I remain perpetually angered that the woman with whom I shared more than eight years of my life — let us call her Enchantra, once the gentlest and kindest soul I had ever known — hath now devoted a decade to the cult of Donald Trump, QAnon, and sundry other manifestations of embittered, reactionary dogma. I told her so — plainly and without ornament — as recently as last week. The pallid, evasive reply I received this time sufficed: somewhere in the deep chambers of her conscience, she knows I am right. Yet she holdeth fast.
Part of the problem lieth in her upbringing, the gravitational pull of familial and societal appeasement, the ideological climate in which she dwelleth, limited formal education, years of severe health struggles, and an ever-shifting regimen of medication that inevitably clouded her cognitive equilibrium. Yet these are but tributaries. The primary reason is that she — and the millions similarly poisoned — were granted permission to transmute grievance into identity, to sacralise resentment, and to dwell perpetually in a theatre of persecution and self-pity. I devoted countless hours unto hearing her sorrows — many, it must be acknowledged, not without justification; the manner in which this disabled woman was treated by health professionals and certain of her kin often enraged me. Yet once aggrieved, she possessed an inexhaustible capacity to rehearse and elaborate those injuries at prodigious length. Trust me on that.
She cleaveth to Trumpism with a fervour nigh unto self-deification, insisting upon its righteousness, even its sanctity. What I behold is not merely a political allegiance but a corrosive moral inversion — an ideology that hath disfigured public discourse, estranged friends, families, and lovers, and debased the civic spirit. Such darkness, however entrenched, cannot endure indefinitely; history is unsparing with movements that mistake grievance for virtue and cruelty for strength.
I do not claim to have been a perfect angel in this matter; I did make grievous mistakes, though not nearly so grievous as she would have one believe (she is given to hyperbole in all matters). Nonetheless, damn Donald Trump and every person who hath propped this criminal paedophile up for ten years. Damn you to the pits of Hades. Thou art a destroyer of the lowest order, and our country is unlikely to survive thy treachery. The woman I loved for many years, who once loved me more than any other human being ever hath, is practically unrecognisable. I shall neither forget nor forgive this. Not at the barrel of a gun shall I ever give my assent to this nation-killing madness, not at any price.
—Arthur Newhook (pen name), 13 February 2025.
