Can you think back nine years to Jan. 20, 2017? Those of us able to spend a little time in front of a TV that day saw a man in a long red tie and his perfectly dressed wife, unsmiling in her powder blue coat. We listened as the man delivered a dispiriting inauguration speech about “American carnage” and other alien concepts. We watched as the cameras panned the crowds on the mall before the Capitol. They appeared modest by any measure.
Then began the heated debate about crowd size. The president, unable to concede relative weakness in any form, insisted that his crowds were bigger than any ever before. I don’t remember whether this superlative extended to “ever, in the entire history of the world,” or some such assertion, but it was clear he was adamant.
No amount of evidence, including side by side aerial photographs comparing the crowds in the first Obama inauguration to his own, could sway him. His staff did his bidding and insisted on the lie. Senior White House consultant Kellyanne Conway famously described the fictitiously inflated crowd size numbers as “alternative facts.” Yes, it was the beginning of our glimpse into an “alternative universe.” And it was all over something as inconsequential as crowd size.
Interestingly, some guard rails on truth and decency were still in place in that first administration. He shed staff like water if they would not repeat his lies and profess abject loyalty to him, but at least there were limits on his imagined power over reality, and there were laws, the Constitution and two other branches of government to counterbalance his overreach. Yet he was so fixated on his own greatness that he was prepared to enter that alternative universe.
The loss of the following election, though proven beyond a reasonable doubt, was utterly intolerable to him. It broke his tenuous grasp on reality. To this day he continues to be consumed by his lie of a stolen election. Even though he won a second term in the White House, he is still incensed by a lie of his own making. He has left his nation in the dust as he has climbed above the stratosphere in his own head.
Here we find ourselves one year into this man’s second term as president. The guard rails are off. The Constitution is there for the breaking, the rule of law is irrelevant, and Congress appears paralyzed. His sycophants and cronies repeat his lies and amplify the destructive force of his delusions of power. In his first administration, at least it was possible to count the lies. Now they are beyond counting, and we are numb to them.
For their own sanity, most Americans have had to tune out the unthinkable dismantling of democracy that is taking place at the highest levels of government. But now, as the president unleashes inadequately trained militants to deport immigrants in Minnesota, most law-abiding and integrated into their communities, we may be at a turning point. This is no longer some esoteric point of debate.
Of course there needs to be a thorough and impartial review of the evidence of the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this month at the hands of ICE agents. This needs to take place at the state level as well as the federal level. But the videos of the killings of these American civilians exercising their constitutional rights are there for all to see. What we see cannot be plastered over and replaced immediately by a narrative that rings completely and utterly false.
We the people need to ensure that the truth will actually prevail here. We are done with the egregious distortions of truth and perversions of justice which have become commonplace in the past year. We don’t want to be dragged into the upside-down, inside-out world of a man who was elected to act in the best interest of our country.
I honestly believe that none among us voted for a man who is bent solely on aggrandizing himself at the expense of all the rest of us and all we hold dear. We cannot enter his alternative universe.
Millie LaFontaine is a retired neurologist who lives in Concord.