Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It’s The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. Subscribe to his Substack.
Summer is drawing to a close.
Here in Chicago, that means the end of block parties, art fairs, and music festivals. Restaurants will begin closing their outdoor patios and putting away the tables and chairs that animated our sidewalks. The parks will become quiet. No more Shakespeare or softball. Lake Michigan will lose its sails and swimmers. The river will flow without its kayakers. Our streets will see less strolling, hear less singing, and experience fewer chance encounters with old friends. Fresh blueberries will become a memory. Our great green canopy turn yellow and orange and start to fall.
We long for it to last just a bit longer. But it never does. To every thing there is a season.
But in America every season is interrupted by the attention-seeking madman in the White House. Even here, amidst all the attractions of summer, his increasingly insane lies were impossible to ignore. He told us we won the war in Iran and promised to bomb Iran into the stone age and to destroy its culture. He proclaimed that we own the Strait of Hormuz and warned that Iran is plans to charge tolls for passage in the Strait. He told us South Korea is bad and North Korea is respectful. He said Lake Ontario has a new name and affordability is a hoax.
That would be bad enough. But he didn’t just interrupt us with his increasingly crazy outbursts; he weighed us down by leading our country into one failure after another. His wars and his tariffs have raised prices for everyone. Young people tell us they cannot pay for housing or afford to start a family. Bond traders are telling us that the nation can’t afford its debt.
Summer was different this year. We choked on wildfire smoke. We set new records for the number of tornadoes. Massive heat domes killed thousands Europe. Collapsing glaciers wiped away whole towns in Tibet. Drought and crop failures were common. Mr. Trump assaulted our common sense by spending billions to pay companies to abandon clean wind-power facilities even as we bore witness the increasingly deadly consequences of man-made climate change.
Summer was further disturbed by the hubris of big tech. Billionaires betting on AI and the support of a president they could bribe, tried to brush us aside like ants at a picnic. If there are benefits to AI, they didn’t tell us. Instead, they bought millions of acres, often using shell companies to hide their intent, and are investing vast fortunes to build data centers that raise our energy prices, pollute our water, and thrum noisily at all hours. They thought, as the President does, that our future is theirs to decide.
This summer we lost our friends. Donald Trump declared economic war on our closest ally, Canada. The U.S. Department of the Interior posted a menacing image — a doctored photo of riparian scene with a timber wolf eating a Canada Goose under a banner that read Lake America. The rest of the free world stands with Canada just as they stand with Ukraine. We are left standing alone.
This summer we lost our soul. Donald Trump kicked his ethnic cleansing project into high gear. hunting, capturing, and detaining more than 2000 people every day. His Department of Homeland Security posted a video showing shackled Haitians boarding a deportation flight. Our tax dollars now purchase electric shock gloves because the cruelty of shackling people who broke no law is not sufficient.
This summer was interrupted by anguish for the men and women aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. At sea for months, without adequate resupply because nearby naval bases were destroyed by Iranian missiles we were told did not exist, the hardships these sailors endured broke our hearts. Failed leadership, lies, poor decisions, and hubris caused their misery, just as they have caused ours.
And so, this summer we set aside our play and organized and voted. In record numbers we turned out for hard fought primaries. And in a break from the past, the moment those primaries ended we came together united and determined to take back our country.
It is as if our whole nation is aboard the Abraham Lincoln. We have suffered hardship because our corrupt, incompetent and puffed-up leadership confuses doctored photos with actual accomplishment.
How fitting that a ship named for a real great president has endured a terrible ordeal and is coming home. Abraham Lincoln is coming home. And so are we.
Chicagoans pay for summer in the icy slush of February. Trump will pay in November. A new Congress will be sworn in the following January. You know what?
I’m looking forward to winter.
Trump and El Niño
Our world is about to get weird, and nobody is ready. Not politicians. Not a hungry, thirsty third world. Certainly not the American political system. The coming 18 months will be a stress test for civilization as we know it.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and insightful article! It fills me with sadness to consider what is occurring, but it also fills me with resolve. I’m hoping millions of others will stay the course and not give up!
So much seems to be riding on our expectations for the midterms that it can be easy to ignore the extraordinary width and depth of the damage and the contradictory forces Trump and his myrmidons have managed to inflect and to amplify on our nation and on the world.
Just one example: ponder for a moment the extraordinary irony of Trump’s war on a theocracy very much like the one he, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, and others would like to install right here in the US.
Even if the Democrats win control of the House and/or the Senate in November, the ‘great task before us’ to try to return us to some semblance of the nation we were intended to be is herculean. And the Democratic Party has shown a remarkable tendency to shoot itself in the foot every change it gets.
Just for starters, internationally, no other nation can now ignore the possibility that another Trump may only be one election away. For even if the Democrats take back our national legislature, the forces that empowered Trump and which have always lurked within us will only go underground, to seek and to await their next ‘champion’.
Trump was no flash in the pan. I’m just over 81, and so my life has almost exactly spanned the period of our history from being the Arsenal of Democracy which, together with our allies, defeated (but unfortunately did not destroy) the greatest evil in human history to the present moral, social, political, religious, and financial morass in which we now find ourselves - in which a man who would not at all have been at all out of place in either the Nazi hierarchy or our own pre-Civil War slavocracy. That didn’t happen overnight in 2016.
In 1838, a rangy young politician stood before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois and warned us that, “As a nation of free men, we must live through all time,or die by suicide.” He knew whereof he spoke, and he would later give his life and perhaps almost his sanity to preserve, protect, and defend that nation. In doing so, he did indeed leave us with that great task, one which is somewhat different but no less daunting today than it was between the two Aprils of 1861 and 1865.
We would do well to remember that.