I've really been enjoying reading Craig Calcaterra's newsletter lately. He was able to put into words how I feel about how this administration has changed me.

Cup of Coffee: January 13, 2026:

When the President of the United States says that merely being disrespectful to his secret police force justifies three bullets in the head we're done with even the pretense of democracy. It's the sort of thing even Stalin wouldn't say out loud, even if it was the policy of the day.

The entire DOJ has been fatally compromised, after all. If ICE and Border Patrol are Trump's Gestapo, the DOJ has become his Reich Ministry of Justice.

If I wanted to I could easily highlight a half dozen other news stories, just from the past few days, illustrating the complete breakdown of governmental capacity, the Rule of Law, and the country's basic respect for humanity under Donald Trump. After the year we've had none of this should shock me, but I guess I wasn't at full mental strength yesterday because by the time I consumed all of this awful news I found myself in something akin to a state of shock. Indeed, I was in a paralyzing stupor for most of the day. I didn't write a word of this newsletter until after 4PM yesterday because I was simply unable to do what I've forced myself to do most of the time since last January: put my head down, push the horrors aside, and power through. I allowed myself to become angry and upset and I felt rather hopeless until I went to sleep last night.

That doesn't happen very often. I've rallied in the face of all this before and I will certainly rally from it again. But when it happens it makes it hard for me to form coherent thoughts. The light and the oxygen is sucked from the room and nothing seems to matter. ... but yesterday I just found myself staring at the screen and wanting to scream. Or cry. Or to simply close out every window and dissociate for a while.

Instead, all we got was dumb, evil reality in a volume that none of us are wired to process on anything approaching the level we're being forced to process it.

Most of the time I can pull it off, but yesterday all I could feel was despair and anger. Yesterday I was thrust, once again, into that headspace in which I find myself fantasizing about awful things happening to the people responsible for all of this. A headspace in which I find myself fantasizing about their deaths. That's a thing I've never, ever experienced in my life, but in the past year I've had to accept that I now wish for the deaths of some people. I hate that I do that. I hate that they have pushed me to feel that level of hatred in my heart, but they have. It's a reminder that even if I don't participate in or acquiesce to the atrocities being perpetrated by this lawless regime, they have nonetheless changed me. They've made me a worse person for merely having born witness to them. And that makes me hate them even more deeply.

All of this has changed us. It's changed me at least. It's changed me into something I don't like and I wish I had not become. It's heartbreaking. I'll never forgive them for it. I just want to go to sleep and wake up to have found that this has all been a nightmare.