Women rounded up to be sent to “The Colonies,” Handmaid’s Tale, Season 2.

My most fervent prayer is that Trumpism comes to an end.  Obviously, the best way for that to happen would be for Bob Mueller to make his findings known, and then we can celebrate as we watch the entire evil regime be removed and arrested on national TV, so they can never hurt anyone else.   That would be an event worthy of a new national holiday.

Of course, it might set off a civil war.  Trumplicans have promised that.  Whatever.   At this point, I’d welcome a civil war if it meant we could be rid of the orange menace and his cabal of anti-American, antisocial ghouls.   Bring it on.

But each day this horrific human being stays in office, the worse things get.  When I look back over the past eighteen months, it’s startling how much we’ve normalized and the unnerving way he’s been able to accelerate and intensify his assaults on democracy.   We are so much closer to being a fascist state than we were eighteen months ago.   Essentially we have one-party rule now, and no one ever holds Trump and the converted Republican Party (which is now the Party of Trump) accountable for anything, no matter how heinous or cruel their actions.    The crippled but still functioning free press is the only thing left that keeps us still tethered to a thread of democracy.  How much longer that  (and our freedom of speech and assembly) will last I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

So I’m not getting my hopes up about the Mueller investigation.   If he’s even allowed to finish his investigation, the complicit GOP Congress, which is supposed to provide a check on the president’s absolute power, is likely to do nothing.   Trump will skate — even if he’s found guilty of treason, which seems more likely every day.   He literally could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and nothing would happen to him.   That might have been the one thing he ever told the truth about.

More likely is that we could neuter Trump’s tyranny by turning the House and Senate blue in November.   But because Russia has shown every intention of still meddling in our elections, because of blatant gerrymandering and voter suppression on the part of the GOP, and because of the Trump regime’s daily assaults and smear campaigns on Democrats, the free press, and democracy itself, our side is being discredited and weakened.    The Democratic Party is  growing, since many never-Trump conservatives have left the corrupt, Trumpicized GOP and independents have also seen the writing on the wall and have vowed to vote blue in November.   But we don’t have much power and our voices are drowned out by the much louder, wealthier, and more aggressive Trump GOP.

If we manage to succeed, Trump could be rendered fairly harmless and impeachment proceedings could finally begin with a Democratic House and Senate.  It could happen, but even with all the excitement about the impending “blue wave,” I’m not getting my hopes up.  Putin is an evil genius who knows exactly how to turn things in Trump’s favor, and the GOP, with all the Putin/Koch/Mercer/Adelson money behind it and almost unlimited power and control,  will almost certainly do their best to make voting as difficult as they can, and gerrymander districts even more than they already are.   So even with renewed Democratic motivation to vote, we could still wind up losing.

If they win, it will be too late.  America as we know it will be over. Back in January 2017, when Trump took office, Amy Siskind, an expert on authoritarian states and the author of the book, “The List,” which documents in horrifying detail each week of the Trump administration (every week, the assaults on our democracy have increased in both number and severity) predicted we had less than two years to save our country.  After that, it would be game over.  Well, we are there.  It’s been almost two years.    Honestly, I don’t have high hopes.   Of course, I’ll still do whatever I can to turn things around, and you’d have to kill me before I wouldn’t show up at the polls this November.    But I’m not feeling too optimistic.

I know I couldn’t survive in the sort of regime that will result when Trump seizes full power — which he will certainly do if we fail in November.    My temperament isn’t  suited for totalitarianism and fascism.   I couldn’t physically, emotionally or spiritually handle a political environment of such mysogyny, cruelty and watch the exploitation and institutionalized abuse of the most vulnerable members of society.

This regime seems very hostile to women in particular, and coupled with the powerful influence of Dominionism and far right evangelicalism, they are poised to overturn not just Roe vs. Wade, but also use “Old Testament Law” (the “Christian” version of Sharia Law) as justification to take away all our rights, including contraception and even possibly the right to vote or own property, just like they do in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.  As an unmarried (divorced) older female without much in the way of financial means, I’d be an easy target for the emboldened regime to exploit, marginalize, and abuse.   Social security and Medicare, which I’m counting on in a few years since I have very little in retirement savings, will be gone — and everything I paid into it over four decades effectively stolen from me by insatiably greedy oligarchs who believe they deserve everything and the “little people” deserve nothing.

Right now, I don’t see any way I’d be able to flee the country, and I wouldn’t leave without my adult children anyway, who are also vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by this regime for reasons I won’t get into here.   They would also be targets.

I fear death.   Maybe faced with a dystopian future of wasting away in a concentration or slave labor camp reminiscent of “The Colonies” in The Handmaid’s Tale (the “Colonies” are the grim hard labor camps that older and infertile women, and female dissenters are sent to shovel toxic waste until they die), that fear might disappear.  At that point, suicide might be an option.  I don’t know.   I can’t imagine such a thing now.   I still have too much hope that things can’t stay like this — even though intellectually I know they can.

Every day I pray that a miracle gives me back the country I love, or barring that, that an opportunity for escape opens up for my family and I to start over in a new country.   If neither of those outcomes are in the cards, all I want from God is a quick and merciful death to spare me from the horror and pain of the alternative.