An American emergency: Is the patient half alive or half dead?

An American emergency: Is the patient half alive or half dead?
At the 100-day mark, Trump’s America lies wounded with no hope for help

By Lucian K. Truscott IV
Columnist
Published April 29, 2025 9:17AM (EDT)


(Salon) You’re not alone if you feel like the last 100 days have been one very long episode of “The Pitt,” HBOMax’s new hit medical drama about an emergency room in a hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, starring Noah Wyle, the actor who starred in “ER.” We’re the patient in this drama — the U.S.A., the oldest continuous democracy in the history of the world — and it feels like we’ve been on the table in the OR since the credits rolled back in January, with one bleeder after another squirting blood all over the surgeons, the nurses, the operating instrument tray and everyone’s bootie-clad feet slipping on a floor slick with blood.

....(snip)....

This patient – you and me and our neighbors and people we don’t even know half way across the country riding tractors or flipping burgers or tapping at keyboards in offices or changing the diaper of their newborn baby or studying biology and calculus and psychology in college or learning to read and write in an elementary school at the edge of a small town with a flag waving atop a pole at the apex of the driveway where the school busses drop kids off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon – we ended up in the ER with an ailment we had suffered before and thought we had been cured of. But the medicine didn’t take, or it was the wrong diagnosis, or we didn’t take care of ourselves and were reinfected. It happens. Getting sick is a fact of life.

Ending up in the ER, however, isn’t.

How the hell did we get here? Sure, there was an election, but we’ve had elections before that didn’t put us into surgery with our abdomen open with several failing organs and forceps pinching a half-dozen veins that threaten to bleed us out. Some of the tissue that has held us together and kept us alive is already necrotic. The Department of Education and the EPA are turning black around the edges, as is the Department of the Interior, which just announced that they’re going to reopen drilling at Bears Ears and other national monuments.

....(snip)....

They’re going to destroy the economy and put us in a recession before Trump declares that he has made a “deal” and “won” the “trade war” and tries to dig us out of the hole he’s got us into. They’re going to lose in lower courts until they get a few cases before the Supreme Court, which is going to rule against him on birthright citizenship but give him just enough of a “win” on one of the immigration cases that he can declare “victory” and avoid disobeying a court order. He’s going to get some kind of “deal” on Ukraine with a side-promise from Putin not to take any more territory until 2028, which will quiet down the Europeans and give him a chance to defenestrate NATO, which is what Putin has wanted from the beginning and what they started talking about as far back as Helsinki. He’ll fatten his bottom line with crypto and pay-to-play trade deals with foreign countries, and he’ll play plenty of golf. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/29/an-american-emergency-is-the-patient-half-alive-or-half-dead/