My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was complaining about recent history. An odious fraud comes to power and proceeds to make a mockery of existing laws. Fools and bigots rally around him. The elected officials who could rein him in encourage him and his lackeys to create chaos on a daily basis. How could these things be happening in 2026?
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I said, trotting out the hoariest of cliches.
“That ain’t true,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Not when it comes to masking.”
I realized he was talking about facemasks. A few years ago, sane people wore masks to help limit the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Rightwing goons and nincompoops ridiculed them and called them “woke.” They accused mask wearers of trying to abolish their God-given right to do as they pleased, even as hundreds of thousands of Americans became infected with the virus and died.
“Everything has flipped,” my crusty neighbor explained. “Most of them woke peeps put away their masks when the pandemic cooled down. It’s the goons who are masking now.”
He meant members of the huge, militarized gang called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, usually referred to as ICE. The heavily armed and armored ICE agents get media coverage every day. They wear masks not for health reasons but rather to hide their identities as they stalk, chase, beat, abduct, jail, deport and sometimes shoot people who seem alien to them, all for the purpose of discouraging immigration to the United States. They get paid to eliminate undesirables and scare everyone else.
“They’re a private army, Odd Man, just like the Gestapo.”
“You’re wrong,” I reply. “The Gestapo wore fedoras, not masks.”
From The New York Times, another reminder that being a dictator means having the power to replace the historical record with self-serving propaganda:
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery removed wall text that referred to President Trump’s two impeachments — language that had upset the White House — when the museum recently replaced a portrait of him in its “America’s Presidents” exhibition.
The wall text described some of Mr. Trump’s political accomplishments… [but] it also included: ‘Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.’
That sentence had long bothered the Trump administration.
The Smithsonian Institution used to be “regarded as independent from the executive branch,” the Times reporter wrote. But now Trump is threatening to cut the Smithsonian’s funding unless it presents him with a list of its current and planned exhibitions, presumably because he intends to block or alter any exhibitions that don’t please him.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit backed off when I tried to show him the whole article. “Gimme a break. I don’t want to think about that hog monster no more.”
“Dictators think they can erase history,” I said, referencing a conversation he and I had recently. “They count on chumps like you to forget what really happened.”
I was worked up because I’d just reread Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), which opens with an anecdote about a 1948 photograph of Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia’s Communist leader, standing on an outdoor balcony next to another Communist official, Vladimir Clementis, who had just placed his cap on Gottwald’s head to protect him against the cold while he spoke to a large crowd.
The anecdote ends like this:
Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on the balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head.
“Come on now, Trump ain’t that bad,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Even if he was, the media in this country wouldn’t let a story like that be forgot.”
I rolled my eyes. “What about Fox News? What about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post? They’re trying to make us forget the real story of what happened on January 6, 2021.”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But that was a long time ago, Odd Man.”
Update: The Post ran no stories — that’s right, zero — about the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Capitol. Yet another glaring indication of how thoroughly Bezos was cowed by the re-elected Trump.
You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. — Stephen Miller, speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I we were discussing the extent to which Donald Trump’s clumsy embrace of imperialism — the invasion of Venezuela, the threatened takeover of Greenland, etc. — was influenced by advice from his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.
Swamp Rabbit tossed his empty beer can. He said Miller is Trump’s idea man, and that his ideas were heavily influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
“Miller got picked on in high school because he was a 90-pound dweeb,” my bibulous buddy said. “He’s using Nietzsche language to justify his desire to get revenge on the bad-asses who picked on him.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “It wasn’t Venezuelans who picked on him. It wasn’t Greenlanders.”
It seems Swamp Rabbit recently saw some author on TV talking about Nietzsche and realized Miller must have cribbed a lot of his sayings from The Will to Power, Nietzsche’s guidebook to personal growth through self-assertion.
“Miller must have misread him,” I said. “Judging from his comments, he owes more to Heinrich Himmler than to Nietzsche.”
But then I thought it through and pitched a theory of my own — that Miller got his ideas from Baby Face, a pre-Code Hollywood movie (1933) where Barbara Stanwyck plays the daughter of a saloonkeeper who is pimping her to his customers. She puts up with this miserable situation until she meets a philosophical old guy who holds up a copy of TheWill to Power and offers her some stern advice:
“You must be a master, not a slave. Look here — Nietzsche says, ‘All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation.’ That’s what I’m telling you. Exploit yourself. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities! Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!”
“So she runs away to New York City,” I said. “She gets a job in an office building, cozies up to a series of horny executives and literally sleeps her way to the top floor.”
