Hitting the ‘Hope Pipe’ Is a Dangerous Gamble In The Trump Era
Genuine Hope will derive from doing what’s hard when it matters most, not walling off in a fantasy world of naïveté
When Trump and his slavish apparatchiks try to redefine America in their toxic, intolerant image, it is our duty to remind them of a Harvey Milk quote: “All men are created equal. No matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.”
Slain San Francisco Supervisor and gay rights icon Harvey Milk once said, “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you gotta give em’ hope.”
Finding slivers of hope in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s devastating reelection is essential for mental health and survival. However, a hit from the seductive “hope pipe” can increase what I call “hopeamine”, a self-induced euphoric state that dulls the senses at a time when a person should be on alert for danger.
In response to one of my columns, a person wrote a letter to the editor to Out South Florida:
What we are about to see in Trump and in his cabinet are a bunch of unnatural disasters waiting to happen! Nevertheless, even in this setting I firmly believe without a millisecond of hesitation whatsoever: God’s got this, the LGBTQ community has this, and together we’ll make it fabulous!
I wish I could share such an optimistic view. When the Holocaust ended in 1945, the world’s refrain was “Never Again.” Not only has war, torture and genocide happened again, these grisly events are as predictable as death and taxes.
Since 1945 we have witnessed: Stalin’s atrocities, Pol Pot, North Korea, Franco, Tito, Papa and Baby Doc, Putin’s reign, genocide in Bosnia, Syria, Sudan and Rwanda, military dictatorship in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, Iran and Afghanistan’s religious oppression, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Muhammad, The Troubles in Ireland, China’s Uyghur camps, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, ISIS and Al Qaeda’s 9-11 attack.
The list of tyrants and unthinkable atrocities could go on and on. Given our modern history, unbridled hope minus evidence is a childish coping mechanism. The harsh truth is that sometimes threats dissipate, and other times evil triumphs.
If you want to understand the danger of a naïve version of hope subsuming reality, read a gripping New York Times story about Jaime Cachua. He is a law-abiding undocumented resident of Rome, Georgia who has spent more than three decades in America.
Sky, Jamie’s father-in-law, who claims to love him like a son, pulled the lever for Trump, potentially wrecking his own family. The level of denial and false hope runs deep:
“We have to prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Jaime told him. “There’s a chance we could lose everything.”
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Sky asked. “How? Help me understand.”
“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.
“I’ve never felt like a foreigner until now,” he told Sky.
“I’m not going to let anything happen that puts your family at risk,” Sky said.
“It already did,” Jaime said.
“All those criminals that Trump’s been talking about — the rapists, the gang members — that’s not you,” Sky said. “You deserve to be here. To me, you’re basically American.”
“But I’m not,” Jaime said.
“I know it might not always seem like it, but I’ve got your back,” Sky said. “I like Trump, but he’s a blowhard. He’s a salesman. He’ll toughen things up on the border, but he’s not actually coming after people like you. Nobody’s putting you on a bus unless they get by me.”
Perhaps Sky hasn’t noticed, but Trump picked anti-immigration stalwarts Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to sweep immigrants out of America. There is a significant chance that Homeland Security will go by, over, around or through Sky to deport Jaime. If he’s lucky the deportation will be quick. If Jamie is unfortunate, he will stagnate in a miserable camp for months, or even years, before he is unceremoniously booted from America and forced into a new country he doesn’t know.
Similarly, what does the LGBTQ community have to be inherently optimistic about? The Trump administration is busy hiring staff from Project 2025, despite frantically distancing himself from the totalitarian scheme prior to the election. Women should be equally alarmed, with Texas exploiting Trump’s victory as an opportunity to sue a New York physician who prescribed abortion pills for a Dallas woman.
Should we have hope for the future of healthcare? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been tapped to run Health and Human Services despite his opposition to vaccines. RFK Jr. is running around Capitol Hill with a crackpot lawyer who petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
Who is in favor of POLIO!!!???
Can we hope for a more civilized, united country that eschews political violence? It’s highly unlikely, with President-Elect Trump poised to release the unpatriotic thugs who ransacked our nation’s capitol building on January 6.
Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, tapped for Defense Secretary, is credibly alleged to be a sexually abusive drunkard who is more interested in purging the Pentagon of “woke” soldiers than defeating foreign foes. Hegseth is traversing the halls of Congress this week, protected by an explosively violent security guard:
The guard, a former Army Special Forces sergeant major named John Jacob Hasenbein, left the military after a 2019 training session in which witnesses said he beat a civilian role-playing in the exercise, kicking, punching and leaving him tied up in a pool of his own blood.
