At the Threshold

The warning lights are flashing. The air has changed.

Photo by Robert Gourley on Unsplash

We all know there are places we shouldn’t go. You can feel it—the air changes, the light turns strange, and something inside whispers, stop here. Beyond that point, danger isn’t a theory; it’s a certainty.

But some people don’t stop. They see the same warning signs and keep walking. Maybe they think the risks are exaggerated. Maybe they believe they’re stronger, smarter, immune. Or maybe something inside them has gone numb—so far gone they no longer care about the consequences, at least not until they arrive.

Nations aren’t so different. Political life, like human life, is full of thresholds that shouldn’t be crossed. Yet it’s never clear when a country passes the point of no return, when the slow drift into unfreedom becomes a fall. Sometimes it happens quietly, almost gently, step by step, law by law, excuse by excuse. Other times, it’s sudden—one sharp break, and the ground of everything we believed in gives way beneath our feet.

What makes this moment in our history so remarkable—and so dangerous—is how unmistakably singular it is. Our current president is not merely flawed; he is profoundly compromised, a man whose moral failures are too deep to disguise. And yet, there are far too many who try. We reach for the easy deflections: What about Obama? What about Biden?—as if pointing elsewhere could erase what stands plainly before us.

Yes, those men had their faults. They made mistakes. They pursued policies we could debate or oppose. But they did not endanger the constitutional order. They didn’t treat the law as a nuisance or the truth as an obstacle. They respected the guardrails—the norms, the institutions, the shared rules—that make democracy not just possible, but durable.

We have been tested before. We endured a Civil War that nearly destroyed the Union, two world wars that reshaped the planet, the turmoil of the civil rights era, the failure of Vietnam, and the scandal of Watergate. Through it all, our presidents—imperfect, human, flawed—tried, in their own way, to steady the nation, not to shatter it. Even Nixon, when confronted with the truth and the demand for accountability, resigned rather than drag the country deeper into crisis.

But this is different. We have never seen a president so brazenly use the power of his office to enrich himself, to reward his allies, and to empower the billionaire class at the expense of ordinary citizens. We have never seen a president so willing to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon against his political enemies. We have never seen a leader who so deliberately divides the nation—who cultivates hatred, resentment, and fear as tools of political survival. We have never seen a man so determined to dismantle every system of oversight designed to keep him honest.

And perhaps most alarming of all, we have never seen a Congress so willing to bow before him—so timid, so afraid of its own duty, so ready to trade principle for self-preservation.

This is the danger of our moment. It is not just one man’s corruption, it is a nation’s temptation to look away, to normalize the abnormal, to tell ourselves that the rules will hold because they always have. But they hold only as long as we do.

History’s warning lights are flashing. The air has changed. The light has turned strange. And once again, something deep within us is whispering: stop here.