ICE – Democracy Warrior

Hey, Congress! Are you dead?

Dear Congress,

I am asking you the question that a popular Chinese app asks users as a check for proof of life: “Are you dead?”

The United States is in crisis. Donald Trump is turning the nation’s immigration enforcement and border control agents into his personal murderous Gestapo. Americans are increasingly seeing the federal executive as an enemy of the people. Tensions are growing nationally toward a violent eruption of outrage. In all of this, where are you, the Congress?

I don’t know whether you are aware of certain uncharitable rumors about you that are making the rounds. Many people are saying that for the entire first year of Donald Trump’s second term in the presidency, you were missing in action, that you checked out, that you were just phoning it in. That’s what some people say. Other people have far worse to say. Those people say that you, and by “you” they mean Trump’s fellow Republicans who are in control of both chambers of Congress, are either complicit in an enormous crime or are base cowards who know that the president is doing great wrong but dare not do their constitutional duty and check him.

What say you, Congress? Are people telling lies about you?

I’ll tell you how I see things. First of all, I have to ask: Are you with us? That means: Are you awake? But it also means: Do you stand in solidarity with those of us who are committed to American democracy as it is expressed through our traditional constitutional order and the rule of law? What I see with my own eyes is that you, the Republican Congress, are, with scant exception, failing in your duty to the United States.

That is how I see things. And you may ask me what evidence I see to justify such an accusation. I see a president who is clearly mentally ill in a very dangerous way and is being abetted by most congressional Republicans, by commission or omission, as he destroys the underpinnings of democracy at home and shatters our most precious international security alliances while empowering some of the worst elements on the global stage.

You congressional Republicans have been nearly uniformly silent as Trump unilaterally and unlawfully demolished the East Wing of the White House to build an obscenely gigantic ballroom, a monument to his diseased ego. You have been silent as he defiled the nation’s living tribute to an assassinated president by slapping his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That monument was created by a previous and perhaps nobler Congress, and Trump has no right in law to profane it with his name. Your silence at his perverted use of the Kennedy Center condemns you. What about the United States Institute of Peace, another of Congress’s noble creations on which Trump has imposed his name even as he is in court against the rightful overseers of the institution who are suing to wrest it back from his grasp.

Anti-Republican messaging in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., seen on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

You have been silent as Trump, the most lawless American president in my lifetime, builds the twin agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Customs and Border Protection into his own secret police. Are you awake? Are you seeing what is happening in our country? Have you read any world history at all? Will you be silent until Bokassa decides that even you are not pure enough for his regime and his masked men come for you? When they drag you out of your homes and hustle you into their unmarked vehicles, your newly discovered voices and your outrage will count for nothing.

He has threatened Iran with war to protect Iranian protesters against their government’s violence, but here at home, he is threatening to answer Americans protesting his excesses by invoking the Insurrection Act and unleashing the U.S. military against citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Congress, have you anything to say about this?

What Trump is conjuring up in this country is an old problem from hell, a murderous chaos that has plagued the world throughout the ages despite being entirely foreseeable. Congress, will you not stop him and the terrible trouble that is coming? Short of a general — and wholly unpredictable — rising of the people, only you can restrain him. Will you not see your duty and do your duty? If you leave him to his own impulses, he will push and destroy and destroy and push until everywhere is war. And because he is an old man whose time among us is short anyway, he will not be around to live alongside us in the wreckage his actions will have produced.

If you want more evidence of Trump’s mental disease, just look at his fevered desire to have the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his acolytes ran a nakedly disgraceful campaign for him to get it. He claimed idiotically to have ended multiple wars. When the prize went to Venezuela’s María Corina Machado for her leadership in the opposition to the dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that Machado had told him that she dedicated the prize to him. No shame. Did you notice that, Congress?

Then came another shameful act in the play. Machado, recognizing Trump as the prostitute that he is, offered him her Nobel medal as she visited him here in Washington after he had ousted Maduro. She was obviously hoping to buy Trump’s blessing for her to become Venezuela’s president. Trump merely took the gift and posed proudly with her and it for a photo op. She got a compliment and so far nothing else of substance.

