The End of Days Inn

What Trump’s team wants to do to America, and how to fight it.

I am in northern Ohio, looking down at the End of Days Inn.

The parking lot cracks like an outstretched palm no fortune teller needs to read because its future is too obvious. The cracks spread to the dead mall next door, a vacant behemoth with CLOSED and THANK YOU written on an old marquee. I wonder about the person who placed those letters there one by one. That final demarcation, the words you write when you cannot say goodbye.

At the condemned Days Inn, the “D” was removed from all signs. As if folks needed a clue that the old days are gone, as if weeds winding to empty windows weren’t enough.

“AY’S INN”, my children read, laughing.

“This is what America looked like when you were one year old, after the economy collapsed,” I said to my daughter, born in 2007.

“And this is what America looked like when you were one year old, when they said we'd recovered," I said to my son, born in 2011. "But they were lying."

We were in the upper Midwest on errands planned long before the election. That’s the thing about semi-authoritarian states that many Americans don’t grasp, even though they’ve been living in one for nine years. Life goes on, collapsing in pieces instead of dramatic sweeps, acclimatizing you to horrors and destroying your expectations until survival becomes an aspiration.

That is why I watch the weeds: they are defiant. I wake before sunrise to see them emerge from the night, swaying in the wind. I watch them later at golden hour: how they gleam, amber and rust, and catch the sun. They shimmer until blackness buries them from view.

But I know they’ll be there the next day.

In 2012, I was in Azerbaijan for a conference on internet freedom, strolling the streets with a dissident and his tail of national security service agents. The agents followed the dissident wherever he went and listened in on every conversation, no matter how banal.

“How do you get used to this?” I asked, as we sat down at a café, and the agents got in line to place their own order.

“You don’t,” he said, sipping his tea, “And we are.”

Azerbaijan hires fewer agents now: smartphone surveillance took care of that. Authoritarian lackeys, like writers and artists, have been replaced with machines. I wonder if the laid-off henchmen tried to convince the dictator that stalking requires a human touch. I wonder whether they sit at home like American journalists, wondering what has become of their lives and the world.

In 2012, the dissident said he liked visiting the US because he could avoid constant surveillance. I got my first smartphone the next year, like many Americans. Now those days seem like a dream I once had, a dream no stranger could record.

There is no such thing as internet freedom.

*          *          *

We drove from Missouri to Illinois to Indiana, where, in accordance with Indiana state law, I belted out John Mellencamp songs until we hit the Ohio border.

“They told me, when I was younger/ ‘Boy, you're gonna be president!’/
But just like everything else, those old crazy dreams kinda came and went,” I sang, laughing maniacally.

Mellencamp was wrong: anyone could be president. Even a career mafioso and seditionist — hell, he could be president twice!

Ain’t that America, you and me — and the fascist makes three!

Only Trump is not a true fascist. Fascism requires allegiance to the state, which Trump lacks. The biggest threat to the US is not fascism but mafia state autocracy. Not 20th-century style dictatorship, but controlled demolition by a billionaire criminal network, abetted by complicit actors within the US government.

The strongman theory was always a strawman.

For over half a century, Trump has operated within a transnational organized crime network whose goal is to strip the US down and sell it for parts, much like the oligarch raids after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been aided in this endeavor by institutions, in particular the DOJ, which has long protected Trump, and by members of the Democratic Party serving as controlled opposition.

Many Americans did not want to believe this final twist. It is harder to reckon with betrayal than with a straight liar.

But the footage of a grinning Joe Biden with Donald Trump — the man who Biden claimed is a fascist who will destroy America and then handed the keys to the country, promising to accommodate him — seems to have finally woken folks up.

I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.

That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.

They want you to buy into every cheap cliché and every manipulated poll. They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny.

They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s.

Do not fall for it. That does not mean abiding bigotry or withholding disgust at those expressing it — but it means knowing there is a larger plan, and that operatives are taking advantage of your pain. You are a pawn here, not a player.

