So, we have a once and future president who is an adjudicated criminal and sexual predator, was impeached twice during his first term, cannot tell truth from fiction — like many of his followers — and is incapable of governing competently and effectively.

Good job, America!

Apart from the billionaires who really can expect to profit from his tenure, his voters seem to be fantasists who believe he will somehow, magically, bring down the price of eggs and return us to a pre-pandemic world. (The pandemic was, after all, “manufactured,” according to one reader of this paper.)

The brazen murder of the CEO of United Healthcare speaks to the inequalities that fueled Trump’s rise. Unlike Trump’s fantasizing followers, this man apparently understood where his trouble lay and took action. (Although we do not know at this writing the assassin’s name or motive, the public reaction has been as celebratory as it has been horrified, which speaks to the animus felt by many towards our health insurance industry.)

Our country will be manifestly less safe because of Trump, his sycophants, and his billionaire backers. In a country awash in guns, how many more tragedies will it take to convince members of Congress that people need better education, health care, child care, and more restraints on corporations? (It’s hard to live in this society anymore without feeling that you are little more than prey to both legitimate businesses, scammers, and everything in between.) The suggestion that Democrats need to focus more on “success” than “handouts” is no doubt well-taken, but without good health, adequate education, fair wages, and affordable child care and housing, “success” is likely to be elusive.

Democrats have rightly criticized themselves for ignoring the needs of the working class and the jeremiads of, especially, Bernie Sanders, who could have predicted that the gap between rich and poor in this country could only end tragically. When Democrats pushed Sanders aside in 2016, many Sanders voters turned to Trump, exchanging realism for fantasy. The Republicans, in backing Trump and his working class supporters, have cynically used the very inequities they themselves have engendered to entrench their power and ensure that these inequities will be permanent.

Above the door of a natural history museum where I worked in college was the motto: “Truth is always the victor.” Truth indeed has a way of catching up to us, but not always in a nice way. The “manufactured” pandemic had over half a million casualties, more in red states where Trump’s lies about it were believed. The climate change “hoax” continues to disrupt our weather catastrophically. The truth that enormous wealth gaps undermine democracy will not end happily unless those gaps are mitigated.

The other night my husband and I watched a 1956 movie set in 1947, amid the tumultuous end of British rule in India. The villain was a communist (of course) trying to stir up trouble among the Indian populace. “They [the communists] want to create so much chaos,” says the hero, “that then they can just take over.” We looked at one another. No one watching this film in 1956 would have thought that could happen here. Today it very well might, oligarchs like Elon Musk, not communists, slated to become the beneficiaries.

Kathe Geist lives in Charlemont.