Ever since Donald Trump began his “Revenge Tour” in January 2025, I have avoided discussing politics with my friends. Trump’s presidency depressed me to the extent that I began to distrust the American voters: How could they elect someone who was so evidently in it for himself only? Someone who was so obviously mendacious and corrupt? The only solution was to break the man—but that was something beyond my power to effect. I could vote, and I did vote; but I saw that mere complaining was only going to upset me.
Above all, I had to keep myself in one piece. Parochial political discussions were useless.
With the 2026 midterm election, I see the first glimmerings of hope. It will take time to heal, and I don’t entirely trust the Democrats either. They can still emerge as the circular firing squad they used to be over the last several decades. Or they could rise to the occasion.
As usual, I was not completely satisfied with the election (I never am). I was against many of the Propositions that passed. And I was dismayed that Brian Goldsmith will be my State Senator. Well, I have been represented before by jackals in the halls in Sacramento and Washington, DC. That’s nothing new.
I cast my ballot in the 2026 Midterm Election last week by dropping it in a Board of Elections lockbox situated at Stoner Park just under a mile from my apartment. Why did I vote early? Basically, I was so sick and tired of having my mailbox stuffed with multicolored ads claiming the support of the police and firefighters and full of outrageous lies and name calling. Now I could funnel all that stuff straight into the garbage where it belongs.
Democracy can be enervating in the extreme, especially when it is bloated with the cash of billionaires who are trying to push candidates and propositions that would favor their quest for power. I am sure that, human nature being what it is, the lies and name calling will always be a part of elections. The existence of so much money in campaigns, however, makes it ever so much more intense and vicious.
A month ago today, I posted about a candidate for California State Senate named Brian Goldsmith. He has been particularly energetic about stuffing my mailbox and TV screen with lies against his opponent, a fellow Democrat named John Erickson. His TV ads concentrate on attacking Erickson for daring to suggest cutting the staff of the LA sheriff’s department despite the crime rate going up 137%. Why, then, does the L.A. sheriff Robert Luna endorse Erickson? Does he want to see the L.A. sheriffs get gutted?
It seems that Goldsmith is a political consultant who is massively funded by several PACs with bland names. Although he is running as a Democrat, he was recently a Republican and changed parties. That’s a shrewd move in a state that at present is anti-Republican. But then why is he being endorsed by Republicans?
You have to be wide awake when voting. Things are never what they seem to be.
It happens every election. There is always a BIG MONEY candidate who spends millions stuffing the mailboxes and smartphone memories of voters. They start early in the race and keep spending the big bucks until voters are sick and tired of hearing from them. In the last election, it was Tom Steyer for Governor of California. He lost. Prior to that, it was a developer named Rick Caruso running for Mayor of Los Angeles. He lost too.
In recent years, California voters have rejected candidates who looked to be buying their way into elected office. I rather suspect the same thing will happen to Brian Goldsmith. It doesn’t matter that he is opposed to Trump. The only California State Official whose opposition to Trump matters is State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who uses the courts to fight Trump’s questionable tactics punishing California voters for not liking him.
I for one will not vote for Goldsmith. If necessary, I will write in Martine’s name as my pick for State Senate. She would definitely be more conscientious, and she wouldn’t be corrupt. (Even though she’s a Republican, but that’s a long story that will be told elsewhere.)
The next five weeks are bound to be exasperating as billions of dollars are spent trying to convince voters to select various (mostly) power-hungry politicians and questionable propositions. As for the propositions, I vote NO on all of them. Hidden deep within the bowels of most propositions is legal language showing that the proposition is not what it claims to be. So if I vote them all down, they are not likely to adversely affect me.
As for the candidates, when I receive my ballot, I will hold my nose and try to make the most intelligent choice I can, given the available information.
It almost seems as if our elections are forever wars like our … well, like our actual wars. And probably just as expensive. We have one billionaire candidate for Governor of California who has bent almost $200 million on advertising … and he’s still going strong. And this is a primary election to boot!
For months, my mailbox has been full of multicolor campaign literature, both negative and positive. I keep my little flip phone shut off because the political text messages are flowing like the Garganta del Diablo at Iguazu Falls:
I am immune to all political appeals because I sent in my ballot almost two weeks ago. Would you believe that the reason I voted early is so that I can ignore all urgent political appeals? The one positive thing about this election is that I am happy with our Los Angeles Councilwoman, Traci Park, who has actually performed well in her first term. I am least happy about voting for the numerous judicial offices.
When June 3 rolls around, I plan to celebrate. I think I’ll go to the Getty Center and spend all day looking at art. That always calms me down.
In July 1943, the Writers’ War Board asked New Yorker writer E. B. White to make a statement on the subject “The Meaning of Democracy.” Below is White’s statement:
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. [Italics mine]
In 2016 and 2024, I learned that, according to Mr. White’s statement, we are NOT living in a democracy. I say that because a certain individual was elected president twice by more than half the voters—voters who were not only wrong in electing him, but very probably wrong in their judgments on any subject you care to name.
I suppose I could be forgiving toward the voters who propelled Trump to the presidency, but I don’t feel like it. I have no intention of agreeing that water flows uphill, that the sun sets in the East, or that the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces can declare war at any time against anybody. In fact, I am feeling very non-committal about our country as it begins to celebrate its 250th anniversary as a former democracy.
In the Age of Trump This Is Becoming a Real Problem
With most of my friends, I tend to avoid any discussion about the current political situation. That becomes a sticky issue when so many people are glued to news programs. In fact, the only person with whom I am comfortable discussing the news is my brother Dan. And that is because we generally agree on most of the issues.