You still have power — and it lies not with parties, but with people. The election was an illusion. As I said many times, you can’t vote out the mafia. Your power lies in refusing to abandon each other or abandon the truth. Central to that is understanding what you are fighting.

The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.

The second most important thing is who paid for it.

If you want to see who owns America, look at donors — but above all, look at Trump’s pardons. They are listed here, starting with his granting of clemency to migrant abuser Sholom Rubashkin in December 2017 and ending with his late 2020 and early 2021 pardons of long-time criminal partners like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.

Look at who procured these pardons and notice how frequently the name Jared Kushner comes up. Notice how his name vanished from the bromides of the punditry, despite Kushner’s relevance to both Israel’s genocidal wars and to Netanyahu — a lifelong family friend — as well as to the prior and future Trump administrations.

Trump was never the greatest threat to the United States, but a bulldozer for bigger interests. The litmus test of whether the US is an entrenched mafia state has always been Kushner, and the US keeps on failing.

*          *          *

When the errand in Ohio was done, we took the long way home. We had driven 500 miles, so what was 600 more?

I remembered that when were in northern Indiana years ago, I bought the best honey I’d ever had. I couldn’t buy more because the Amish don’t have online ordering, what with not using electricity, and seven hours is a long drive for honey.

But two hours isn’t.

We entered Shipshewana around noon. I was delighted to see the honey shop was still there. I bought a gallon, along with other sundries.

“Gotta stock up,” I said lightly, “In case the grid goes down.”

“That’s what a lot of people have been saying,” the storekeeper said, her voice solemn. She wore a bonnet and a concerned expression.

We kept driving, past houses with solar panels and ropes hanging clothes out to dry: the most reliable way to identify an Amish home. We passed horses and sheep and Amish girls in traditional clothing playing soccer in a pasture. The air tasted fresh and clean, and we breathed in deep.

We saw rows of horses and buggies and decided to see what was happening. It turns out that every Wednesday, Shipshewana has a massive flea market auction.

I am a creature of the secondhand store, but I had never seen anything like this. The market was in a giant warehouse packed to the brim with 20^th century debris: Wurlitzer radios and ukeleles, children’s toys promising God-approved magic tricks, concrete reliquaries, road signs bearing every possible warning. There were multiple auctions happening simultaneously: bearded men in suspenders and hats dropping rhymes like a rapper for items like a butter churn or a poster of Nancy Sinatra.

I saw things I wanted, but I was too slow. I’m a St. Louis city girl, I could never keep up with the fast-talking, eagle-eyed Amish. We stumbled out of the warehouse in a daze.

“That was not what I expected,” my husband said.

“Isn’t it nice when that happens?”

I know what to expect, in terms of the big picture, for Trump’s second term. I know they want to turn all of America into the End of Days Inn. I know that while they’re trying to destroy the US, they will also be engaged in foreign atrocities, and that the tactics used abroad will be used on us.

Because we do not matter — not as Americans, not to them. We never did.

But we matter to each other as human beings. And in this country where the worst plans are openly announced and followed, there is still room for surprise.

I’m not romanticizing the Amish: I don’t romanticize anyone. Why romanticize people and ruin them? Let people surprise you. Let people destroy your preconceptions and burn your generalizations down.

Let America open itself up to you, even if it feels shallow and cruel. There is gold in them thar weeds at the End of Days Inn. The clearer you can see the beauty in the wreckage, the lighter your load will be.

Psychologically, that is. Practically, I recommend several gallons of honey.

*          *          *

Thank you for reading! If you have practical questions, I will be doing a Q & A for paid subscribers this weekend. You can read how the Q & As work here – don’t worry, the answers are open to everyone. I would never paywall in a time of peril.

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The End-of-Days Inn

Abandoned mall

A sampling of wares from the Shipshewana auction! More photos below:

Shipshewana street traffic