The world will never be the same again, Version 3.0

On September 11, 2001, I was standing in the back of a conference room in Hagerstown, Md., listening to an Allegheny Energy executive deliver a briefing on some subject that must have seemed important at the time. It was almost 9 a.m. and the briefing had almost concluded when a message was delivered to the room.

An airplane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in downtown New York City.

A maintenance man named Ron rolled in a TV set on a cart and over the next hour and a half, Ron and I watched as planes crashed and towers fell. Others came in, watched for a while and went on their way. I remember turning to Ron at one point and saying, “The world as we know it will never be the same.”

Now I don’t claim to be the only person who said those words that day, but in the years that followed, they certainly came true. The world is a vastly different place than it was at 8:45 a.m. on 9-11-01 when American Airlines Flight 11 was still one minute away from the WTC North Tower. Nothing that was true before the crash can ever be true again.

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The next time I felt that way was November 9, 2016, when I woke up from a catnap some time after midnight to discover that Donald J. Trump had been elected President of the United States.

The night before, as votes were being counted, every political pundit and every campaign official and every voter in America with half a brain believed that Hillary Rodham Clinton was on her way to becoming the first woman president in the history of the United States. Political statistician Nate Silver – who was never wrong – determined that Clinton would win in a landslide over Trump, who most rational people considered to be an idiot.

Even Trump believed he would lose. Instead of writing a victory speech, he had started beating a drum of delusion while claiming that the election was rigged, apparently because illegal aliens were pouring across the California border to vote for Clinton or because of some equally stupid reason which I have successfully managed to forget.

I had fallen asleep that night believing there could possibly be a Democrat in the White House for the remainder of my life, and woke up to learn that Nate Silver was very, very wrong and that Donald J. Trump had been elected president. If Ron the Maintenance Man had been standing in my bedroom watching TV with me that night, I would have turned to him and said, “Ron, the world as we know it will never be the same again.”

We are now less than two years into the Trump presidency and it’s possible – as I said about 9-11 – that nothing that was true before the election can ever be true again. Trump began his term in office by appointing cabinet secretaries and other key officials who have made it their mission to destroy the very institutions they represent. He has alienated America’s allies while sucking up to the dictators of our greatest enemies, and has thrown the country into greater and greater debt to repay wealthy Republican donors for helping him get elected.

I could mention that he tells an average of 5.6 lies a day (or whatever the count is up to now), cheats on his taxes and uses the White House as a profit center – and don’t even mention the word “Russians” – but just recounting all of this makes me want to hurt somebody, and I’m basically a non-violent kind of guy.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure that nothing that was true before the 2016 election can ever be true again, because Trump has stolen the truth and twisted it into a farcical, fictitious and fraudulent alternative reality. I’m less sure that any of this can be fixed, and if it can, how long that would take. I don’t think it will happen during my remaining years.

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And now, finally, to top it all off, a Republican-led Senate which has done absolutely nothing for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Average American has confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court a chronic prevaricator who went on TV and embarrassed himself in front of the entire world by whining, crying and lying about his high school and college years; screaming and shouting about a “Clinton conspiracy” and a liberal donor campaign to sabotage his nomination, throwing all pretense of non-partisanship out the window; and disrespecting members of the Senate who had the audacity to ask him probing questions about his past life of boofing, barfing and banging helpless drunk girls.  

It’s bad enough that I no longer believe a single word the president says, but now I have to question every decision the Supreme Court makes. Is it the proper decision, based on the intent of the framers of the Constitution and the rule of law? Or is it the decision demanded by the far-right Heritage Foundation, the spineless Republican Party and the New York crime boss who has gained control of our republic?

It is possible that the Supreme Court will never be the same again.

There used to be three co-equal branches of government in America that acted as checks and balances against each other, but we don’t have that today. What we have is one pocket of power that has melted the executive, legislative and judicial functions into a gurgling glob of denial, deception, demagoguery, disenfranchisement and deceit.

In other words, our government which was once the envy of countries around the world has become that “basket of deplorables” that Hillary Clinton warned us about. She was mocked for saying that, and it turned some people against her, but she was right. As I have said before, America has fallen...and I’m afraid she can’t get up.