One more nationwide demonstration is under my belt. I joined the Hands Off event in Geneva, standing on State Street, with a few thousand of my neighbors, frightened and concerned Americans. Trump, naturally, after announcing the imposition of massive tariffs, flew away to his Trump National Doral Golf Club to host the LIV tournament. All the while, the rest of the country reacts to the impending trauma, (business closings, layoffs, rising food prices) that are entailed by the tariffs.

Trump enjoys bringing pain… He believes that no one should suffer alone. Pain necessarily is to be wide-spread for things to get done. Conflict is welcomed, treating former allies as enemies, upends all that was settled, agreed upon.

I joined hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans to resist this grim assessment of life, of world. Trump is an eccentric abuser, deeply unhappy with this world, with himself. Like conservative evangelicals who support him he pines for a remaking of the world, and fantasizes a “better” other-world. He sets upon destroying this world, like a suffering and tortured God.

Once upon a time,
Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man,
like all believers in an other-world. (Hinterweltler)

The work of a suffering and tortured God,
the world then seemed to me.

The dream and fiction of a god,
the world then seemed to me;
colored smoke before the eyes of a discontented god.

Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you
   – colored smoke did they seem to me
         before creative eyes.
The creator
wished to look away from himself;
so he created the world.

Drunken joy it is for the sufferer
to look away from his suffering
and forget himself.

Drunken joy and self-forgetting,
did the world
once seem
to me.

This world, eternally imperfect,
image of an eternal contradiction
and imperfect image
– a drunken joy to its imperfect creator:
thus did the world once seem to me.

Thus did I also once cast my delusion beyond man,
like all the believers in an other-world.
Beyond man, indeed?

Ah, you brothers, that god whom I created
was man-made and madness,
like all gods!
Human was he,
and only a poor fragment of a human and ego.

Out of my own ashes and glow
it came to me, that phantom.
And truly,
it came not to me
from the beyond!

A new will I teach to men:
to choose that path
which man has followed blindly,
and to approve of it
– and no longer to slink aside from it,
Like the sick and dying!

The sick and dying
– it was they who despised the body and the earth,
and invented the heavenly world,
and the redeeming drops of blood;
but even those sweet and dismal poisons
they borrowed
from the body
and the earth!

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Otherworldsmen no. 3