But Congress, the question for you is this: What sane and normal man would accept someone else’s prize as his own? Would a sane and decent man not have thanked Machado for her gesture and politely declined the offer? Not Trump. He could not even summon the momentary decency to ask, like murderous MacBeth, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” The least that you, the Congress, could have done was to pass a resolution of disapproval of the president’s behavior. But no. Apparently what people are saying about you is true.

You are complicit in the squandering of the greatest gift that this country has given to humankind and bequeathed to posterity: the American model of liberal democracy. If there is such a thing as divine retribution, your portion will be bitter, indeed.

And you are silent as the world laughs at the United States as never before because of the unhinged behavior of our president. Just look at his performance last week in Europe and in relation to Greenland. He publicly said that because “Norway” did not give him the Nobel Peace Prize — the prize is not the Norwegian government’s to award — he was even more minded to pursue control of the Danish territory of Greenland. But Congress, Western Europe’s long-suffering leaders finally set you an example of how to deal with Trump: They told him to go off and pleasure himself. They stood up to the bully, and, suddenly, he lost his appetite for Greenland.

In the meantime, though, because of Trump’s madness, much of the world is reordering its affairs to work around the United States, which is now widely seen as the rogue nation that we used to accuse other countries of being. Trump is destroying the U.S. brand globally, and our country’s wellbeing and that of Americans out in the world are being put at material risk. What are you doing about it, Congress?

In our domestic and foreign affairs, things are falling apart in dangerous ways, and all because of one man: Donald Trump.

Congress, get off your ass! Do your duty! Stop Trump!

Sincerely,
A deeply distressed citizen

Trump’s grip is not as tight as he thinks it is

On the night immediately following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, my sleep was disturbed by visions of the ensuing protests around the country exploding into an “American Spring.” In Washington, D.C., where I live, I saw a vast rising of demonstrators besiege the White House, then overrun the place. The president and his key advisers fled the compound by helicopter, and a mob ransacked the abandoned executive mansion and the adjacent executive office buildings.

Lesser White House staffers fled into tunnels beneath the White House complex and tried to slip away into the city. Not all escaped, however. Some were cornered and beaten. In the general chaos, deaths occurred on both sides. For many hours, Trump’s whereabouts were unclear, but then it emerged that he had flown to a U.S. Navy ship in the Atlantic and eventually retreated to Florida and the gilded fastness of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County. He was guarded there by various elements of federal security agencies and by a cordon comprising thousands of the most die-hard MAGA faithful.

In the capital city, the mob was gleeful, but the event was a tragedy. Our country had walked the path of Sri Lanka, Egypt, Tunisia, the Philippines, Bolivia, Honduras and many other countries in the Americas and beyond whose leaders had so outraged their populations that those leaders had to flee the people to save their own skins.

Crowd control barriers line the front of the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 500 12th Street SW in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026. Protesters had gathered outside ICE headquarters the previous night to protest Wednesday’s fatal shooting in Minneapolis of a U.S.-citizen civilian, Renee Good, by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

There was a time when I could not dream to countenance such developments in the United States of America. Our country was different. Manifestly different. But on Jan. 6, 2021, everything changed.

On that day, Congress, acting in a constitutionally mandated exercise, was meeting in a joint session to conduct the pro forma task of certifying the electoral college results that established Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump, the incumbent and soon-to-depart president, had urged his supporters across the country to assemble in Washington on that day. On what was then known as Twitter, Trump declared: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

On the appointed day, Trump hosted a rally on the Ellipse at the south side of the White House. Although at one point he urged the enormous crowd to act peacefully, his words in their totality were highly aggressive and provocative. “And if you don’t fight like a hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore,” he said near the end of a fiery speech, which also featured the recently minted lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Then he told the crowd that “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue — I love Pennsylvania Avenue — and we’re going to the Capitol … and we’re going to try and give our Republicans — the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So, let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The “pride and boldness” that the Republicans in Congress needed, in Trump’s mind, was the will to interfere unconstitutionally with the certification of Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

The crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue as a “they” rather than as a “we,” since Trump was not among his supporters for that procession (apparently having been diverted by the Secret Service), and laid siege to the United States Capitol. Trump’s supporters ultimately forced their way into the place and rampaged through it in a display that disgusted all decent Americans and shocked much of the rest of the world. From that disgraceful episode several deaths resulted, including that of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot by a police officer as she tried to climb through a breach in a locked door well inside the Capitol.

