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

It's fascinating, in a "watch the train go off the rails" kind of way...

Everyone knows we're speeding toward disaster, but no one knows how to stop.

Trump's people are reduced to hoping that China will bail them out. Yeah, right....

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Woman holds an upside down US flag to protest against President Donald Trump
outside the US Capitol ahead of his joint address to Congress in Washington, DC, on March 4, 2025.
(ALLISON ROBBERT/AFP via Getty Images)

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.

Patients end up in the ER because they were in a car accident, had a heart attack or stroke, suffered from some pathogen that hit them out of nowhere or had been lurking in their systems unnoticed and undiagnosed until they spiked a fever or passed out or started coughing up blood and couldn't stop, or somebody shot them or they shot themselves.

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.

New infections are threatening our intelligence agencies like the NSA and the CIA. They turned out the lights in the room where cyberattacks used to be watched out for. Over at the Pentagon, they're converting executive offices on the E-Ring into Mar-a-Lago bathrooms where anybody can walk in and rummage through stuff that used to be Top Secret. They're talking to each other on cell phones as secure as those at strip mall Verizon stores. Over at the CDC, they've decided it's no longer necessary to protect ourselves from diseases like AIDS and measles or even tuberculosis by helping foreign nations with their outbreaks because…uh… none of their citizens travel to the U.S. on airplanes, and nobody sneezes on each other anymore…or the oceans protect us from all that foreign stuff…or something anyway.

And just in case you do get run over or start bleeding and are taken by ambulance to an actual emergency room, forget about all the OR gowns and light blue scrubs and latex gloves and face masks and eye shields and the rest of the stuff everybody puts on every time they walk into an operating room. It was reported over the weekend that there won't be any container ships arriving at U.S. ports by the end of next month because China isn't going to load them up at their ports and put them to sea, so we'll just have to put all that OR stuff in the laundry and reuse it. Oh, I'm sorry. Most of it is made from paper and disposable plastic and biodegradable this and that, so we'll just start using paper towels and tissue paper and spray everything down with Clorox. Don't worry. We'll make do.

There was some good news over the weekend. Inflation hasn't begun to spike and there aren't yet any empty shelves at Walmart and Home Depot and Target, and nobody has had their Social Security numbers sold to crypto kings operating out of Pacific islands nobody has ever heard of. Still, people are starting to notice that something is… off . Polls have Trump's numbers down 10 percent from where they were on Inauguration Day, with the president's approval ratings in two polls at 39 percent and in the low 40s on most other issues, with his disapproval in the mid-50s to even higher. Polls aren't an election, but as Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo said, "Politics doesn't stop just because the President says it does or even when he's in the midst of an attempted authoritarian takeover. Politics continues. Public opinion, if anything, becomes even more important."

To put it another way, public support matters more, not less, when you're trying to do big things like upset the constitutional order and cancel stuff like due process under law and deport people who have rights that you might not like but are guaranteed by - get this - their physical presence within our borders. People notice when economic apple carts start to turn over, and they even notice when you start losing in every courtroom your new staff of genius DOJ lawyers has been forced to walk into to face lawsuits that mounted slowly at first but are now reaching a kind of national crest.

So, how are we doing under the big round lights laid out there on the table in the OR with our torso sliced open and guts glistening, held together with forceps and clamps and surgeons' thumbs and forefingers and the floor slick with blood? Is the patient half alive, or half dead?

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.

He'll be the President of the Red States of America, meaning as a country, we'll be half alive and half dead.