What's the Price? Who Will Pay It?
The Cost of Our Delusions

ELIZABETH GEORGE
Mar 6, 2026

In author Kate Gale’s fine novel Under a Neon Sun, the narrator Mia confronts the father who abandoned her to grow up in a commune with a self-involved mother and a predatory “guru” whose idea of leading his flock had a great deal to do with raping 13 year old girls. As a young adult, when she finally sees her father, she says to him, “…so let’s just admit that this family, like this country, was never great, was never exceptional, was always flawed. America is a country where the bullies win.”

But America has always pretended otherwise, from its inception to this very day. The idea of America was terrific: a new country that welcomed everyone but especially the “huddled masses yearning to be free.” It was going to be a country where people from all nations could come together to form a union from which would spring the riches of education, ideas, invention, prosperity. And these riches would be available to all. The seeds of its greatness would be planted in the words of its Constitution, and this document would be the guiding light for every generation that followed those who wrote it.

In order to carry forth the light and the blessings of liberty, however, there were obvious flaws in the general idea of America that needed to be assiduously ignored. As time has gone on, the flaws have become the chasms that we can—if we wish—continue to live with, clinging to the delusion that those chasms simply aren’t there.

If, as a nation, we owe Donald Trump anything, what we owe him is the end of our delusions. He may retain his own, encouraged by his die-hard MAGA supporters and the sycophants with whom he surrounds himself as well as anyone else who wishes to curry his favor, but for anyone who is watching closely and thinking critically, the dance has finished, the story is over, and the game is done.

In the past, there was some greatness to America. The country garnered the admiration of the world as it provided food and medicine to poverty stricken nations with limited resources, as it assisted other nations in recovering from natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and fires. The country’s greatness grew from its support of science and scientific discovery and advancement, from its triumphs in technology, from its universities, from its commitment to developing medicines and protocols to fight cancer in all of its forms. And, of course, it grew in greatness most of all from the extraordinary sacrifices made by a generation of men and women who—in the company of allies—liberated Europe from the occupation of the Nazis.

Now, however, things have changed and America clings to a delusion of greatness by pouring resources into the creation and use of ever more formidable weaponry. Ineffective and unqualified officials talk about “war” as if it were a board game. Instead of the gravity involved in making decisions that will cost lives, the actions ordered by men who have no business directing military matters have become diversions celebrated by narcissists and psychopaths who direct the course of people’s lives—and their deaths—from behind a black curtain in a golf club.

What we owe Donald Trump is an acknowledgment for his willingness to pull the shroud off the corpse of our country. Demented though he appears to be, he has forced us to look at who and what we have become. Flimflam man that he has been throughout his adulthood, he has managed to convince millions of people that the way to greatness lies in the persecution of others and the turning of a blind eye to the predation and the greed that have dominated his Presidency from his very first day in office.

You cannot call yourself nor can you ever be a great country when there is no equal justice under the law. You cannot call yourself nor can you ever be a great country when lies are either shrugged off or accepted as truths. You cannot call yourself a great country when one person is allowed to glorify himself at the expense of the suffering of other people.
Under Donald Trump, JD Vance, the Presidential cabinet, and the GOP Congress, we have jingoism run amok, and every day it becomes more obvious and more pathetic. Frankly, I yearn for the day when the Karma they deserve comes knocking on their collective door. Frankly again, I fear I will not live long enough to see it happen.

In conclusion and under the banner of a different topic, I would like to salute the people of Minneapolis. Without their daily demonstration of peaceful protest in the face of the provocation of masked gunmen governed by their own cowardice, we would still have that architect of inhumanity and evil—Kristi Noem—in charge of Homeland Security and ICE. While it is true that she dug her own grave with her testimony before Congress (blaming Trump is never a good idea), it is the people of Minneapolis who put her in that hot seat and handed her the shovel. She did the rest, all on her own.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104