Estate, all but the most radical Christian Nationalists and most extreme Zionists and Islamists, found common cause with one another and with much of the Third Estate, consistent with the teachings of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran.”
Such alliances became increasingly visible in local protests against billionaires’ water-sucking data centers in drought-stricken areas, curtailed voting rights, loading docks filled with tariff-free job-sucking Chinese robots and warehouses converted into holding pens for unwelcome non-white immigrants.
In Baltimore, the Banner reported, newly arrived white South Africans welcomed by the Trump administration were greeted with portraits of Nelson Mandela.
Outside the ICE detention center in Social Circle, GA, Baptist clerics and Jewish rabbis brandished banners with Biblical quotes reading, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” and “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong”. An imam from Atlanta joined the group, carrying a sign that read: “Do not let the hatred of a people cause you to be unjust. Be just; that is closer to piety. Surah al-Ma’idah (5:8)”.
Outside Trump’s New York Tower and at his Florida home and at his golf courses, old and young protesters, many of them women waving pictures of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, set up loudspeakers and blasted a 1985 oldie by the aptly named British band Dire Straits:
“Get your money for nothin’, get your chicks for free . . . “
As the protests grew, the Trump administration tried to discredit them as left wing, violent and bankrolled by Iran, at the same time claiming that the Islamic Republic was “beyond bankrupt” because the Strait of Hormuz remained closed except to ships from nations such as China that had cut deals with Tehran.
In San Francisco, Austin and Boston, local law enforcement officers arrested armed members of the Proud Boys and other groups that supported Trump who were masquerading as protesters and seeking to incite violence.
As the protests multiplied, a new generation of leaders emerged that included not only younger moderate Democrats, but also Republican defectors, clergy members, labor leaders and local officials.
“Unlike the conventional wisdom that coalitions are assembled by leaders from the top down, this one was built from the bottom up,” said Lawrence Kroger, the author of The Rebirth of Democracy in America. “Their leaders did not form the protest groups; they built on and knit together ones already in existence.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/shane-massey-south-carolina-clyburn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
“A number of skeptics argued that such a diverse coalition could not hold together. But was it really much more diverse than the Continental Army of slaveowning Southern planters, Northern merchants, frontiersmen, free and enslaved blacks, some Native Americans and ordinary farmers and tradesmen?” asked Vernon Wormer, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy.
By the middle of 2028, as the protests against the Trump administration’s handling of the economy, insider trading, cryptocrookery, health care policies and more spread, a growing number of disgusted former federal law enforcement, military, intelligence, public health, economic and other officials joined them. A few risked their lives and their fortunes— but not their sacred honor — by revealing evidence of official wrongdoing.
Some groups even appropriated the last verse of the national anthem:
“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave;
“O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”
Trump, no profile in courage, panicked and ordered drastic action to maintain control of the government in 2028 and avoid the legal, financial and other consequences of defeat, chief among them being remembered as a loser.
Desperate times demanded desperate measures. Trump had bought a second six months for his flailing Iran war, derided as Operation Epic Fubar, by arguing that changing the conflict’s name to Operation Sledgehammer reset the clock and bought the disastrous stalemate he started six more months without congressional authorization.
Faced with a threat to his presidency, his already tarnished name, his memorials to himself and above all to his wallet, Trump claimed in an early August 2028 barrage of early morning Truth Social posts that he was entitled to a third term because his first and second terms had been interrupted by a crooked 2020 election.
In one, he added an AI video of former Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall supporting his claim, although its impact was limited because he mistakenly labeled the former judge Clarence Marshall.
In a live interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, Trump argued that “James Garfunkel was president like that”. When Collins asked if he meant James Garfield, he replied, “Like that, but not that Simon guy. He’s an idiot, and I don’t like him.”
When Collins asked if he knew that a 1947 constitutional amendment barred presidents from serving a third term, he called her “a stupid loser and she’s not my type”.
Trump’s last ploy was a grudge too far, even for some of his longtime supporters when it dawned on them that he was no good for them and belatedly began moonwalking away in an effort to save their own seats (double entendres intended) and the remnants of their reputations amid nine percent inflation, an ever-growing wealth gap, a deteriorating health care system and a paralyzed and sclerotic political system owned by the Second Estate.
“Dictators drown in their own inflated egos and grandiose ambitions and surround themselves with sycophants, so they often overreach,” said Dr. Faun Rosenberg, Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University. “Napoleon invaded Russia. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Putin invaded Ukraine. Trump invaded America.”
Soundtrack:
Full credit to the Harvard Lampoon’s 1964 Dacron High School yearbook Kaleidoscope for all but one of the names cited in the fake quotations, and to the good friend who recklessly lent me his copy of that heirloom, a predecessor to Animal House.