Swamp Rabbit scratched his matted gray hair and looked puzzled. “So Miller is like the Barbara Stanwyck character? Or are you saying he’s like the old guy with the Nietzsche book?”
“The old guy, you dummy. Miller’s way too ugly for the Stanwyck part, but he’s smart enough to be a big influence on Trump, his lord and master.”
“You’re giving me a headache,” Swamp Rabbit said, reaching for another beer.
Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin in a recent New York Timesop-ed:
… No amount of whitewashing can erase the images of “stop the steal” rioters assaulting police officers with baseball bats, metal pipes, Confederate and Trump flagpoles, bear spray and other chemicals.
But is Raskin right? I had to remind my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and, in the process, start this country down the road to dictatorship.
“Dictatorship is a big word.” Swamp Rabbit said. “Be cool, Odd Man, things are bound to get better.”
He argued that Trump, although a notorious liar, a bigoted conman, a convicted felon and our most unqualified president ever, cannot justifiably be called a dictator, or even a would-be dictator, because our government still operates under the system of checks and balances established 249 years ago by the enlightened rebels who participated in the Constitutional Convention.
“You got your executive and legislative and judicial,” he explained, playing devil’s advocate. “A president, even a lowlife like Trump, will get smacked down by the other two branches if he becomes a danger to democracy. Ain’t no way he can be a dictator.”
But what happens if the president is a danger but the people in the other two branches are too cowardly or corrupt to smack him down? If an entire political party falls in line behind a leader who files bogus lawsuits alleging election fraud and recruits counterfeit electors? If the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a president can enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for most “official” actions — i.e., actions taken while in office?
He stroked his goatee and said, “Don’t ask me, I ain’t no Constitution expert.”
The answer is nothing happens, because the laws governing the executive branch, as spelled out in the Constitution, are too vague to rein in a rogue president who would be king or, in this case, dictator.
It’s maddening. Trump’s coup attempt failed, but not before 147 Republican senators and Congress members refused to certify the 2020 election results. Afterwards, some prominent Republican pols scolded him for his lawlessness, but they reverted to being his stooges as soon as it became clear that MAGA voters were still with him. Now that he’s president again, they’re in lockstep behind him as he tries to erase history by blaming the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Democrats. Erasing is what dictators do.
“Enough,” Swamp Rabbit said, still playing devil’s advocate. “Can’t you just call him an authoritarian?”
“That’s a weasel word.” I replied. “But call him that if it makes you happy.”
Lately I’ve been either jogging or writing, and my newsy neighbor Swamp Rabbit wants to know what’s up.
“How come you spendin’ so much time in Bog Water Homes?’ he said, naming the swampy development where we live. “You get laid off from your save-the-planet job?”
I told him clean energy is still growing but 2025 was a bad year for expansion, if that’s what he means by save the planet. Nobody from the Trump gang attended the United Nations climate conference (COP30). Instead, our felon-in-chief and his gang weakened fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, undermined efforts to expand the electric car industry, and permitted new oil-and-gas drilling in America’s coastal waters.
“I had to ease up on trying to sell wind and solar because the fossil fuel goons are surging,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “But that will change when the MAGA regime is overthrown.”
My mangy neighbor snickered. “You sure that’s gonna happen? You see what them yahoos done last month?”
He was referring to the brazenly nihilistic order to halt construction of five offshore windfarms that would power millions of homes on the East Coast. And, before that, the EPA’s Orwellian decision to erase all mention of human-caused climate change from its website.
“Wind and solar jawns are losing the information war,” he added. “What you guys need are influencers.”
I had assumed that “influencer” was just another name for salesperson, or marketing consultant, but Swamp Rabbit quickly set me straight. Social media influencers are performers. They have filmmaking skills and are young and photogenic and eager to become indistinguishable from the brands they are pushing.
“Don’t you read Philadelphia magazine?” he said before showing me an article naming the “influencers of the year,” in categories like fitness, fashion, lifestyle, parenting, home and design, and nano. (I had to google the latter.)
“And beauty, of course,” he added. “A beauty influencer would know how to make wind turbines and solar panels look sexy. She could get out there with a ring light and a cute little outfit and sell clean energy at a discount with her $300 skin cream.”
“You’re drunk, Swamp Rabbit. Most people wouldn’t fall for a pitch like that, even on TikTok.”
He snickered again. “Get with the program, Odd Man. Things have changed.”
I was putting together this year’s Christmas playlist with help from my neighbor Swamp Rabbit, who has strong opinions about holiday music.
“No more ‘Jingle Bells!'” he shouted. “There are two thousand versions out there and they all suck.”
He asked me if I was including any serious songs this year. He meant sentimental standards that were hits before your mother was born. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and so on.
