America’s Sickness Requires Harsh Medicine
Editor's Note
As other writers have noted, it would be a mistake to assume that undoing the damage of the destructive Left is as simple as winning a single election, passing a single law, or reforming a single institution. Peachy Keenan examines the upheavals of Trump’s first weeks back in office in light of that fact, and likens the task before us to the often unpleasant treatment required for the gravest diseases — of the physical body as well as the body politic.
Saving the life of a dying patient almost always involves doing something incredibly painful and invasive. You may have to make them much worse, temporarily, in order to make them better. Sick people may need pieces of their bodies removed, limbs amputated, skulls sawed open, enormous amounts of awful drugs administered that make them violently ill.
Maybe you’ve experienced this. Maybe someone close to you had to get chemotherapy and radiation to treat their cancer. You watched as they became gaunt, bald, and nauseous. Someone I know once had a terrible eye infection and had to get the top layer of both [trigger warning!] eyeballs surgically removed to save his vision, which produced excruciating pain — but it worked.
The cure may hurt, but healing is coming.
This is exactly what Donald Trump is doing to the United States. Mass deportations, with all the sob stories and scaremongering videos flooding social media; the short-term pains of a propped-up economy adapting to badly needed corrective measures; the messy business of foreign leaders waking up to the reality of an America that looks after her own interests — these things can be difficult to watch. But our (many) terminal diseases require radical interventions.
Trump addressed Congress earlier this month like a doctor methodically explaining how our cancer has spread and describing the life-saving measures he has to take to cure it. He is cutting away the tumor of waste and fraud. He is performing an immigrant-ectomy by deporting dangerous criminals. He is putting the government on DEI-alysis to clean out the destructive practice of race-based hiring. He is administering hardcore chemotherapy to the sick economy. He’s putting us on a strict low-fat, high-fiber diet. The federal budget is undergoing weekly injections of DOGE-zempic to transform its flabby body into a lean, mean fighting machine.
In short, President Trump is cardioverting the country.
Have you ever been cardioverted? I have. Cardioversion involves placing paddles on the chest that send a powerful jolt of electricity into the heart to literally stop it and restart it. It’s a hard reboot. I should know.
I survived getting cardioverted — at 27 weeks pregnant, no less. A week before this happened, I’d been diagnosed with a mysterious case of tachycardia that had made my heart race for about an hour. But after keeping me in the hospital for a week with no further episodes, they sent me home. The day after that, I had a second episode of tachycardia while driving up Coldwater Canyon with a toddler in the car. At the emergency room, my heart raced for hours. None of the doctors could get it to slow down. At one point, after it had been going up to 210 beats per minute for almost six hours, the hospital’s head obstetrician came in to get my permission to let him perform an emergency c-section “just in case.” When they finally told me I was going to be cardioverted, I asked him, “Have you ever cardioverted a pregnant woman?” He said, “No, nobody here has, but I googled it. Should be fine.”
It was only years later that I realized “just in case” meant “if I was dead.” When it came time to jumpstart me, my room in the ER filled up with every single doctor on call: obstetricians, cardiologists, nurses, anesthesiologists. The baby and I were each on heart monitors so they could track us both. They put me to sleep with a little propofol and I instantly found myself on a white sand tropical beach, finally at peace. But despite the magic elixir, I felt every bit of the cardioversion: a tremendous jolt and heavy pressure on my chest. And then they did it again for good measure.
This is what President Trump is doing to the country. He is performing a hard reboot of the entire system. When America admitted herself to the Emergency Room on election day in November, her condition seemed incurable. Her vitals — inflation, deficits, immigration, birth rates, morale — were terrible. The patient presented with a sickly, exhausted appearance, bruised and bleeding. Doctor Donald promised to lead us back to good health and stitch up the wounds.
When I woke up in the emergency room after my cardioversion, the heart rate monitor was no longer beeping like a racehorse in a full sprint. I was back to normal! It had been a terrible ordeal, but it was over. Twelve weeks later I delivered a healthy baby, and a few days after that, I underwent a procedure that cured my unruly heart once and for all.
The grim-faced congressional Democrats in the audience of Trump’s address had expected a funeral. They craved a funeral: the country had been bled dry for four years, and Trump was the final nail in her coffin. They scowled, shouted and grimaced. They mourned. They wanted to see the body and desecrate it by hurling filthy obscenities and refusing to stand for murder victims and children with cancer. But instead of a funeral, it was a joyous celebration.
Donald Trump, the man who narrowly escaped an unplanned craniotomy over the summer, refused to die. Out of that improbable, impossible moment comes our hope for a country returning from the brink after its own close call with death.