Morning in America?

The pit and the pendulum

Exclusive to MeierMovies, May 2026

I can’t sleep at night anymore. And I can’t wake up knowing America will still be here.

This is what Donald Trump has done.

The media talk about how Trump has changed politics, society, the world. But no one talks about how he’s changed me, the everyday nobody.

I want to wake up to the Kennedy Center, to the historic White House East Wing, to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to our national parks and forests, to our Constitution, to reproductive freedom, to separation of church and state, to the rule of law, to America. I want to wake up from the nightmare.

I didn’t think it could get worse than January 6, 2021. I didn’t think it could get worse than a sitting president denying election defeat and inciting a deranged mob to defile the United States Capitol, hang the vice president in effigy and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power in a way not seen in our 250-year history. But it did on April 7 when Trump threatened to kill an entire civilization and then confusingly retreated from his own genocidal words, in a King George III moment of madness. I wasn’t alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I can imagine it now – if Khrushchev and Kennedy were schizophrenic sociopaths.

I wonder where our leaders have gone. I wonder why Congress didn’t rush to reconvene when Trump hinted at Iranian nuclear annihilation. Where are our heroes of old, I wonder, like Joseph Welch, who, in 1954, hastened the end of McCarthyism with his simple yet profound “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

I know the political pendulum will eventually swing back to sanity. But when? And will I still be sane when it does?

I don’t ask for much. Like billions across the globe, I just want to wake up in the morning without a pit in my stomach.

Trump is the pit in the stomach of the world.