“I don’t like having my heartstrings tugged,” I said. “It gives me indigestion.”
“You don’t have a heart.” Swamp Rabbit said. “What about cheerful Christmas songs? I bet you don’t like them either.” He named Mariah Carey’s monster hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which sounds like Phil Spector on crack cocaine.
My mangy friend can’t accept that I’m turned off by songs that hit you over the head in order to coax a certain emotional response. Songs that try to reduce you to tears or pump you up with false bravado.
“So what is on your playlist, Odd Man?”
I told him I still like Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy “Peanuts” theme and singers who summon up the Christmas spirit with humor and elan, like James Brown on “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto.”
“That song’s on your list every year.” he said. “Why don’t you give it a break?”
“It’s one of my standards, you fool. Like I said last year, if you don’t like my list, make your own.”
Swamp Rabbit looked puzzled. “Sherpas are the guys who guide them crazy mountain climbers to the top of Everest,” he said. “What’s that got to do with CBS?”
It took me a minute to explain. On Sunday night I’d waited for a televised football game to end so I could watch “60 Minutes,” which used to be famous for investigative stories that upset powerful wrongdoers. This week’s lead story was supposed to be about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador where they were subsequently abused and tortured.
But not so fast — at the last minute the network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, aired a feature about sherpas instead of the tortured-migrants story, ostensibly because the Trump gang had refused to respond to questions from “60 Minutes” about the latter.
“That’s a really lame reason not to run a news story,” Swamp Rabbit said. “And who the #*&% is Bari Weiss?”
I told him Weiss is the opportunistic hack chosen by Trump ally David Ellison for the editor-in-chief’s job after Ellison and his father, billionaire Larry Ellison, gained control over Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS. In effect this makes her the sherpa for the CBS News team, guiding them to stories her boss wants to cover, and away from stories that would be unflattering to Donald Trump.
Weiss said she is delaying broadcast of the migrants story, not killing it, so that CBS can get “the principals on the record and on camera.” But this is a lie; they’ve already been given a chance to go on record. What she’s actually doing is kowtowing to the Ellison family and Trump, and in effect helping rob “60 Minutes” of the credibility it earned over more than a half-century of mostly first-rate investigative reporting.
Meanwhile, the Ellisons have sought Trump’s help in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, another network Trump is determined to gag. To help with this he might lean on his ally Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, who backed a previous Trump complaint about “60 Minutes” as well as Trump’s attempt to have ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel canned.
“This is straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook,” I said. “You can’t have a true dictatorship without first having control of the mass media. Trump and his cronies are trying to establish the American equivalent of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.”
“There you go again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Every time the Trump gang does something despicable you start yelling ‘the Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming.'”
“Crypto-fascists is more accurate,” I said. “And they’re already here, but not enough Americans have noticed. They’re too busy watching football games.”
Footnote: You’ve got to wonder about people like Bari Weiss. She’s been a right-winger for a long time, but she once fancied herself a free speech advocate and even ran a publication called The Free Press. Was that a pose or did she expect all along to end up taking orders from a billionaire fascist? Was ideology the deciding factor or was it just about the money?
Coda: The good news is that totally suppressing news stories isn’t so easy these days. The tortured migrants story that Weiss shelved is already available on the internet:
[Trump] lied and said that prices are coming down. He lied when he said prices were at an all-time high under President Biden. They’re at an all-time high right now. He lied when he said that inflation was low inflation. 2.7%, that’s the number he used, is well above the Fed’s target.” — Economist Justin Wolfers on MS NOW
Wolfer’s quote could serve as a fitting response to Trump’s rant last week at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, PA, a curious choice of venues. Does Trump think most people are unaware of his colossal failures as a casino owner in Atlantic City? That they don’t know how many of his grand projects ended in bankruptcy, including Trump Taj Mahal, possibly the ugliest gambling palace in history?
Casinos aside, do they really agree with Trump that affordability is “a Democrat hoax”? Swamp Rabbit wanted to know.
“The MAGA crowd invested all their fear and hate in supporting that old fraud,” I told him. “They won’t switch gears this late in the game.”
My mangy neighbor was perplexed or pretending to be. “I was gonna buy a couple bell peppers at the Acme but they cost two-fifty each,” he said. “And a 22-ounce container of coffee costs 20 bucks. But them MAGAts ain’t up in arms about price increases. Trump must be doing something right.”
“Trump knows how important it is to convince people to believe him, not their lying eyes. You can’t install a proper dictatorship, or establish a viable cult, unless you get your hardcore followers to embrace magical thinking. Once it takes hold, the facts don’t matter. 2+2=5. If the orange buffoon says it, it must be so.”
