The Truth always reveals itself

Three Things Cannot Be Long Hidden — the Sun, the Moon, and the Truth ~ Buddha

I did not vote for Trump. I do not support him or his policies. But I will say this — every time he enters office, a great deal of truth is revealed — not about him, but about us.

Maybe I was naïve. Maybe I was sheltered. But it wasn’t until Trump’s last term in office that I fully understood how deeply embedded racism, ableism, and misogyny still are in this country. It was like the moment he was sworn in, the shadows vomited up everything we were pretending we’d already healed.

Suddenly, white supremacist groups were holding torch-lit marches at universities — out in the open, unapologetically. I remember watching it with my mouth open. This wasn’t the 1960s. This was happening now.

Then came the murder of George Floyd — brutal, public, daylight. The kind of execution-style policing you expect from a dictatorship, not a country that boasts “liberty and justice for all.” Around the same time, Ahmaud Arbery, a black man was dragged from a truck and lynched. Lynchings. In 2020. These were not isolated events; they were echoes of a deeper rot.

There was the rise of misogyny, loud and proud. Men — grown-ass men — were suddenly bold enough to demean women in public, talk about our bodies like they were property, joke about sexual assault, and call it “locker room talk.” But what more can we expect when the President himself has a long track record of publicly demeaning women and boasts, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

And what happened next? Sexual harassment survivors were silenced again. School-age girls faced increasing taunts and inappropriate behavior from boys who had absorbed the lesson: if the president can do it, so can I. Women’s testimonies in court, in boardrooms, or at school board meetings were dismissed, mocked, or interrupted — often by men emboldened by a culture that placed power over accountability.

And now, here we are again.

Karoline Leavitt, our White House Press Secretary, doesn’t even try to mask her contempt. She speaks down to the very people she’s supposed to serve, weaponizing her position like she’s auditioning for a reality TV spinoff. She’s not a leader. She’s a performance piece in a show where cruelty gets the highest ratings. And I’m not entertained.

And then there’s the way this administration treats individuals with disabilities. The President shows disrespect to the disabled community using the R word at campaign rallies and mocking journalists with physical disabilities. Disability has become the punchline again and children are mimicked on playgrounds while teens are mocking disabled children on Tik Tok.

These aren’t isolated moments, they are cultural resets. All of the painstaking work of inclusion and awareness have been undone in what seems like seconds. And now his administration and allies are working to dismantle the supports and civil rights protections that individuals with disabilities rely on to survive. The very system designed to uphold equity and dignity are being dismantled in broad daylight.

All while Congress flirts with dismantling the checks and balances that have upheld our democracy for centuries and a California mayor proposes solving homelessness with free fentanyl. Talks of segregation and deportation of U.S. citizens and threats to reproductive autonomy are somehow still up for debate in 2025. And yet, large portions of the public are more interested in Katy Perry’s space ambitions than in the erosion of their rights.

I didn’t vote for Trump. But I’m not here to preach about left vs. right. I’m here to say: look around. Watch what happens when cruelty is modeled at the highest level. Watch how it infects classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, and households.

People get brave when he’s in power. Not brave in the honorable sense. Brave in the bold, loud, bigoted way that gives them permission to say the quiet parts out loud. And the scariest part? “We” elected him. Again.

This isn’t just about one man. It’s about what he mirrors back at us. The truth he reveals.

We can’t unsee it now.

And the question that keeps me up at night is no longer “how did this happen?” It’s “what are we going to do now that we’ve seen it?”