
On Jan. 22, I was rushed to the hospital in what turned out to be a critical condition with bladder and bowel blockages likely related to the five cancer surgeries I had in December.
On my third week in the hospital, I crashed — unable to breathe, slipping into unconsciousness, I had to be put on a breathing machine. Doctors removed liters of fluid from my lung with a needle between my ribs. I was unconscious for several days. When I finally woke up, I didn’t know what day it was or the year or where I was.
It was terrifying.
Fortunately, I recovered my memory of the present, but everything that happened while I was unconscious is lost in the memory pan of the critically ill. I was lucky to survive with only a few lost days, although I remained on the breathing machine for over a week as they attempted to normalize my blood gases so I wasn’t drowning in carbon dioxide which we normally breathe out with no problems.
While being treated for my cancer-related issues, I contracted the flu or pneumonia in the hospital and nearly died.
A grim metaphor
As a journalist focused predominantly on politics, the coincidence of Donald Trump’s first month in office and the illness that has left me too ill and weak to even tweet to my 160k followers on Twitter/X has left me divorced from the work that has driven my career for decades. My late wife’s best friend posted periodic updates from my Twitter/X account, but I didn’t have the strength to even write my thoughts on the mayhem Trump and Elon Musk, Trump’s unelected, unconfirmed, co-president who has a title he invented for an office that does not exist.
It has been painful to witness the devolution of the country under Trump and the world’s wealthiest man, who in a stunning breach of ethics, has multiple contracts with the U.S. government, yet has been given access to the security of every American’s personal data.
Cancer is an easy metaphor to use. People do it all the time. But the fact is, what we are witnessing is indeed that — a growing cancer of megalomania, power-grabbing and greed. As someone fighting a deadly cancer, the parallels could not be more clear to me: this is a gnawing, dangerous, aggressive cancer that is threatening to take over our body politic and subsume our democracy.
Trump, the bully
Fear is another quotient — the entire Republican party has ceded itself, its integrity and its own power to Trump and Musk. The fear of reprisal is significant. Just last week at a meeting with the nation’s governors, Trump singled out Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills in a heated exchange in which she said she would not be adhering to Trump’s anti-trans executive orders.
Trump threatened both Mills and the state and said she would be out of politics when she said she would fight him in court.
It was a brief yet telling incident intended not just to bully Mills, but also to let other governors know that Trump could inveigh against them as well.
This is how Trump has always operated, both as a businessman and a politician: Trump threatens but never cajoles — no carrot, just stick.
This is where we are now. Two of the world’s biggest bullies taking a literal chainsaw to democracy and the separation of powers, using threats and assaults on what is, in many instances, the work of notable scientists and career intelligence agents and those maintaining the U.S.’s nuclear stockpile.
And there is nothing to stop this Trump-Musk juggernaut.
The entire GOP is in their thrall. How else to explain the tacit approval of the GOP Senate for confirmation of some of the most unqualified and even dangerous nominees for top positions, like Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, or corrupt near-criminal Kash Patel to direct the FBI, an accused rapist and drunk as Defense Director or the world’s leading anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to run the sweeping complexity of Health and Human Services?
How could anyone with a scintilla of integrity or even common sense have voted their approval for these choices?
Where is the opposition?
Watching Musk take questions from the press in the Oval Office should unsettle the hell out of everyone, irrespective of party. Yet just as so many Republicans have fallen in lock-step with the Trump-Musk duopoly, so too have the Democrats — save the occasional outspoken voice like Mills’ — been uniformly and depressingly silent.
Europe has spoken out in opposition to Trump. So too have President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron.
Where is the opposition leadership from the Democrats? Strongly worded tweets are hardly enough. Even our longtime complainants like Bernie Sanders have been muted in response to the harrowing actions of the last month.
Understandably, everyone is shell-shocked, even though Kamala Harris warned everyone throughout the campaign about what Trump would do if elected. Harris also insisted Project 2025 would be Trump’s guide to his presidency and its litmus.
Thus far, Trump has followed that 900+ page treatise crafted by some members of his former administration to the letter. This is the remaking of our entire system of government with a return to 1950s ideology, particularly with regard to women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
Snap out of the torpor
While it may be understandable that Democratic leadership could not imagine that a second Trump presidency could be this terrible or this dangerous, it is. And that demands a vibrant, declarative and most importantly visible Democratic opposition.
The unprecedented actions since Jan. 20 are breathtaking. Just this week, Trump announced he would be selling gold cards for millions to those who want to emigrate here. Meanwhile, those deportations of millions that Trump promised have not materialized. Nor have food prices come down.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer must step into a consistent role as voices of opposition and dissent. They need to present the facts to MAGA Americans still in the honeymoon phase of having voted for Trump while also reminding Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents that they are, as leaders, a united front against the chaos and mayhem being wrought by Trump and Musk.
The cancer is real
Nothing ever prepares you for a cancer diagnosis. It is the most gutting news you will ever receive. On Election Day, democracy received just such a diagnosis and we have learned the details are aggressive and metastatic.
Democratic leadership and Democratic constituencies need to be vocal. Leadership should be holding regular and well-publicized press conferences. There needs to be a plan to recover ground in the 2026 midterms.
Without a vocal counter to Trump-Musk, that cancer will continue to eat away at our entire democracy, sundering the separation of powers and embracing the worst conspiracy theories with the very Constitution at stake.
Cancer replicates deadly cells from within. That is what we are looking at. The question is, are the Democrats strong enough to be the treatment America so desperately needs.