by Timothy McQuiston, Vermont Business Magazine
People can believe anything, of course. Some people may believe the moon is made of cheese. Most days it’s a classic Vermont cheddar. Sometimes when it’s full and high it’s more of a crumbly white Wensleydale, tart on the tongue. Other times on a sultry summer evening it might rise like a tasty smoked Gouda.
In the same vein, some people believe the 2020 presidential election was stollen.
We can’t fully explain why people believe in these things, but in the case of the presidential election we can explain why other people would want them to.
The current and former president perhaps also believes the election was stollen. Whether he does or does not really doesn’t matter.
What matters is that he set a mob on the Capitol to overthrow Congress and democracy. Who knows what they would have done if they had cornered Speaker Pelosi or Vice President Pence?
What we can assume with confidence is that for the president and like-minded people there is no sense of right and wrong or truth or lies. For such people these notions are all tools in the same toolbox, just as sometimes you need a socket wrench and sometimes you need a pair of pliers. You use whatever tool you need.
Another piece of the president’s political genius is the employment of chaos. Chaos is not a tool, it’s part of the end product, like the engine in an automobile. Chaos is vital and necessary. Chaos is the permanent revolution. Chaos, for lack of a better word, is good. Chaos works.
Your foes, and friends, are kept off balance and constantly running around with their heads cut off. It is a proven and effective way to accumulate and retain power. This is nothing new, as is retribution.
Retribution works especially well in turning foes into friends and making cowards out of others. A good example of the former is the current vice president, who once likened his boss to Hitler.
The fear of retribution makes people do things they abhor. Just take a look at Apple CEO Tim Cook’s face during the inauguration ceremony. A more miserable man there never was, but he was still there, presumably to protect his company and maybe, just maybe, obviate the massive tax, and ultimate retribution, on Chinese supplies called a tariff.
Another example is talk-show host Bill Maher, who ostensibly is a longstanding critic of the president’s. He recently enjoyed a meal with the president. He spoke kindly of the president and related stories that made him seem more human.
Do not make anything of this. He’s since lambasted the president. For celebrities and politicians, there is almost no such thing as bad publicity. And at the end of the day it was all “mutually assured attention.”
A good example of getting friends to bend their knee no matter what was during a speech given by Iowa Republican US Representative Ashley Hinson during a Town Hall in April.
Hinson enunciated the usual apologetics of the political moment: That Democrats were to blame for not passing a law that, among other things, would have created a special category of crime if an undocumented immigrant assaulted a police officer; Hinson also said she “truly believed” that God saved the president’s life during an assassination attempt last July in Pennsylvania; she also said the president was “protecting women and girls.”
The police comment led to some “January 6” catcalls, when US citizens (the mob) assaulted police officers in what the president later called “a day of love.”
As for the assassination attempt, we will not presume the mind of God, which would be blasphemy, but a follow up question to Hinson might have been, “Why would God not see fit to also save President Lincoln or President Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr or prevent any heinous crime perpetrated by one person on another?”
But it was when she mentioned the part about “protecting women and girls” that the polite Iowans became vocal.
We believe that this is one of the worst times in American history. Others will scoff at the notion and deride the hyperbole. Just in one lifetime we’ve gone through the assassinations of the ‘60s, Vietnam, Watergate, recessions great and small, 9/11, COVID-19, and survived, even if badly scarred.
Others have said we have gone through worse times in our history and have made it through. How much worse could this be? We don’t know because it’s far from over.
The hopeful ones still acknowledge that this is a terrible time. Certainly it will not affect just Americans. And there will be effects beyond what we can now anticipate.
In an answer to a question about when Congress is going to fix Congress, Hinson said, “When I look at what Congress is doing, we are working on executing exactly what we campaigned on doing and what the president campaigned on doing.”
On that point we would agree. We should take the president at his word, including the preposterous, like annexing Canada. It’s all part of the reality of chaos.
It’s not just Hinson’s fault she got elected. It’s not just the president’s fault he got elected. It’s not just the mob’s fault, or the MAGAs’ fault, or the oligarchs’ fault. There’s not a single person of voting age who isn’t to blame, including us and everyone who then and now opposed the current slate of elected officials.
While the president’s popularity has shrunk, we ask ourselves, why isn’t it zero? It shouldn’t be this easy to undo democracy, the Supreme Court, the Constitution, right?
We are all responsible for the chaos and whatever comes with it.
And just to be clear, the moon is not made of cheese.
A version of this piece first appeared in the May 2025 edition of VermontBiz Magazine
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