Introduction: The End Begins with a Smile

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"

The Last American President: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Introduction: The End Begins with a Smile

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security
of all. —John F. Kennedy

It didn’t look like the end of democracy. It looked like a Tuesday.

I remember watching the television that day, January 6, 2021, as a man stood on the Capitol lawn. Red hat, blank expression, that thousand-yard stare people get when something fundamental breaks inside them. His face was flushed crimson against the winter cold, fists clenched like he was holding onto the last threads of a reality rapidly unraveling, and his voice—already sandpaper-rough from hours of shouting—cracked as he howled into the January wind: “They’re stealing my country!”1

Inside those historic halls, American police officers were being beaten with the very flagpoles that once carried our stars and stripes.2 Outside, thousands swarmed barricades, waving signs proclaiming “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President” and “1776,” equating their insurrection with our founding revolution, a perversion of history so profound it leaves historians breathless.3 A gallows stood erected on the lawn. Pipe bombs waited silently nearby.4 And the president of the United States—the man who had sworn an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic—watched it all unfold on television, doing nothing.5

But here’s what we must understand: this didn’t start with violence. It didn’t begin with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue or emergency decrees or a midnight coup with generals in dark rooms. It began with something far more insidious. It began with a smile.

A familiar grin from behind a podium. A catchphrase designed in a marketing meeting: “Make America Great Again.”6 A seductive promise that only he—not we, not us, not our democratic institutions—only HE could fix what ailed America.7 There was always that wink to the cameras as he mocked journalists doing their constitutional duty, as he demonized immigrants seeking the American promise, as he insisted he could never lose unless someone cheated, because losing would mean the system was rigged against him.8 And when he did lose? He smiled again, and lied. A Big Lie that would have made Goebbels proud.9

The Pattern of Democratic Collapse

History doesn’t end in a blaze of glory or even in tragedy. It ends in applause. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe tyranny arrives with jackboots and blood-red banners, goose-stepping soldiers and midnight arrests. But in twenty-first century America, it arrived in a designer suit (however ill-fitting), a private branded plane, and a social media account with millions of followers. It came through legal loopholes identified by cynical attorneys and billionaires’ checkbooks, riding the algorithms of outrage and our insatiable hunger for spectacle. It came packaged as entertainment.

The pattern is depressingly familiar to students of democratic collapse. In Weimar Germany, the Nazi Party never won an outright majority in free elections. Instead, conservative elites believed they could control Hitler, using his popular appeal while restraining his worst impulses. They were wrong.10

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez came to power through democratic elections, then systematically dismantled democratic guardrails by packing courts, attacking the press, and eventually rewriting the constitution.11 In Hungary today, Viktor Orbán maintains the outward appearance of democracy while controlling media, judiciary, and electoral systems so thoroughly that opposition becomes functionally impossible.12

In each case, democracy died not through military coups but through legal mechanisms, not in a single dramatic moment but through the accumulation of seemingly minor changes. The forms of democracy remained—elections still happened, courts still ruled, newspapers still printed—but the substance had been hollowed out, replaced by the raw exercise of power unconstrained by democratic accountability.13

This book isn’t simply about Donald Trump. How could it be? He’s merely the symptom, not the disease. This book examines the ecosystem that built him:

A father who taught him that domination was the only currency worth pursuing.14

A mentor—Roy Cohn—who showed him that shame was for the weak, and that attacking was always better than defending.15

A political party that traded two centuries of principles for four years of raw power.16

A donor class that used him as a wrecking ball to destroy the administrative state that had once kept their avarice in check.17

A media landscape that fatally mistook charisma for character, volume for vision, and ratings for responsibility.18

Trump didn’t hijack the system. Let’s be absolutely clear about this. He revealed it. He pulled back the curtain and showed us what had been growing in the dark for decades.19

Voices from the Brink

Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker who counted ballots in 2020, received death threats so severe she needed police protection. “I’ve seen America at its worst,” she testified to Congress, “but I never thought fellow Americans would threaten to kill me for counting votes.”20

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, required round-the-clock security after recommending COVID-19 precautions based on medical evidence. “They know where my children work and live,” he revealed, describing how former patients he’d treated for years suddenly branded him a “traitor” and “deep state” operative.21

Maria Caffrey, a climate scientist with the National Park Service, watched as her research on sea-level rise was systematically censored. When she refused to remove references to human causes of climate change, she lost her position. “They didn’t disagree with our findings,” she testified to Congress. “They erased them.”22

These voices—the poll worker, the doctor, the scientist—are canaries in our democratic coal mine. When those who count votes, protect public health, and investigate scientific truth become targets rather than public servants, democracy gasps for air.

He was not a mistake or an anomaly. He was the system’s reflection in gold-tinted glass, a product of Citizens United, gerrymandering, and propaganda channels masquerading as news.23 He rose not in defiance of democracy, but through its loopholes and fractures, the very weaknesses the Founders warned us about but that we, in our complacency, allowed to fester.24

And if he takes America down into the darkness of authoritarianism, it will not be an aberration. It will be a completion.

The completion of a Supreme Court reengineered to serve wealth rather than justice.25

The completion of a political party and media ecosystem organized around grievance and resentment instead of ideas and solutions.26

The completion of a public sphere so disillusioned it no longer believes in the possibility of a better future.27

The completion of a government so hollowed out by greed and rendered impotent by gridlock that it can no longer respond to crisis but only exploit it.28

This book is many things: a map of how we got here, a psychological autopsy of a broken man and the broken system that elevated him, a political reckoning long overdue, and most importantly, a warning.

It explains how America reached the brink not just of authoritarianism, but of irrelevance on the world stage. It reveals how one man, driven by ego and emptiness, was handed the nuclear codes by a party too cowardly and too compromised to stop him. And it examines what happens when the most powerful nation on Earth becomes effectively ungoverned when it trades empathy for vengeance, competence for chaos, and reality for ratings.29

We are not guaranteed another free election. The Constitution is not self-executing; it requires people of good faith to defend it.30 We are not promised a second chance at this experiment called democracy.

This is potentially the story of the last president we may ever elect freely. Unless we choose to fight. Unless we recognize that democracy isn’t something we have, it’s something we do, every single day.

The choice, as it has always been in America, is ours.