a wretched situation

There was a time I felt proud of the United States. Not blindly, not without criticism, but with a sense that we were striving toward something better. Our history has always been contradictory—liberty proclaimed by slaveholders, equality promised but rarely delivered—but there was, for a time, a belief that we were moving forward. I believed that trajectory would hold. Now, I’m not so sure.

The decline didn’t begin with PrumpTutin. He’s a culmination, not a cause. If we’re plotting a timeline, the pivot point is Ronald Reagan. But the erosion of principle runs deeper than any one presidency, threading through decades. It’s been hiding in plain sight for years—in boardrooms, on talk radio, behind patriotic slogans and tax cuts. It crept along quietly while we convinced ourselves the center would hold. And only lately has it stepped fully into the open, dropping its last disguises and, in the end, revealing itself for what it is.

The Founding Fathers were many things—flawed, idealistic, self-interested—but above all, they were conscious of history. They knew republics failed. They studied Rome, debated philosophy, and warned—over and over—that without public virtue, the experiment would end in chaos. James Madison feared that “if there be not virtue among us, we are in a wretched situation.” John Adams was even blunter: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Their worry wasn’t theoretical. It was structural. They built a system that required restraint, deliberation, civic character. They feared demagogues, mob rule, and the seduction of spectacle over substance. And here we are.

The 20th century, for all its turbulence, offered moments of renewal. The New Deal, for example, wasn’t just economic reform—it was a reaffirmation that the federal government could serve the people. That collective effort mattered. Even amid the contradictions of Jim Crow and McCarthyism, there was a sense that the United States was working through its unfinished promises.

Reagan changed the language. Government, he said, was the problem. Markets, he implied, were moral. Greed, said his disciples, was good. The public square thinned out. Civic life was privatized. Patriotism became a flag pin and a tax cut. Underneath the optimism was a quiet surrender: to corporate power, to individualism unmoored from responsibility to the idea that society owed you nothing.

The warning signs weren’t subtle. They were televised, commercialized, and eventually digitized. When the Cold War ended, so did any pretense of a shared civic mission. The internet fractured the conversation. Truth became contested terrain. Anger became currency. Institutions rotted from within, and trust collapsed.

Then came PrumpTutin.

Not an aberration. A mirror. A product of decades of anti-intellectualism, racial grievance, and economic disillusionment. PrumpTutin branded cruelty as authenticity. He mocked the weak, lied without hesitation, and governed by impulse. He was cheered not despite these things, but because of them. His rise wasn’t a break from the past—it was the inevitable outcome of our forgetting.

Forgetting what?

That the United States is not an identity—it’s a covenant. A fragile agreement between the governed and those who govern, bound by more than laws and elections. Bound by belief in something larger than self-interest. Bound by the understanding that liberty without virtue is rot.

The Founders feared this moment. Not foreign invasion. Not even economic collapse. But moral decay. The slow unraveling of civic character. The replacement of deliberation with performance, duty with grievance, principle with power.

PrumpTutin thrives in that vacuum. He feeds off spectacle, grievance, and the blurring of truth. He’s not simply a man, but a brand, a phenomenon—a dark hybrid of entertainment and authoritarianism. The Founders wouldn’t have recognized the name, but they’d have recognized the pattern.

We were warned. And we ignored them.

Now the question isn’t whether the United States is great, or even good—but whether it can be governed. Whether we still believe in the responsibilities of citizenship. Whether we still recognize the difference between freedom and license, between dissent and destruction.

History doesn’t wait for us to remember. It moves forward with or without our consent.

We’ve arrived at the edge of the map. The Founders left us no GPS. Only a warning.

And they were right.