by W.D. Ehrhart
Ever since one of my students suggested it to me back in about 2003, I have been reading a weekly news digest called—take a guess—The Week. It’s a compendium of information drawn from sources all over the U.S., and even internationally, in print and online.
Last month, I took a break from the world when my wife and I drove up to the Adirondack Mountains and spent four days with old friends of ours who live there. No news. No noise. Lots of wildlife: a mother deer with twin fawns still in spots, three wild turkeys, a hummingbird that hovered for over a minute at eye level checking me out. A night sky unadulterated with surface light and packed with stars.
When I got back home, however, my latest The Week was waiting, and here’s what I found in it:
The Editor’s Letter said that “President Trump was swept into power on a wave of massive distrust in institutions, and he has quickly proceeded to dismantle them.”
On the next page, we learn that Trump’s pick for Homeland Security Secretary did not authorize release of FEMA aid in response to the terrible flooding in Texas for the first 72 hours of the disaster.
In an article about Ukraine, we’re reminded that Trump “bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office and ‘blamed the victim, Kyiv,’” but now maybe “has finally realized Putin has been playing him.” On the same page, we learn that “President Trump reignited his trade war this week, threatening the European Union and Mexico with 30 percent tariffs and Canada with 35 percent tariffs, even as a Labor Department report showed existing levies are boosting inflation.”
On the next page, we’re told that Trump’s pick for Attorney General, “who said in February she had the Epstein list ‘sitting on my desk,’ announced last week no list existed.” And that, according to the Bulwark, “Trump’s quandary is that he’s ‘in the files,’” having been “friends with Epstein,” his Florida neighbor for 15 years.
Meanwhile, in a section called “The U.S. at a Glance,” we learn that a partisan Supreme Court packed with the help of reptilian Mitch “Turtleneck” McConnell has ruled that “the Trump administration can fire over 1,300 Department of Education (DOE) workers, clearing the way for the president to fulfill his longtime goal of gutting the department.”
A few pages later, the “People” section reports that “President Trump [has] threatened to strip his longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship.”
And in “Best Columns: The U.S.”, the Washington Post reminds us that Trump said at his second inauguration, “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again”; Slate reports that while a majority conservative Supreme Court is allowing Trump to ransack the DOE by executive order, the same court limited Joe Biden’s authority, “barring him from forgiving federal student loans, enforcing environmental laws, and deciding ‘major questions’ without the permission of Congress”; and the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed cuts in Medicaid and food assistance, nevertheless voted for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” because she was afraid Trump’s MAGA followers would kill her if she didn’t.
All of this on a single page of The Week while in “Best Columns: International,” we read that the Brazilian newspaper Estadao accuses Trump of “running ‘a mafia operation,’ trying to force Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to ‘surrender to [Trump’s] absurd demands’” concerning former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
In a section called “Talking Points,” we learn that Trump’s appointment as head of the FBI is using lie detector tests to discover who might be talking trash about the director, who meanwhile has disbanded “the squad investigating public corruption—because it was investigating wrongdoing by Trump administration figures.”
On the same page, the New York Daily News editorializes that the Trump administration “is essentially asserting that Trump should be allowed to override ‘the Constitution itself’” on the issue of birthright citizenship.
Meanwhile, still in “Talking Points,” we read that while a majority of Americans oppose the Gestapo-like sweeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and deportations, the Wall Street Journal reports that “the White House has ‘shown few signs of slowing,’” and according to the Los Angeles Times, Trump’s Homeland Security Chief—who thinks habeas corpus gives Trump the constitutional right to deport anyone he wants to deport—“vowed last week to intensify the crackdowns,” declaring, “we’re going to take these criminals down with even more strength than we ever have before,” even though the majority of those swept up in ICE raids have no criminal record.
And finally, in “The Last Word” section, we read that “Trump has repeatedly described, in bizarre detail, his desire to see American journalists suffer—he is specifically preoccupied with fantasies of journalists being beaten and raped in prison.” This in addition to reminding us that on the first day of Trump’s second term, “he pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been convicted for their actions in the 2021 insurrection, including those with ties to various extremist groups and those who had violently attacked law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol.”
All of what you’ve just read is taken from a single edition of a weekly news digest. A single week’s news. This would almost be funny. Indeed, cosmically hilarious. What the great American writer Herman Melville called “this vast practical joke” we call life.
But it’s not funny. This egomaniacal buffoon and felonious grifter is the president of the United States of America and arguably the most powerful person in the world. And he is an infantile, cruel, impulsive narcissist who ought not to be trusted with the keys to the liquor cabinet, let alone to the levers of power.
In recent years, our refreshing and restorative little mini-vacation to the Adirondacks has become an annual event. But I find myself wondering what will be the state of the nation and the world by next summer, and whether or not I myself might by then be deemed “an enemy of the state,” and find myself in “Alligator Alcatraz” or a Salvadoran prison.
In Donald Trump’s MAGAWorld, what was once unthinkable has become all too possible.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.