Is it too pretentious to launch this piece with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche? The German philosopher and cultural critic has been dead since 1900, but he’s totally in tune with the America of 2025:
“When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
I’ve been pondering that warning ever since Trump used an AI video to pilot a fighter plane and dump diarrhea on pro-democratic protestors. Permit me to update Nietzsche:
“If you choose to live in a sewer, the sewer will gift you its stink.”
How we devolved to the point where a president of the United States can basically crap on dissenting Americans is something future historians will study for eons (assuming they’re free to do so). The poop video is way down on the latest list of Trump perfidies – starting with the East Wing demolition, a metaphor that even the dumbest grad of Trump University should be able to muster – but we do need to pause on that video before it slips down the memory hole, because it’s such a sick symptom of what we’ve become, of how low we’ve sunk.
Trump is what happens when a seriously coarsened culture surrenders to its basest primal instincts. His hatreds and grievances, his lies and demagoguery, his lust for revenge, his assaults on fact and truth, his weaponized anger and incivility, his dirtbag language – all that, and much more, were deemed worthy or excusable by a voting plurality, sufficient for a second White House tenure. Which proves Nietzsche’s adage that “Man is the cruelest animal.”
Granted, Trump didn’t create our debased cultural climate, but he is clearly its chief beneficiary, its end product, its toxic exploiter and accelerant. The late Michael Gerson, a principled conservative commentator, got it right back in 2018, during the first MAGA tenure. Lamenting the nation’s slow and steady death of civility, Gerson said, “The gag reflex is gone.”
And the best way to trace the civility death arc is to flag the behavior of Gerson’s fellow conservatives, who saw themselves as the guardians of morality, holding back the coarsened hordes while claiming fealty to God. They were all in righteous high dudgeon 27 years ago when Bill Clinton had sex with an intern and sex talk swept the land. Back then, evangelical leader Gary Bauer said, “I walk around my home with the TV remote in my hand for fear that they (his children) will come in the room when a story about the president comes on.” And Christian Coalition director Randy Tate saddled his high horse: “We have to be a nation that expects the highest from our public officials.”
Contrast that last quote with Mike Johnson’s amoral obsequiousness. When the House Speaker was asked the other day about Trump’s poop video, he was not concerned in the least about whether pooping on people was vile, sinful, or in any way lower than what we should expect from our top official. Instead the pious poseur sniffed his hero’s sewer and found it fragrant: “The president uses social media to make his point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that.”
Trump had indeed made his point. In a country that no longer functions as a democracy, the only opinion that matters is his. By definition, those who challenge his opinion don’t count – they are to be marginalized and crapped upon. In this new America, it doesn’t matter a whit what the national polls say – in the latest one, his approval rating is a feeble 39 percent – because he has the power and the guns to do whatever he wants, and that starts with ensuring the 2026 midterm elections go his way.
That video is the quintessence of his contempt for dissent and free expression. Mussolini once said that “if you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices,” but his formula for fascism now seems quaint, because Trump is tearing out the feathers in clumps, not caring that millions have noticed.
Yes, we’ve noticed. But then what?
A new report authored by more than 340 former national security and intelligence officials – titled “Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline” – warns that “Absent organized resistance by institutions, civil society and the public, the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion.”
Organized public resistance – bigger and more frequent mass marches – will test the public’s resolve. Nietzsche famously said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Will he be proven right?
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]