The Time Is Now

Abstract

Like many Americans, I greeted Donald Trump’s presidential run announce-ment in 2015 with bemusement. However, my reaction changed quickly. Trump’s candidacy looked and sounded too familiar. Raised in communist Poland, the first post–World War II generation, I was in the cohort that grew up with the wounds of Nazism always vivid in our collective consciousness. The questions of good and evil, and the desire to understand our human capacity for compassion and cruelty, have preoccupied me as long as I can remember. Watching Trump pulverize his stunned opposition on both political sides to the wild enthusiasm of the expanding army of his supporters left little doubt in my mind about the outcome of the election. I imagined that, as it progressed, there would be a chorus of voices warning about the consequences of Trump’s inevitable presidency. Surely Americans understood the dangers in store for them—and if by any chance they did not, then experts in psychology and history would be able to warn them. Naively, I waited to see such warnings in mainstream media, but there were none. At best, we were treated to articles portraying Trump’s apparent narcissism as a personality trait typical for all politicians and not posing a threat to democracy or the world. He would pivot, the conventional wisdom went, and/or surround himself with qualified people. This reasoning, of course, turned out to be profoundly wrong.