Hot Type: A Return to the Dark Ages

In the wake of Donald Trump's election, Heidi Siegmund Cuda writes an elegy for her country

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance, Wednesday 6 November 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press/Alamy

“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1943

I have spent the last eight years investigating the Trumpocene and Russian information warfare, and the last six months, deeply immersed in research on Weimar Germany.

The gravediggers didn’t have to triumph. In 1932, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party was fracturing, haemorrhaging members, and many in his orbit were showing him only a “performance of solidarity, imposed devotion”, according to the authors of The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic.

But revenge-seeking men with a lust of power and greed saw in Hitler a tool to obtain both.

Despite knowing that it can happen ‘here’, in the last 72 hours, I allowed a flicker of hope into my heart. I allowed myself to believe that America was going to get it right this time, and we would celebrate our first woman president. We had already fired Donald Trump once, and his final campaign message to America was denying he was a Nazi and that he simulated a blow job.

As of this writing, Donald Trump is on television, declaring victory, and I can’t go through that again. 

So now, I am a woman without a country writing an elegy for the once admired United States of America.

We just handed over our country to Vladimir Putin and US oligarchs, because not enough people could bring themselves to vote for a black woman.

As Nikita Khrushchev said in 1956: “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within”.

There were 50 bomb threats to polling locations in five swing states — with 32 in Georgia — according to the FBI, which stated that threats to four of the states came from Russia.

When Kamala Harris ran for President in 2020, I lined up behind her. When it became clear she was not getting enough traction and dropped out, I lined up behind Joe Biden.

After his poor debate showing in June, I was not among the people demanding he step aside. I thought it was the wrong move. I was aware that incumbents overseeing a strong economy are always re-elected, and he already beat Trump once. 

But when he chose to step aside, after being pressured to do so, I lined up behind our party’s candidate, Vice President Harris. And the transition was seamless. Democrats came together and worked hard to get their ticket of Harris and Gov. Tim Walz into the White House. It was a powerful thing to witness — with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama returning to the stage with brilliant, inspirational speeches. 

In contrast, Trump was telling dick jokes to thinning crowds. 

So I allowed myself to believe that the woman would prevail, because women bleeding out in parking lots would enrage enough people that enough millions would prevent the unthinkable from occurring.

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

The unthinkable has arrived.

Both predictable and shocking. For the past decade, Americans have been blanketed with digital poison served directly into the minds of our citizens by hostile foreign powers. It works particularly well on those who are already racist and misogynistic to begin with. And for the past five decades, the religious right in America has demonized Democrats.

But really, how we got here was one lie at a time. One amoral NBC producer at a time, producers who knew Trump was a bankrupt fraud but pretended he was an ubermensch for ratings. We got here one author at a time, willing to create a mythological ‘Art of the Deal’ character or authors who withhold important national security information to sell books. 

In 2016, the New York mediasphere had a duty to warn us about their homegrown confidence man but instead, they burned the witch: screaming ‘Benghazi’ and ‘But Her Emails’ until the fake rich guy who laundered money for the Russian mob looked like a sensible choice. 

We got here one access journalist at a time, one normalizing puffpiece at a time, one Vichy headline at a time, and one propagandist on nightly news shows at a time.

Lie after lie compounding to a complete annihilation of reality, aiming to encourage people to overthrow their own governments, to become foot soldiers for fascism under the guise of patriotism. 

We got here because Ford pardoned Nixon. We got here because people don’t read history books anymore.

We got here because those history books they don’t read would have told them that Trump and his VP JD Vance were using a cruel and effective playbook, where people are ‘othered’ and called ‘vermin’ and dehumanized until those listening to the ravings of these mad men were out for blood.

We got here because America has collective amnesia. We forgot that Trump has a sentencing date coming up in three weeks, and that he led an insurrection.

Trump, who sells gold shoes, cheap watches, and bibles made in China, to foot soldiers of fascism, who think they’re patriots.

We got here because the churchy wanted to conquer mountains, and they chose an amoral man. 

We got here because we didn’t listen to the smart woman who warned us in 2011 that Russia’s election was fraudulent, and that democracy was receding in Europe and the former Soviet Union. 

In 2013, that smart woman, Hillary Clinton, was the most popular politician in America. In 2016, after Putin ran his full-court ops, millions decided they didn’t like the smart woman, they didn’t like her voice, something about her emails. They’d been Benghazi’d by Fox. 

But the Orange Man who grabbed pussies and didn’t pay his contractors, the one with the six bankruptcies, who ran a Russian dorm he called a Tower, he was just right. Smh. The smart woman still won the popular vote, but the Orange Man who grabbed pussies had Cambridge Analytica, and Jill Stein who sat with Putin, and Facebook, which scraped our data for Cambridge Analytica. And Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s funder, who was credited for the tech ground game.

Now, he has Elon Musk in a Mein Kampf-lettered MAGA hat, who brings all the trolls to the yard, boosting Russian-paid ops for Trump.

So, here we are — the death of a flawed but beautiful country, a country so divided from reality, we didn’t even know that President Joe Biden was doing a great job, quietly doing the labor of democracy, returning our economy to the top of the world. 

We didn’t know because Russia and US oligarchs were targeting us on social media to deny us that reality. He was blamed for being one in a long history of presidents unable to affect peace in the Middle East.

And the Russians knew about his success as a President. But they didn’t want us to know.

In the 277-page Doppelganger affidavit, detailing the seizure of web domains run by the Russians to mimic Western news outlets, a translated dossier by the Russians revealed they knew Biden had saved the economy, and in their words “fed the rednecks.”

So the Russians looked for proxy wars they could start, kicking around a few ideas. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.

I spent election night with friends — one from Hungary, who told stories of door knocks, family businesses being seized, Russians raping ancestors — and another friend, a longtime activist who grew up with blacklisted families. We all understand reality. We know there is no announcement in advance when a country has had its last free election.

We all have our passports in order.

I am haunted by the words of Bertolt Brecht, a poet and playwright from Weimar Germany, who fled to Scandinavia when the Nazis came to power and later moved to Southern California. 

In his poem ‘To Posterity’, he wrote:

Indeed I live in the dark ages…

Ah, what an age it is…

When to speak of trees is almost a crime

For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

I don’t know how to be silent about injustice. I do not know how to obey in advance.

I don’t want to think about the unthinkable, but I am forced to, in interviews by people who are watching America at this time, worried for Ukraine, worried for Europe.

For months, I have been asked about what it would mean if Trump gets back into power.

And for months I have answered: 

“It means a thousand years of darkness.”

We can hope for a deus ex machina — a magical resolution to a seemingly unsolvable problem, like Trump being thrown in jail where he belongs — but hope is the thing with feathers.

RIP America. You had a good run.