As I watched the current president of the United States struggle to pronounce the name of the drug he was blaming, without evidence, for causing autism and then later proclaim that autism doesn’t exist within the Amish community, a rather troubling thought struck me.
A bunch of kids think this is normal.
Donald Trump has been—as mind bending as it might seem—the face of the Republican Party now for a decade. His crass, unpolished, bumbling, ignorant, antagonistic, insulting, ill-informed style of rambling in front of a microphone has now been with us for more than 10 years. And a generation of kids now think this is normal.
Our youngest voters—those turning 18 in time for the 2026 midterm elections—have been listening to Trump’s schtick since they were 8 or younger. They’ve grown up through their most formative years listening to the president of the United States call people silly names, lie with abandon and speak like an imbecile.
They think it’s normal.
It’s not.
It wasn’t always like this. I promise. Just 17 years ago, the Republican nominee for president—a war hero who commanded and gave respect—took the microphone away from one of his supporters when she began calling the Democratic candidate an “Arab.” John McCain then told her, “No ma’am, he’s a decent, family man, citizen of this country who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
That Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, was one of the most eloquent, intelligent and inspiring presidents in our country’s history.
The guy before him, while not eloquent or necessarily intelligent, at least aspired to be decent. He behaved like a normal human. He treated others with dignity and respect—even his political opponents.
As you travel back in this country’s history, the presidents only become more distinguished and aspirational. There are strong, tough men and smart, wily men and some men who didn’t perform well and others who we put on our money and remember that we’re only still a whole country because of them. And all of them—all. of. them.—had great respect for the office which they held—the one that leads the free world.
It is only recently that our society has been dumbed down to the point that we would accept a person who lacked both the intelligence and the humility to at least pretend to be a professional, dignified human while serving as this country’s leader. And honestly, I don’t know if I can, in a sentence or two, explain to you how that happened, other than to say that we had the country’s first Black president and the internet at the same time and that led to mass fear among the whites.
And when you’re afraid, you do some really dumb stuff.
Our really dumb thing was electing a person who is a fake tough guy who picks on the marginalized and weak and turns every interaction into a personally beneficial transaction. He also speaks like a drunken middle-schooler.
No other president in our history would have proclaimed—wrongly—either that Tylenol causes autism or that the Amish don’t have autism. Such a statement just a decade and a half ago would have created a firestorm that burned so hot the president would have likely become totally ineffective from that point forward. No other president would have dared publicly write that he sought to use the power of his office to silence a critical comic or write publicly to his AG that he wished to have his political adversaries prosecuted.
But such statements are barely a blip on the screen when you’ve been convicted of 34 felony counts, been impeached twice, led a coup against the country, attempted to undermine elections, been found liable for sexual assault, admitted to sexual assault on tape, got caught paying off a porn star to keep quiet about your affair, colluded with a hostile foreign nation to interfere in an American election and personally benefited like no previous president from your position. In fact, the only thing that might trip you up after surviving all of that is being named repeatedly in files documenting the world’s most famous pedophilia ring.
It wasn’t always this way, though. It really, really wasn’t.
Our people weren’t always so scared of concepts like equality and diversity. Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t exactly welcome them with open arms, but they were coming around. I thought we were finally getting past the fearmongering over who people loved and how they wanted to live.
For all of my life, until 10 years ago, this country had been moving forward, pushing through the racism and bigotry and misogyny and hatefulness. It was by no means perfect, but it was always getting better, always moving towards good. Then we hit a wall in 2016 and started to roll backwards.
A whole bunch of people in this country have embraced hate again. They’ve decided it’s OK to vilify our most vulnerable again. They’ve been sucked into fearing an entire group of people simply because they have a darker skin color and speak a different language. And they’ve been conned into believing that there’s some sort of biblical purity to it all.
They chose a person who reflects that reverse-evolution mindset to lead them. To many of us, it remains a mouth-open surprise that we are at this place, dealing with this stupidity, suffering through an embrace of ignorance in a time when we’re all walking around with super computers in our pockets. We have chosen this — out of fear, out of selfishness, out of greed, out of a desire to be accepted into any group.
It wasn’t always this way. It was never this way. We broke it.
It’ll be up to you to fix it.
