Or: How I Learned to Stop Laughing and See the Abyss

There’s a moment in every con when the mark realizes he’s been had. Mine came late—embarrassingly late. I’d been riding the Trump rollercoaster for years, white-knuckling it through loop-de-loops of outrage and absurdity, telling myself it was all part of some grand American farce. The joke was on the liberals, the establishment, the whole rotten system. Trump was the whoopee cushion at the funeral of American decorum, and I was too busy laughing to notice the corpse was real.

I’ll own it: I fell for it. Not the MAGA hat stuff—I never voted for the guy—but something maybe worse. I fell for the idea that Trump was amusing. That his chaos was a kind of performance art. That beneath the carnival barker shtick was just another corrupt politician, no better or worse than the rest, just louder and more honest about it.

I was wrong.

The scales didn’t fall all at once. They peeled away in layers, like old paint on a toxic building. First came the AI videos mocking Palestinians during what can only be described as a genocide he was actively facilitating. Dark, sure, but Trump had always trafficked in dark humor, right? Then the double-cross: promising to end the siege in exchange for a dual-citizen hostage, the kind of transactional cruelty that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s nasty, but he’s still shaking things up, still saying things others won’t…”

The voice of the con artist’s best friend: the rationalization.

Then Jeffrey Epstein entered the picture—yes, that Epstein. In a private email that surfaced, the late pedophile and professional blackmailer wrote something that stopped me cold: “I have met some very bad people… none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.”

Now, you might ask: why would I take moral guidance from Jeffrey Epstein? Fair question. But here’s the thing about monsters—they recognize their own. When a man who trafficked children for the world’s elite says someone else is worse than anyone he’s ever met, you have to at least consider the possibility that he’s not exaggerating.

That’s when I started going back through the highlight reel, except this time I wasn’t watching for the laugh lines. I was looking at where everything landed. And I had to do something I’d resisted for years: I had to open my heart to darkness. Not the metaphorical darkness of “politics I disagree with,” but the actual thing—the possibility that some people are so profoundly deformed at their core that most of us literally can’t see it. Our imaginations won’t let us. It’s too outside the normal range of human behavior.

The final nail came with Gaza. After brokering what he called a “ceasefire,” Trump executed an about-face so brazen it would have made Machiavelli nauseous. His administration strong-armed the UN Security Council into accepting a plan that essentially outsourced the genocide, giving the Israelis a breather while other nations coordinated with them to finish ethnically cleansing Gaza—or at least demilitarize it, which amounts to the same thing for a people resisting occupation after surviving what may be the holocaust of our time.

That’s when I finally saw him clearly. And I didn’t like what I saw. Not one bit.

I can already hear the chorus: “Really? Now you see it? What about ICE? The racism? The pardons for war criminals? The corruption? The election interference? The degradation of basic decency? The tariffs that destroyed farmers? The cuts to veterans’ benefits, SNAP, Medicare?”

The list is long, and it’s a valid indictment—of Trump, but also of me. Yes, I saw all of that. But not like I do now. Not with the clarity that comes from accepting what I’d been avoiding: that this isn’t just another corrupt politician. This is something else.

I think Trump knows it too. There was a moment recently when he said he doesn’t think he’ll make it to heaven. It was delivered with his usual glibness, but I heard something underneath it—a kind of acknowledgment. The presidency didn’t create his malice; it unleashed it. It gave him the power to reach his full dark potential, potential he’d had all along. The office served as both amplifier and indictment.

Here’s what I’ve learned, late though the lesson comes: Trump’s greatest trick isn’t the lies or the bluster or the norm-breaking. It’s the way he keeps you from believing he’s as bad as he actually is. The sheer scale of it, the constant motion, the circus atmosphere—it’s all camouflage. We keep looking for the punchline because we can’t accept that the joke is on us, and it isn’t funny.

So stop being distracted by the antics. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Stop telling yourself it’s all part of some complex strategy or that he’s “just playing politics.” That’s the con. You’re the mark. Believe he’s a deeply bad person and start seeing his actions in that light. Not because it’s politically convenient, but because it’s true.

The rollercoaster is still running. The question is whether you’re going to keep riding it, or finally get off and look at what it’s built on.

I got off. Late, yes. Too late, probably. But I got off.

The ground is steadier here, if lonelier. And from here, you can see the whole machine for what it is: not a ride at all, but a wreck in slow motion, with Trump’s grinning face painted on the front car as it hurtles toward something none of us should want to see.