OPINION: America’s great, deliberate mistake

America has made a great mistake.

One Trump presidency was an historic aberration, an absurdist romp with a con man TV huckster that was the result of half the country hating Hillary Clinton.

But a second Trump presidency is something else — a great mistake. The millions who voted to return this tragically narcissistic, hopelessly ignorant and blatantly corrupt man to control of the nuclear codes don’t know it yet — and many will never figure it out — but they have imperiled the future of their country and the world.

The same kind of thinking — magical thinking — that treats Donald Trump like some kind of normal political personality is ignoring the enormous consequences of Nov. 5. Logic attempts to explain his election logically. There is no logic.

The election was about the price of bacon, some will say. Or President Joe Biden’s obvious need to earlier disavow a second term. Social media elected Trump. Or the Mexican border did. The traditional media blew it. Democrats lost the plot with white, working-class voters. That explains it.

But all these “explanations” avoid the reality of Trump and Trumpism. We made this decision with eyes wide open. We didn’t elect an adjudicated rapist because Safeway’s bacon is overpriced. We didn’t elect a man who sent a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and hoped to hang his own vice president because desperate migrants still see our America as the last best hope on Earth.

Nope, we wanted more of the distracting, nonstop Trump reality show with its Hannibal Lecter rants and shark stories. We chose to believe his lies. Blame the Democrats, blame the press, blame social media, blame the elites, but in the end none of it matters. We chose a leader of vile temperament and odious corruption. We chose our American fascist.

“Elites” didn’t make us want more of the vulgar rhetoric and the obvious lies. Many of us enjoy how he summons up hatred with the absurd claim that the gender of school children is being changed during homeroom. We found comfort in the put-downs of an accomplished Black woman, and we laughed along when he joked about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband being nearly killed by a hammer-wielding nutjob. We chanted “lock them up” because it felt good to hate and demean and threaten. We saw it and we accepted it.

We embraced — for the second time — what journalist Susan Glasser has correctly termed “the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism and xenophobia ever waged.”

We liked the promises of revenge and retribution. It feels good, after all, to go after “those” people, because our side is right, and what harm could a little revenge do?

When the deportation roundups begin, how will we feel about the “illegal” people who roof the houses, milk the cows, landscape the lawns, work in our restaurants and pay their taxes? Will we notice when families are separated and children are discarded as collateral damage? Will we laugh at the concentration camps?

One Trump term was an aberration. This Trump term was a choice.

In authoritarian and fascist systems, there is a daily need to justify the unjustifiable. They must make the absurd and dangerous normal, so we blame it on the price of bacon or Biden. We console ourselves that it is just vile talk. It can’t possibly hurt me. My side won. The “other” has it coming.

From the beginning, there has been one great failure regarding Trump. We have lacked from his first day the imagination to see where his villainy has taken us and will now take us even farther. Or perhaps we really do see and elect not to care. What’s worse?

Before Jan. 6, 2021, the vast majority of Americans could not have believed the seat of American government might be attacked by a violent mob willing to harm and kill police officers in order to halt the peaceful transfer of power. We couldn’t image it, so now many rationalize it and all the lies he’s told about it.

It wasn’t that bad. Trump really didn’t incite the riot. Maybe you believe that.

But it was bad, and he did incite a riot. And now he will pardon those who committed those outrages. He told us repeatedly that he would do so, and he will. And we elected him again.

He promised to fire thousands of career federal employees who are not “loyal” to him, an unprecedented break with American history, and he will do it.

He will threaten Ukraine just as he did before. He will weaken, if not destroy, NATO just as he did before. He will politicize the American military just as he tried before.

Few presidential candidates have been so explicit about their aims. We heard it. We saw it. We embraced it, and not because bacon costs too much.

As the historian Timothy Snyder writes: “It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of Jan. 6. It is predictable that he will cooperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.”

We knew all this. Many warned us, especially people — many now in danger — who worked with him at close range. They aren’t traitors or partisans, but military leaders and elected officials and Americans. And yet we chose to ignore and embrace all this.

The ultimate collapse attendant to our enormous mistake will appear to come slowly, but then it will immediately be all around us. It is as predictable as his corruption and his revenge and his hate. And we did it to ourselves.

Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.