When I heard Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump and Vice President JD Vance justify last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis as an act of self-defense by ICE agent Ross, my mind inevitably ran back to the shooting of Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol building, which she had penetrated deeply as part of a violent criminal mob. Since her death, Republicans have lionized her as a martyr, casting her as the faultless victim of a murderous police officer. The second Trump administration even agreed to a nearly $5 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Babbitt’s family.

I suppose the same will happen for Renee Good under the next Democratic president. If it does, it will not necessarily be a good thing, merely evidence of a further hardening of the “us” and “them” division in the country. The right looks after its own when it has state power, and the left looks after its own when state power swings back into its hands. Tribal politics.

And this brings me back to Donald Trump and his behavior as president. The posture of Trump and his administration has been deeply offensive to the values to which this country has long clung — even though too often the country has viewed those values too lofty or inconvenient to be honored. At home and abroad, the attitude of Trump and his administration is broadly adversarial. Trump’s malignant personality has reshaped all of government to project the idea that if anyone objects to what Trump wants, what Trump wants will be obtained anyway — by threat, by corrupt use of state organs such as the Justice Department or by naked force. And because Trump is fundamentally dishonest, discerning his motives in many situations is like unpicking the Gordian Knot.

Thus we have the supposed peacemaker president invading Venezuela and seizing its fraudulent leader Nicolás Maduro in an exercise of thug vs. thug. But what is the real reason? Is it to use Venezuela’s heavy crude oil, which the U.S. does have the capacity to refine, to prevent a fuel-price shock here at home when Trump decides to topple the Iranian theocracy in the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Remember that the Sunni kingdom has urged the U.S. in the past “to cut off the head of the snake” that is Shiite Iran because of Tehran’s feared nuclear activity.) Trump, for various reasons, is eager to please both Riyadh and Jerusalem. And both would rejoice at a defanging of Tehran. But rare is the plan that survives contact with the stresses of reality.

A demonstrator coming from the vicinity of the White House carries Iran’s pre-revolution national flag in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. Iran has been rocked by widespread protests against economic hardships and the hardline theocratic government. President Trump has threatened to intervene militarily in the country to safeguard protesters against government violence aimed at suppressing the demonstrations.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Then there is Ukraine. There, we have our supposed peacemaker president claiming to be working to end the war of aggression that Russia started by invading its neighbor, but Trump, in the same breath, is threatening to acquire Denmark’s Greenland territory using exactly the method by which Russia’s Vladimir Putin seeks to obtain eastern Ukraine: violent and illegal seizure.

I have a theory about this Greenland campaign: For Trump and his white-supremacist cabal, the contiguous parts of the U.S. have become frighteningly polluted with brown and black people. One solution is to obtain a territory in Europe to establish a racial Eden, an elite destination for white people only, and even then only white people of suitable ideological purity. After all, in the eyes of white supemacists, a “woke” white person is as undesirable as a black or brown person. The 50,000 or so Inuit people of Greenland would not constitute a problem. After all, neither did Native Americans, who were eliminated or displaced and corralled as European Americans pursued their “manifest destiny” in westward expansion here.

The effort to take Greenland threatens to sever the U.S. from its NATO security partners and from its commercial and civilizational partners in the European Union. It raises the prospect of NATO’s European members, and perhaps NATO member Canada here in North America, rallying to defend Denmark and Greenland militarily against the aggression of fellow NATO member the United States. That would be the end of NATO as constituted and purposed since its formation after World War II. Trump would shed no tears over a breakup of NATO, and Putin would be delighted by it.

