Mad like you read about
May 21, 2026
“Betty Boop” rose at Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum
A family celebration, and a blade to the heart
One of the challenges of Trumpism—perhaps the thorniest of them all—is learning how to live in what seems to be two worlds at once. One is normal. The other spins backwards with lacerating chaos and remorseless corruption.
The “normal” world—the part I was visiting this past weekend—is how I always imagined it could be. I was in Portland, with its ten foot high rhododendrons and azaleas in bloom, on a day when my essential daughter was receiving a “Masters of Science” degree in the healing arts. It was sanguine to the core, a shared experience with my family and dozens of other families, some of whom arrived for the ceremony holding up poster-sized-photos of their graduates, the way hoop fans bring extra-large photographs of their favorite players to raucous basketball games. Anybody would want to revel in this, to celebrate a chorus of life in burnished light, with hugs and bouquets, and loose prayers for reunions to come.
The toxic, criminal sludge of Trumpism is so wide that it almost seems insurmountable. And yet it simply has to be reckoned with, even though the reckoning will be incredibly difficult, in part because the mere need to do so is infuriating, an admission that we’ve lost valuable ground amongst ourselves and with peoples around the world who’ve expected better from us.
Those prayers collide with the unrelenting scourge of Trumpism; not just Trump’s Liar’s Kingdom—to quote the cover of Andrew Weissmann’s new book—but the lawless avarice and signature cruelty, as if the path to heaven is paved with racist thuggery, flagstone felonies and presidential pardons. It is the polar opposite of the equitable civil society so many millions of good people have worked to secure and expand with their investments in time, labor and creativity. The extant destruction reminds me of what I’ve read about the death tolls of pandemics and physical devastation of great fires. Come what may Trumpism will leave an ash layer in our history.
The noose meant for the hanging of then Vice President Mike Pence, at the site of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. (Image courtesty Wikimedia Commons)
A New York Times editorial a couple days ago, described it this way:
“He [Trump] is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.”
In the run-up to the three day journey to and from Portland I thought I’d be nice to my brain and avoid reading or listening to news. So what I missed was the mind-boggling reach of Trump’s latest (and most egregious) abuse of power. Working closely with Todd Blanche—the “Acting” Attorney General who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney in the Stormy Daniels’ “hush money” case—Trump decided that he should sue his own government. He sought to recover $10 billion in damages he figured he’s owed because an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns to the press. When that gambit hit a legal obstacle Trump and Blanche decided to settle the case for what amounts to a $1.8 billion slush fund of federal money, (named the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from which large sums of your tax dollars can be ladled out to Trump supporters who believe they’ve been wrongly prosecuted by federal officers during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Again, this is a plan that mutated from Trump’s abortive effort to sue the government he ostensibly leads and for which he has emerged (by the default of the Republican Congress’s capitulation) as the most powerful guardian of the federal purse.
Conflict of interest? No problem. He and Blanche—who recently told Fox News that he would still “love” and serve Trump if he chose someone else to replace dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi. So the two worked out a deal whereby the acting Attorney General (Blanche) would appoint a handful of trustees to decide who would get compensated from the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that we taxpayers are expected to stock. But Trump (just in case) would have the power to dismiss any of the appointees.
Wachlella Falls in the Columbia River gorge, forty miles east of Portland
That’s nauseating as far as it goes, but it gets worse.
Who do you suppose would be among the first in line seeking damages for their mistreatment? If you guessed the 1,500-plus Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters whom Trump pardoned shortly after he returned to the Oval Office — you guessed right. This would include the several hundred who were found, or pled, guilty to violent attacks on Capitol police officers.
Blanche has already been asked whether he and Trump would rule out cash compensation to Jan. 6 rioters. And the answer is no.
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Late yesterday, two of the officers assaulted during the Jan. 6th riots filed a lawsuit to block the payments. One of them—metro police officer Daniel Hodges was nearly crushed to death by the rioters.
“Why would you pay people who attacked the police at the Capitol of the United States who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power?” Officer Hodges told National Public Radio yesterday. “Why would you pay people who wanted to assassinate the vice president?”
Officer Hodges is spot on. This is bleeping crazy.
So crazy that you may have to be crazy to ignore it—to put up a wall between “normal” life and the moral absurdities of Trump and his enablers, like Todd Blanche, a cum laude law school graduate who surely knows better.
Family photo at Audrey’s Master’s degree graduation at Lewis & Clark College this past Sunday
The gap between the American ideals that once brought hope to oppressed people across the world and the toxic, criminal sludge of Trumpism is so wide that it almost seems insurmountable. And yet it simply has to be reckoned with, even though the reckoning will be incredibly difficult, in part because the mere need to do so is infuriating, an admission that we’ve lost valuable ground amongst ourselves and with peoples around the world who’ve expected better from us.
I don’t like being angry. But we all have to be mad enough to care; angry enough to bring the very best in ourselves to work at it. To help get things right.
—tjc
