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I don’t think it was a coincidence that President Jimmy Carter passed away before the start of the New Year, writes John Casey.
For me, 2024 was a mixed bag. I wrote my first book, about the love stories behind marriage equality that will be released on the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in June of 2025. As a preemptive measure, I dyed my hair for the first time. I splurged on new and powerful hearing aids, embarked on my fourth year of sobriety, and got another dog, Cooper, a sprightly King Charles cavalier.
I turned 60 last June and spent the milestone birthday at Vice President Kamala Harris’s house in Washington. She gave me a lesson in the Chinese zodiac. I never thought being a dragon would be such a good thing.
A month later, she became the Democratic presidential nominee. I spoke to so many people, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Mark Cuban, Log Cabin Founder Rick Wilson, former Trump supporter and official in his administration Anthony Scaramucci, and many others who had convinced me — or did I convince myself? — that Harris would win. I even wrote that she would, saying that America’s “better angels” would prevail.
They did not.
Before all of this, I secretly wished President Joe Biden would drop out of the race for the first six months of 2024. I was in London during his disastrous debate with President-elect Donald Trump, woken in the middle of the night, in shock about what transpired. I wrote about how Biden reminded me of my grandfather in the sense that I was in denial about how age was diminishing him.
Then Biden dropped out, better late than never, endorsed Harris, and the euphoria of a fresh, bright, optimistic face in the race ensued. It was easy to think that she’d go on to win. Comparatively, Harris seemed like the obvious choice. How could anyone vote for Trump? He was losing his mind. His rhetoric was hurtful and beyond bigoted. He would be a dictator starting on day one. Yet, the dark and ominous Trump will be America’s next president.
At noon, on January 20, 2025, Biden will become former President Joe Biden. At 81, after over 50 years in politics, he will sunset his career in politics, and go into the twilight of his life. And at noon on January 20, Trump will assume the presidency, perhaps taking American democracy into the twilight of its existence.
U.S. presidents have reflected America’s sentiments and aspirations and surmised that the most selfish person on earth, Donald Trump, had been elected by an increasingly selfish electorate. Traveling over the holidays, whether it was intentional thinking on my part, I noticed more selfish behavior than I’ve ever seen before, as we whittle our me-first lives down to the world of our smartphones. A woman ran me over riding her bike while I was running. She was on her phone, which flew out of her hand upon collision. Instead of asking how I was, she screamed, “Where’s my phone?” Enough said.
And this premonition on my part, that America is sliding down the slippery slope of egocentricity, proved startlingly clairvoyant after an unhoused woman was fatally set on fire in a New York City subway car. Instead of helping her — and saving her life — bystanders stood by and filmed her on their phones. They snapped pictures on their phones. They neglected to call 911 from their phones.
This horrid episode is a metaphor of what’s happening in our society today. While democracy burned, Americans turned their backs on her, consumed more by their own selfish needs than the greater good. As the dying woman’s flames burned her body to ash, so too might Trump burn America’s bright sense of hope to dust.
President Biden and his wife Jill love the beach life. They have a beach house in Rehoboth, Del., and as they normally do, spent part of their holiday in St. Croix. I picture Joe and Jill leaving Washington on January 20 for a beach, and I can see them standing on the shores as the sun goes down. And, when Trump assumes office, I see him turning a country with 1,000 points of light, into a dark and gloomy dusk.
And I fear America may never return to that pinnacle of those points of light that former President George H.W. Bush saw for our nation. A confluence of Trump, selfishness, and the ever-increasing insular worlds of our phones will create a country that would be unrecognizable to our forefathers and ancestors.
Clearly, this way of thinking, particularly at the start of a New Year, is morbid and gloomy, so I hope that I’m wrong, just like I was with my prediction that Harris would win the election. But I don’t see America bouncing back to “normal” in my lifetime. The torch of democracy is not being passed on. It is slowly being extinguished.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that former President Jimmy Carter passed away before the start of the New Year. The last two most decent men in politics, Carter and Biden, won’t be in the political world to see the influx and influence of selfishness that will become ever more pervasive in 2025.