Here I return to a theme that I continue to hammer: white supremacy. I believe that Trump sees a Russia with Putin’s values as a necessary partner to a U.S. with Trump’s values in a global, fascist, white-supremacist axis. That axis encompasses Europe’s entire far-right white-purity enterprise stretching from the United Kingdom in the west to the farthest eastern reaches of Russia. And, of course, it includes the supposedly imperiled and dispossessed Boers of South Africa.

The surge in worldwide migration that has come with economic globalization has triggered pushback in countries around the world, but the rejection of the migrant outsider — often a dark-skinned Muslim — has been especially harsh in Europe. That is the tune that Donald Trump sings, demonizing brown-skinned migrants in the U.S. as polluting American blood and society with the ways and values of their “shithole countries” while he pines for the U.S. to attract more Scandinavians as immigrants.

If Trump is burning through the U.S.’s goodwill abroad with hostility and a bizarre tariff policy targeting even long-standing friends, for most Americans he has absolutely no personal goodwill to spend here at home. Trump and his administration are deeply despised across this country, and the hatred is growing. Even elements of his notoriously faithful base are beginning to question their religion. More and more of his base sees him as governing not for the people’s interest but for his people’s interest. Most Americans simply want him gone — whether by impeachment and eventual imprisonment or by illness or death of natural causes. They are sick of his chaos, his bloated and festering ego, his divisiveness.

Protesters head away from the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of a n hours-long demonstration and during biting cold in Southwest Washington, D.C., on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

A message for President Trump from the last protester to leave a rally outside the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 500 12th Street SW in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Law enforcement officers adjust crowd-control barriers outside ICE headquarters in Southwest Washington after the departure of protesters on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. A strong wind, seen here buffeting police caution tape, caused the feel-like temperature to drop so painfully low that it may have contributed to the breakup of the protest.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Increasingly, Americans are appalled at Trump’s misuse of the Department of Justice to persecute his political enemies or any significant figure who stands in his way. This is a man who claimed that the Biden Justice Department had been weaponized against him, but nothing that happened under Biden compares to the excesses of the Trump Justice Department. (In my view, the prosecution of Trump by the Biden Justice Department was entirely right and proper.) Trump has fired U.S. attorneys (whom he himself appointed) because their judgment led them to defy his desires and has improperly substituted handpicked stooges who have gone on to be disqualified or to see their partisan prosecutions rebuffed by grand juries and federal judges. Trump’s Justice Department is has become the very word he used to describe those countries he so profanely dismissed.

After instigating government legal action against Letitia James, Lisa Cook, John Bolton and James Comey, Trump has now sicced his eager-beaver Justice Department head Pam Bondi on the Federal Reserve because he wants to get rid of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. In less than one year in office for a second term, Trump has corrupted the Department of Justice more deeply than I think most Americans could have imagined could happen.

And now we have an aggressive expansion of two federal police forces: Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Customs and Border Protection. It occurs to me that most of the people becoming law enforcement officers in these two agencies today under Donald Trump may be of a mindset like Trump’s: aggressively racist. After all, they must know what team they are joining. And they will get to go hunting throughout the country while masked. These two police agencies worry me inordinately. They appear to me to have the ubiquity and the mindset to be Trump’s own Geheime Staatspolizei in this do-or-die mid-term election year. My fear is that Trump will try to use them and the National Guard somehow to interfere with the conduct of this year’s elections.

If you think I am having a fever dream, think back to the inconceivable events that came to pass with such ease Jan. 6, 2021. Think of what you know of Donald Trump and his most ardent abettors, the likes of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Think of the entire architecture of right-wing white supremacy in this country. None of it has gone away. It waits in the wings to emerge as it did for Jan. 6.

But Trump is not in a strong position. He stands in dire peril, in fact, because with each hand he is holding an unhappy wolf by one ear. One beast is the hound of global alienation, and the other canid is domestic fury over Trump’s crass self-indulgence and his autocratic style of governance. Americans keep telling him that they want no king, and he keeps pressing ahead with what resembles a personal imperial project. He appears to believe that he is safe behind the Secret Service and all the other federal and local law enforcement agencies in Washington. But history shows us repeatedly that when public discontent with a leader reaches a critical mass and the crowds march, even the modern Praetorian Guard melts away and the tyrant falls.

