Within a few hours, on Tuesday April 7, 2026, America’s President capitulated to a puny nation he’d unnecessarily gone to war with six weeks earlier, and two state elections registered a 25-point shift in sentiment away from the party in power. In the Munchkins’ bubbly panegyric:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDing-dong! The witch is dead!Which old witch? The Wicked Witch!Ding-dong! The Wicked Witch is dead!

We’ve cause to rejoice. If our despised despot now seeks to steal an election, he’ll risk not only his skin but eternal obloquy, ranking himself with Caligula and the German guy with the mustache. His fanatical adherents now loathe him almost as hotly as his steadfast nemeses, for breaking his promises to them and, worst of all, failing. Losers in America stink like old fish. His political party rues their sycophantic allegiance to the Big Guy for he will have ruined them, perhaps for all time (twenty-five points!). That he could concoct a stunt in the next few months to restore his mojo seems inconceivable. More extra-judicial murders? More injurious inflation? More teardowns of beloved symbols? More grift? More measles? More grabs for Greenland? More calamitous foreign brawls?

So yeh, I’m relieved, exuberant, jigging with joy (in my elephantine way). I haven’t felt this hopeful about America since Obama was elected. We live to fight on.

The destruction has been immense – and the fiend’s not done. Like a petulant teen, expect him to trash the joint to punish us for our disfavor. Jane and I have a bet whether he and his end up fleeing the country to cushy dachas outside Moscow. Jane says he wouldn’t dare. I say he’s never disappointed me on the downside. “The worst,” as Shakespeare put it, “is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”

Celebration’s warranted – for an hour – then it’s back to work. We must stoke the bonfire of bitterness between now and November, so we expel these traitors to America’s ideals. This is not vengeance but political hygiene. When Decency and Reason fail to persuade, one must resort to punishment. Spare the rod and spoil the Republic. Republican Senators deserve as much forgiveness as the Vichyites and Quislings after World War Two. They betrayed their oaths and America’s promise. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

Trouncing the party of the Nameless One this November – and his wannabe inheritor on November 7, 2028 – isn’t rancor but responsibility. We need irresistible majorities to restore America’s morality. We need to reintroduce truth, decency, fairness, grace, justice, equity, trust into our public business and it will be hard. There’s endless rot to be rooted out. Our vast ship of state doesn’t turn on a dime.

Should the rich beware? You bet. No more hogging the wealth, depriving the needy, gloating while you gorge. No more buying elections and selling pardons. Wanna flee the country with your ill-gotten gains? Have fun in Nicaragua. (I think of the dragon Fafner in Wagner’s Ring, lonely and furious in his cave, guarding his hoard.)

Will the ejection of the Nameless One make of America a Promised Land? Hardly. Avarice, deceit, cruelty, corruption persist in all periods. Money was ever greedy. But we stand a chance of shaping an America we can be proud of, which at least tries to do right.

I weep for joy. The Nameless One and his goons remain – for now – but detoxified, emasculated, defanged. They will not go easy – but they will go. And We the People will remain.