The Democratic nominee proposes Medicare assistance for home health aides to help people who must care for elderly parents while holding down a job and perhaps raising children, and on the same day the journalist Bob Woodward makes serious allegations about the Republican nominee to which a Republican spokesman says the journalist is “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.” There is the 2024 campaign in a paragraph. Serious civics versus a bucket of bird droppings.

This is not the Republican Party that my father respected, the party he felt he could trust to separate truth from fiction. The party of Dwight Eisenhower has been hijacked by a New York playboy who wants Air Force One and the helicopter and the Marine honor guard and though he’s been convicted of sexual assault and fraud, 80 million Americans love him and it will give them a thrill to vote for him. I’m glad my father isn’t here to witness this.

Of course you already know this. We’re two nations and either you believe the 2020 election was stolen and the crowd who took over the Capitol the following January were true patriots or you are confident it was not and that they were felons. There isn’t room for negotiation.

It’s a revolt by Middle America against the coasts, old against young, commoners against college, evangelicals against agnostics, McDonald’s against pad thai, and I as an old Minnesota grad fond of the quarter-pounder feel conflicted, especially when I read that what infuriates Republicans most is political correctness. It irks me too.

It’s why I haven’t listened to public radio for fifteen years. Because even as Russia pounds Ukraine and Gaza is in ruins and fentanyl flows across the borders and the oceans are warming, which contributes to the monster hurricanes, if you listen to NPR you get the feeling that the major problem facing us today is the unhappiness of nonbinary teenagers. The mayor of New York is indicted, his staff flees, New Yorkers know what’s going on, it’s an old old story, but because he is Black, it has to be tiptoed around: the problem is that this great city is a one-party town that tolerates corruption and it needs a mayor who loves the city and that ain’t Eric Adams. It needs a Republican from Missouri who enjoys art and music and food and who feels happy in a crowd experiencing diversity up close.

It’s an election coming up that half the country imagines might bring about less regulation, big tax cuts in the upper brackets, cuts in Medicare and public education, the deportation of ten million, a ban on abortion, but I don’t see that. I see a police van pulling up to the gates of Mar-a-Lago and the Secret Service turning over their charge to court deputies who’ll ship him off to a nice facility in Connecticut that’s reserved for special cases.

There’ll be photographers at the gate and then that’ll be the end of it. The man will be given a very quiet life. Introspection will be inevitable. Maybe he and Mayor Adams will be cellmates. Over time they may develop a rapport. Instead of Fox or NPR they may pick up a Bible and feel the Creator’s great love for them and accept forgiveness and be changed. It has happened before. The freedom to be free of yourself: that’s what it’s always been about.