The inconceivable violation that Trump abetted on Jan. 6, 2021, may yet come back to visit him in the very house where he lives.

The persecution of Kilmar Ábrego García

When the executive branch of the U.S. government publicly turns its power against an individual, that person will need to marshal enormous personal courage and committed legal representation if he is to slip the many snares and stratagems that can be deployed against him.

A Salvadoran national by the name of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García can attest to this. Ábrego García, who is about 30 years old, entered the United States illegally at about age 16 and lived in this country without authorization until a pivotal arrest by federal agents in Maryland on March 12, 2025. I say “pivotal” because he had previously been stopped or arrested by U.S. law enforcement without the storm that grew out of his March 12 arrest.

Arguably the most significant of these other encounters was his March 2019 stop by a police officer outside a Home Depot store in Hyattsville, Md., as he and three other men waited around hoping to be hired as day laborers. That stop led to Ábrego García’s being handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for federal immigration action. It was during his interactions with the Hyattsville Police Department and gang detectives of the Prince George’s County Police Department (the city of Hyattsville is in Prince George’s County) that an assessment of MS-13 gang affiliation became attached to Ábrego García. He was not charged with any crimes and therefore has not been tried on any criminal matter, but the MS-13 label has stuck.

Ábrego García sought release from immigration detention, but this was denied, although the immigration judge hearing his case noted contradictions and inconsistencies in the government’s allegations against the Salvadoran. Nonetheless, a police informant’s assertion that Ábrego García was associated with MS-13 was enough for him to be denied release from ICE custody. He then applied for asylum, but that was denied on the basis that U.S. law specifies that a person seeking asylum must file a claim within one year of entering the country. Ábrego García was many years late with his asylum petition.

He then applied for protection from removal to El Salvador on the basis that he feared for his safety in his native country. At that time, El Salvador was still a pretty dangerous place, with President Nayib Bukele just ramping up his war against the bloodthirsty gangs that had held a knife to El Salvador’s throat for many years. A judge granted Ábrego García’s request for protection from removal to El Salvador.

That was his status until March 12, when he was arrested by federal agents while on his way home with his young child after finishing his workday. Three days later, he was among a three-plane load of undocumented immigrants flown from the U.S. to El Salvador to be incarcerated without trial or any other due process at Bukele’s maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center, known by the acronym CECOT.

His deportation, which took place on March 15, violated the order of protection from removal to El Salvador that the judge had issued. The Trump administration said Ábrego García had been deported in error. Ábrego García’s wife, a U.S. citizen, sued to compel the Trump administration to bring her husband back to the U.S. A U.S. district judge ordered that he be returned, but President Trump himself declared that he had no power to bring Ábrego García back. About this time, El Salvador’s Bukele came to Washington for a White House visit with Trump. It was a reward for his accepting planeloads of deportees, including Venezuelans, from the U.S. and locking them up in CECOT in exchange for millions of dollars from the U.S.

During Bukele’s obligatory Oval Office sit-down with Trump in front of news cameras, Trump and Bukele both were asked about the judge’s order that Ábrego García be returned to the U.S. Each dishonestly offered some form of a dodge about being powerless to do anything. In an exchange with Bukele separate from the formal news appearance, Trump tells Bukele that he would like to send “homegrown criminals” — U.S. citizens, if his meaning is not clear to you — to imprisonment in El Salvador, and he encourages Bukele to build more CECOTs.

The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court to fight the lower-court ruling that Ábrego García be brought back, but the justices disappointed Trump by ruling that the government should “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return to the U.S.

In early June, the Trump administration did return Ábrego García to U.S. soil, but it did so on the transparently spurious grounds of federally charging him with human trafficking.

On his return, he was immediately jailed in Tennessee.

In late 2022, Ábrego García had been stopped while driving on Interstate 40 in Tennessee. The Tennessee Highway Patrol report from the stop says that his driver’s license had expired and that he told the attending officer that he was transporting eight passengers from Houston to St. Louis and on to Maryland for construction work. The officer suspected “human trafficking.” A note in Ábrego García’s driver’s license record mentioned the suspected MS-13 connection. ICE was contacted but declined to take Ábrego García into custody, and, ultimately, no charges were filed against him in relation to that traffic stop.