“But that’s crazy, Odd Man. The peeps will know when they’re running out of money, running out of credit. If the money ain’t there, they can’t buy things. That’s reality.”
I told him that the normal notion of reality doesn’t register with the MAGA crowd any more than it did with the Make Germany Great Again crowd in the 1930s. You can’t tell Trump’s true believers that climate change is real, even as the polar ice caps melt. You can’t tell them tariffs are just another means of taxing the working class, or that their king only cares about self-enrichment. Or that getting rid of immigrants and “woke” Democrats won’t solve their problems.
“Okay, you’re mostly right,” he said. “But Trump sounds loonier every day. Nobody’s denying it, not even the mainstream media. The MAGAts are gonna have to change their tune soon.”
I shook my head. “You really think they’ll admit to being made fools of by the most corrupt and hateful guy ever to occupy the White House? Sounds like magical thinking, Swamp Rabbit.”
Footnote: Trump posted this on Truth Social in response to the killing of Rob Reiner and his wife:
Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace.
Swamp Rabbit said only a psycho would write something so self-delusional and vile. Trumpers will shrug and say: “That’s just Trump being Trump.”
I couldn’t remember whose turn it was this year, so I went ahead and bought the turkey hoagies at Wawa while there was still time. When I got back my neighbor Swamp Rabbit was sitting on his porch, drinking whisky from his broken cup. He protested when I berated him for conveniently disappearing when it was time to buy Thanksgiving dinner.
“I figured you would take care of the food and I’d buy the booze,” he said.
“Very funny. You know I don’t drink, pilgrim.”
As is our custom on this holiday, we discussed the idea of giving thanks. Of gratitude, that is. Swamp Rabbit said he was grateful for the Jack Daniels company and for pro football, but he couldn’t think of any other reasons to give thanks. I told him he was an idiot. He should be grateful he isn’t in Ukraine, or dodging bombs in Gaza. Or running from Trump’s masked stormtroopers, otherwise known as ICE.
“What’s up, Odd Man? You ain’t normally a glass-half-full guy. Your dark clouds don’t have no silver linings.”
“Well, maybe I’ve seen the light. There’s only so much time we get to walk this Earth. Better to be grateful than hateful. There are no atheists in foxholes. No curmudgeons at the pearly gates. No point fretting over climate change and fascist morons. Nothing we can do about it.”
Swamp Rabbit held a mouthful of turkey hoagie. Too shocked to chew, I thought. After swallowing, he downed a full cup of Jack.
“Damn, Odd Man, I ain’t never heard such talk from you. You’re poking fun at me, ain’t you? You’re putting me on.”
He waited for me to confirm his suspicion, but I was having too much fun. I put down my hoagie and shook my head.
“How ’bout them Eagles, Rabbit?” I said. “You think we can beat the Bears this week?”
Swamp Rabbit snapped open a cold beer and groaned as he read aloud from a story on my laptop:
President Donald Trump has come under fire after he hosted a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party just hours before millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
“You can’t make this shit up,” he said. “The truth is sicker than anything them satire writers can come up with.”
That’s because effective satire depends on exaggeration, I reminded him. It’s hard to exaggerate the depravity of people like Trump and his Mar-a-Lago revelers. You can’t satirize them, you can’t shame them.
Democratic party leaders — Chuck Schumer and his fellow dinosaurs — don’t grasp this simple fact. Exhibit A is their failure regarding the government shutdown, the purpose of which was to shame Trump and his toadies into extending the Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) subsidies. Without the subsidies, premiums will jump way up in January and many low- and middle-income people will no longer be able to afford health insurance.
In the end, the Dems settled for next to nothing: a little more funding for SNAP, the rehiring of some laid-off federal workers and — get this — the Republican promise to hold a vote on extending subsidies at some future date.
“That’s like Lucy promising Charlie Brown she ain’t gonna move the football the next time he tries to kick it,” Swamp Rabbit said, referring to the old Peanuts comic strip. “Them dumbass Democrats fall for it every time.”
I told him most Senate Democrats are too cowardly to risk taking a stand on any issue that might endanger their re-election chances. It’s no coincidence that the eight senators who caved to the Republicans — exactly enough to end the shutdown — are either retiring or are not up for re-election next year, and therefore won’t face a possible backlash from angry Democratic voters.
“The Dems are hoping we’ll do their jobs for them by voting to kick out the Republicans in the midterms,” I explained.
Swamp Rabbit threw his empty beer can off his porch and chuckled. “Too bad we can’t kick out most of them Dems, too, and start from scratch.”
Odd Man Out 