It’s been a week…or was it a year? Maybe a decade? Yes. It was all three. On Tuesday many Americans went to bed relieved to discover that the buttons on the nuclear bomb weren’t going to be pushed and an entire civilization wiped out on our behalf. My central nervous system is still rebooting. When I read his vitriolic post I felt the deepest sense of shame I have ever felt being an American. The fear was even worse. It was raw and real. As plenty of MAGA faithful lined up to justify his vile rhetoric with rote precision (including a hometown politician in Nebraska), saying things about his style and the good things he has done. As I listened to them make his actions make sense, it occurred to me that Trump is so valuable to them because he gives them permission to be self centered, ego centrists in their own spheres of influence. While his outlandish and unspeakable vile keeps grabbing the headlines, there is an army of those across this country tearing it up from the inside out.

The strict fiscal conservatives in The Heritage Foundation are literally gutting every federal agency and when they finish there will be almost no infrastructure to support our government. Closing Departments they are unauthorized to close while starving those like the IRS, Social Security and Medicare, these people are destroying our country right in front of our eyes. They need a malignant narcissist psychopath in the White House starting wars and saying vile things online to keep you and me focused away from the reality that in the name of Jesus they are stealing our future.

This week the federal government announced that they are closing the National Forestry Service. Almost no average person has a clue. The goal of the Trump family is complete deregulation and sale of public lands for lumber and oil production. National Parks are on the chopping block, Y’all, and nary a headline anywhere about these sacred places appears being taken from us.

There are dozens of examples everywhere, everyday of this ongoing destruction. Much of what is being done though illegal and being contested in courts, is destroying our infrastructure in ways that it will not recover from. It is why the most Conservative antigovernment representatives in our current Congress will continue to stand by Trump. At this point each Representative’s own ego is so invested in a the Freedom Caucus’s near zero taxed America and its becoming an outwardly demonstrable Conservative Christian America, that they value nothing else and Trump can do what ever he likes. The reality is that Trump being psychologically unwell gives them an open road to steal, kill and destroy any other vision of American life but their own. They do not take him seriously because to do so would interrupt their own agenda. Nebraska Congressman Mike Flood and others know that when he goes, so does their craved for golden hour. They are now loyal beyond what even they can comprehend.

Having been given this kind of power, the kind that empowers the belief in your own superior way of seeing the world, is not a power one lets go of easily. This is the reality that makes the interpret a threat to annihilate another civilization by the president as an unsettling one, just a stylistic difference. When it obvious to outsiders that this kind of rhetoric and behavior is dangerous they simply do not believe it. Believing it to be dangerous would require personal change, humility and a surrender of one’s personal agenda. A very high cost for one who has lost sight of anything but themselves and their unique specialness.

We are going to be challenged like never before in the weeks, months and years ahead. No election has ever been more important than this one. Average Republicans, Evangelical and other Conservative Christians are going to have to grasp how selfish pride, entitlement greed and pure moral decay has taken over their party. Worrying about trans athletes when those in your own party attend a Conservative conference and the Grindr server in the area crashes, and coke dealers are kept busy with increased sales, clearly…you are no longer in the party of Reagan.

I hate it that we are here. It’s such a horrible place to be. Seriously, who in their right mind wants to kill anyone, let alone an entire civilization? No one.

I’m holding on to the experience of the Artemis flight as a reminder of our best self. The people who gave us the reality of that experience this week embodied real spirit of America. A beautifully executed and inspiring mission. Let’s endeavor to become more be like them.