I am a strange kind of hybrid who is at one and the same time a liberal and a fiscal (but not a cultural) conservative. I do not belong to any political party and have even gone so far as to vote for some Republicans for local (but not national) office. As a result, any political discussion with a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat or Republican is likely to end in discord. For example, my dislike of the tent-dwelling homeless in Los Angeles has made me notorious among the woke Liberals of my acquaintance.
When I was a child in Cleveland, I was raised in a family where there were broad political disagreements. My father was a supporter of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency. In 1980, my mother voted for John B. Anderson for the top office. Only my brother and I tended to agree. (In 1968, however, I was so disgruntled about choosing between Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey that I did a write-in for Otto Schlumpf for president.)
So do I watch the news at all? Not really, unless we are talking about the weather. There are so many television channels with news all or most of the time that they really don’t have much to say, so they tend to repeat their “breaking” news ad infinitum ad nauseam. Martine watches the news a lot, but I think her problems with insomnia are attributable to her news habit.
As we head toward the culmination of another anxious election season, I suddenly had an inkling of what could happen. Donald Trump has always relied on rallies where he speaks with a bigly group of mostly young supporters with posters and MAGA hats at his back.
These rallies vaguely resemble the rallies that Trump’s hero, Adolph Hitler, staged in the 1930s. Of course, they couldn’t hold a candle to the giant 1935 rally in Nuremberg which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and released under the title Triumph of the Will. Now that was a real rally, with over 700,000 supporters in attendance.
Hitler Rally in Nuremberg 1935
The thought came to me that the whole Trump moment in American history will end badly. The electorate is largely made up of two groups:
People who hate Trump with a passion
People who idolize Trump with a passion (but who will come to hate him when they wake up and find out they have been used)
What I think will happen at some future date is that those faces at MAGA rallies will become a mark of shame, and that people will scan photographs of the rallies with magnifying glasses to find neighbors they could blame for their predicament, which will probably get worse over time. (Even if it doesn’t, the voters will think that.)
I look at cars that bear political bumper stickers and think, “What happens if they park their car in a neighborhood which is strongly ‘anti-’ their candidate?” That’s one of the reasons my car is devoid of bumper stickers and decals.
Height Is the Only Advantage for This Mental Midget
Today I watched the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and her opponent. There couldn’t possibly be two candidates who were more different from each other.
Trump’s only advantage is that he is almost a foot taller than Harris, and America is a country which tends to over-reward candidates who are tall. I myself am of medium height (5 feet 8 inches, or 1.75 meters), though because of a pituitary tumor I had from an early age, I was the shortest male in class throughout my elementary school years. It was only after the tumor was removed at age 21 that I grew to my present height.
There have been statistics to the effect that greater than average height is a clear advantage in politics, business, and wooing. My own thinking is that the height advantage, while real, is no guarantee of success.
At today’s presidential debate, it was Kamala Harris who stood tall. She was quick to react, made frequent eye contact, and even began by going to Trump’s podium and shaking his hand, which no doubt surprised the ex-president to no end. Trump, on the other hand, looked like the grumpy old man that he is, wanting to chase all the darned kids off his lawn, and speaking with a cold, constipated rage that made me think we probably wouldn’t live out his term if elected.
The worst thing about years evenly divisible by four is all the political activity that is conducive only to nausea. Oh, and there’s an extra day in the calendar just to rub it in even more.
I do not care what political beliefs you hold. No doubt they are very true—because they’re your beliefs and you will stick by them come hell or high water. Ho hum.
What is particularly galling to me is that this electoral cycle started four years ago and continued in high gear with rallies and other events. Well, although I will vote in November, I have no intention of donating money to any party or candidate, taking any political surveys, following the political news on TV, engaging in political conversations with my friends, wearing any candidates’ buttons, or slapping any bumper stickers on my car.
Effective immediately, I am not playing the game. I am stepping off the merry-go-round and not caring who gets the brass ring. Whoever wins the 2024 election, my goal is simply to survive. The 24-hour news cycle can go fish.
Well, of course Tolstoy did not write anything about our upcoming presidential election, but what he said back over 125 years ago can still resonate with Americans today. Below is an excerpt from his diary entry for February 7, 1895.
The situation of the majority of people educated in true brotherly love and now oppressed by the deceit and cunning of those who wield power and who force the majority to ruin their own lives—this situation is terrible and seems to offer no way out. Only two ways out present themselves and both are barred: one is to break violence by violence, terror, dynamite bombs and daggers as our nihilists and anarchists did, to smash the conspiracy of governments against peoples, without our participation; the other is to enter into agreement with the government, make concessions to it and, by taking part in it, gradually unravel the net which holds the people fast and free it….
Dynamite and daggers, as experience shows us, only provoke reaction and destroy the most valuable power, the only power in our control—public opinion; the other way out is barred by the fact that governments have already come to know how far to tolerate the participation of people who want to reform them. They only tolerate what doesn’t destroy the essentials, and are very sensitive about what is harmful to them, sensitive because it concerns their very existence. They do tolerate people who don’t agree with them and want to reform the government, not only to satisfy the demands of these people, but also for their own sakes, for the sake of the government. These people would be dangerous for governments if they remained outside these governments and rose up against them; they would strengthen the one weapon which is stronger than governments—public opinion—and so they need to make these people safe, win them over by means of concessions made by the government, render them harmless like microbe cultures—and then use them to serve the aims of governments, i.e., the oppression and exploitation of the people.
Both ways out are firmly and impenetrably barred. What then remains? You can’t break violence by violence—you increase reaction; nor can you join the ranks of government. Only one thing remains: to fight the government with weapons of thought, word and way of life, not making concessions to it, not joining its ranks, not increasing its power oneself.
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