Donald Trump has crossed every line a democracy can tolerate. Not bent, not strained. Obliterated.
Now he’s again dragging Ilhan Omar through the sewer with the oldest trick in the fascist manual: invent a salacious lie, racialize it, sexualize it, weaponize it, and repeat it until the weakest minds mistake it for truth. Incest, immigration fraud…accusations rooted in xenophobia, misogyny, and the very specific American sickness that demands an outsider to hate.
This isn’t politics.
This is a predator signaling to his pack that the hunt is on.
Trump is no longer even pretending to represent a nation. He represents the pathological need to annihilate anyone who challenges him, criticizes him, or simply exists outside his narrow, hate-soaked worldview. He calls reporters “piggy” and “stupid” because he can’t tolerate being questioned by anyone who doesn’t bow. He hides behind “fake news” because it is easier than admitting he is a small, weak man who has never once in his life confronted the truth about himself.
And the people who cheer this behavior — the ones who clap like seals, who pump their fists, who call this “strength” — they are not victims of propaganda anymore. They are participants. Co-authors. Enthusiastic apprentices in the craft of cruelty.
If you support Donald Trump now, right now, in 2025, with eyes open and conscience switched off, you are not simply misinformed. You are not “voting for policy.” You are not “fed up with the system.” No. You are enabling and amplifying the abuse of human beings. You are choosing spite as your ideology and cruelty as your currency. You are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a movement defined by its hatred of anyone who dares to live differently, love differently, look differently, or disagree.
Let’s be brutally honest:
This movement is the death knell of the United States.
Trump, Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Erin Perrine, Kayleigh McEnany, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr., Leavitt, a grotesque parade of sycophants and opportunists who have hitched their reputations to a man animated by resentment and thrilled by suffering. They are termites chewing through the beams of the republic. They smile as the structure shakes. They profit as the rot spreads.
And the people who follow them, who worship them, who parrot their bile with pride, they are the truest enemy this nation faces.
Not immigrants, not refugees, not the poor, not people of color, not LGBTQ Americans, not political opponents.
The enemy is the hateful cult built around Donald J. Trump.
The enemy is the ideology that teaches people to take pleasure in the misery of others.
The enemy is the worldview that treats empathy as weakness and cruelty as virtue.
And yet — and this is the part that stings — the rage I feel at all of this, the fury at what is being done to my country and to people I know personally… I refuse to let it define me. I refuse to become what they are. I refuse to let hatred hollow out my days.
So I am pleading with you, reader, pleading in the same breath with which I condemn.
If you are not consumed with malice…
If you have not surrendered to the cult’s thirst for domination…
If you still feel anything when you see someone hurting…
Then join me.
Join me in denying these monsters the spectacle they crave: a broken public curled in despair.
Join me in refusing them the satisfaction of watching us abandon compassion.
Join me in fighting with kindness, stubbornly, defiantly, deliberately.
Find small mercies each day. Smile at someone who looks like they need permission to exist. Hold open a door. Tip when you can. Donate when you can. Volunteer when you can. Listen to someone who hasn’t been listened to in a long time. Treat every human being — even the messy ones, even the complicated ones, especially the confused, lost souls among us — as if they contain a spark worth protecting. Because most of us do.
We cannot allow the cult of Trump to set the terms of human behavior in this country.
We cannot allow hatred to be the default setting.
We cannot build a decent future while treating people as disposable obstacles or convenient villains.
Kindness is not naïve.
Kindness is not capitulation.
Kindness is rebellion.
And so in the words of the finest American author of my lifetime, Kurt Vonnegut, who understood both the absurdity and the sacredness of being alive:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
Let that be our mantra.
Let that be our answer to the cult.
Let kindness be the one thing they can never take from us.
Let us wage, together, the only revolution that terrifies them: a furious, relentless revolution of kindness.