That traffic stop became the basis for the case of human trafficking that the Trump administration said was the reason for his being returned to the U.S. His lawyers fought on, and judges ordered that Ábrego García be released from custody. He was eventually released but immediately taken back into custody by ICE, and he faced the danger of deportation to a third country. In fact, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department gave Ábrego García an ultimatum: Plead guilty to the charge of human trafficking or be deported to a country in Africa.

He refused and continued his legal fight. Hence his release from ICE custody on Thursday on a judge’s order. His fight is not over, of course. He still faces the danger of a cooked-up federal criminal case in the U.S. or vindictive deportation to a distant country with which he has no connection.

One aspect of the Ábrego García case that stands out is the reckless cruelty of the government in relation to this man. Donald Trump’s government means to triumph over him and make an example of him, and if it must break him and devastate his family in the process, so be it. After all, in the telling of the Trump administration, as voiced by Trump himself and by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, undocumented immigrants like Ábrego García are “the worst of the worst.”

Trump means to remove from the country the vast army of undocumented immigrants that forms a second society within our society, and that in itself is a lawful and proper objective. What is indecent and unacceptable is the manner in which Trump is going about this task, and his motives for taking on this work. Trump’s motives, as I say repeatedly, are not honorable. He, the most lawless U.S. president in modern times, is not seeking to uphold law and order and protect American citizens from criminal “aliens.”

Trump is pursuing a white-supremacist agenda against a steadily browning American populace. And he and his white-supremacist allies on the American far right understand that millions of undocumented immigrants producing Fourteenth Amendment-protected U.S.-citizen children is a hastening of the browning of America and the diluting of the political power of the white populace.

That is what the immigration clean-out is all about. For hard evidence, look no further than the glaring and outrageous contradiction in Trump’s policy toward South Africa’s white Afrikaner farming class vs. his attitude to brown and black undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Trump valorizes the Afrikaners, whose politicians were the architects of South Africa’s infamously racist apartheid system. He says falsely that the Afrikaners are being subjected to genocide by black South Africans and consequently need rescuing by the U.S. in the form of relocation to our shores. As for the latter group, the black and brown undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Trump demonizes and insults them and has unleashed his agents to hunt them down in the streets as if they are rabid animals.

Look also at Trump’s inane threat of military action in Nigeria supposedly to protect Christians who are being persecuted by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Now, there is a population that actually needs protection against the mass kidnapping of schoolchildren, especially girls, and the slaughtering of civilians. But Trump will never countenance bringing the good Christian folk of Nigeria to the U.S. to protect them from genocidal harm. Why? They are black. They are not right for the U.S. asylum program. In fact, under Trump’s recent revision of the program, virtually the only people who now qualify for refugee status in the U.S. are Afrikaners, who are, of course, white and, Trump assumes, ideologically suited to the far-right U.S. mindset. And I wonder whether Trump raised the question of Nigerian Christians merely as a pretense at evenhandedness in his play at savior in Africa.

***

There was a time when I believed that humanity was an ever-improving enterprise. I was mistaken. I misread the advance of science and the modernizing of our processes and accessories as the forward march of humanity. The truth is that our things are nicer but we are not. We constantly see evidence that human nature remains what it was at the birth of bipedalism. We are unchanged in spirit. We are a mixture of virtue and savagery eternally at war with each other. But I — and many others, I think — have failed to see this because of an erroneous reading of what constitute’s human improvement.

But that misapprehension can be corrected by apprehension, and there is enormous satisfaction in knowing that one does stand on the side of light and the angels. Trump’s side is rampant for a season, and then it will pass away. The light of goodness will shine again until the next season of darkness falls upon us. But the good dare not grow weary and must never cease from struggling against the dark. To surrender to the banishment of light means permanent night and its attendant nightmares. The Trump administration and its evil ways are a clear warning that all who stand for justice and right must never stand down.