Meanwhile, Kash Patel is Trump’s pick to run the FBI. This sycophantic “yes man” is beyond eager to persecute and prosecute Trump’s political opponents, including the press.
Make no mistake, the media is already under siege. ABC News capitulated to Trump, paying a $15 million settlement for a weak defamation case the network was likely to win. Next, Trump sued The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer over a poll released just prior to Election Day showing Kamla Harris with a significant lead in Iowa.
Will it soon be prohibitively expensive to produce polling that isn’t favorable to Trump? How would this affect our democracy and future elections?
If this weren’t disturbing enough, tech executives are scurrying to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a $1 million dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration.
A subservient Zuckerberg was joined by Open AI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Big Tech was once high-minded. In Trump’s imposing shadow, however, Big Tech is rapidly degenerating into a Big Wreck. It is run by a hoard of small-minded egotists, greedily protecting their mammoth fortunes by paving the way for America’s authoritarian future. Let’s recall that Google’s original catchphrase was, “Don’t be evil.” The looming Trump regime seems poised to put this rusty motto to the test.
My goal isn’t to depress you, but to offer a heavy dose of reality in preparation for the onslaught to come. If we don’t prevail, we may be entering a Hobbesian world where life is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
A wise college professor of mine once declared that there is no such thing as luck. He defined perceived “luck” as, “the critical, life-changing moment that opportunity meets preparation.”
This is the resilient, disciplined, unbreakable mindset we must conjure to meet this political moment. We must diligently defend Enlightenment values, lest we retreat into an Age of Darkness. Each one of us has an awesome responsibility to do our part to uphold civilization, even as serpents like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy roll out their barbarism in shiny, glittering, sophisticated high-tech packages.
I just finished reading “The Money Kings” by Daniel Schulman. The book traced the lives of prominent Jewish bankers who helped build America and Europe’s financial industries in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I was struck by how hopeful some of the wealthy and powerful bankers were as Adolph Hitler rose to power. They thought their money and station would insulate them from the worst:
[Financier] Max Warburg had been slow to recognize the threat Adolph Hitler posed, and slower still to realize his family, whose roots in Germany stretched back to the sixteenth century, would no longer have a place in their homeland. In 1929, after hearing Hitler address a rapt crowd during a visit to Germany, Jimmy [Warburg] picked up a copy of Mein Kampf and read it with growing alarm, warning his uncles that the demagogue they wrote off as an “idiot” was a real danger. But Max and Fritz shrugged off Jimmy’s entreaties to read Hitler’s book and see for themselves.
For all his efforts to aid emigration from Germany, Max privately argued that Jews should remain in their homeland, holding fast to the misbegotten belief that German Jewry would outlast the Nazi takeover.
What was Max’s fate?
Starting in 1933, Max and his partners were systematically removed from the numerous corporate and cultural boards on which they served. Max was bounced from the Reichsbank’s advisory council and ousted from the boards of the Hamburg-America line and the German Atlantic Telegraph Company. He was no longer welcomed by the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, the Philharmonic Society, or the Board of Higher Education.
Similarly, Trump is also a raging buffoon who is too easily written off as an “idiot” by wide-eyed optimists high on their endless supply of hope. I’m not saying that Trump is the next Hitler, but The Fuhrer was once a silly little felon with a funny mustache prone to temper tantrums. He was underestimated by too many people and before they knew it, it was too late. They were trapped as darkness descended over civilization.
One month from today, Trump will bound onto a multi-million-dollar stage, financed by obedient tech giants, who once openly opposed him. Don’t fall into the ruinous trap of thinking that everything will turn out alright. A mountain of corpses, rivers of tears and an endless sea of pain from the past and current century proves otherwise.
All of us are now in the shoes of the Warburg family, desperately trying to read the tea leaves in our rapidly deteriorating world. They had hoped that Germany’s better angels would emerge, but in hindsight we know what happened. Correspondingly, we are grasping for straws in the dark and don’t really know where our own nihilistic experiment to remake America will end.
At this critical hinge of American history, all we can do is be brave and beat back the rising tide of tyranny. Only through hard work will we finally derive genuine, meaningful hope, rather than optimistic, illusory sugar highs.
When Trump and his slavish apparatchiks try to redefine America in their toxic, intolerant image, it is our duty to remind them of another Harvey Milk quote: “All men are created equal. No matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.”