People are going to try their damnedest to tell a story that Trump was the cause of this crisis and a total aberration.

The truth is that America’s history is lousy with fascism, that the Right and the wealthy created an environment of fascistic lies to expedite profit and power

This symbolic outrage from a party who has gleefully used Trump to dismantle government, fundraise, and stock the courts right up until the last week of his term will help build that narrative.

This lie will only grow the very real danger we’re in.

We’re facing fascism because of our weaponized mythologies of American exceptionalism that spurred on oppressive empire and hid white supremacy, we’re here because of planned economic inequality and because fascism is a means of suppression of reform.

Trump has to be punished. We have to reject and rebuke him. But any honest conversation about this crisis has to go deeper and explain how we arrived at Trump and how the Right fomented this moment intentionally and with no regard to human life, decency, or democracy.

We can have better lives, a better country, a real and just and human society, but we have to move past easy explanations and scapegoats and the spectacle and these mythologies of exceptionalism.

We have everything to gain and everything to lose.