What do we do with our anger at Republicans?

TAT readers,

During some quiet time over the holidays, like most, I spent a bit of time reviewing the last year and peering intently through the window at the year before us. Much of this musing I published at the end of the year here on Substack, titled, Closing out 2025 and making 2026, the year we take back our Republic. As I quietly sorted through a year’s worth of writing, I realized or maybe more accurately, acknowledged for the first time that I have been angry at what has become of the Republican Party in the Trump era, for the entire time. The hard part of this anger is that those I am so angry with, include family and friends. I’ve had to reconcile myself with the fact that you can love someone, even if you don’t like them sometimes.

For a decade, these republicans in my life, demanded that honest people see their conspiracy theories, their little red hats, hear them chanting slogans that a 5 year-old could fact-check for idiocy, aggressive invasion of everyone’s bedrooms, lifestyle and gender are okay. They did this while stuffing their pockets with greed in a race to selloff American and western national security, like its something private equity firms, private investors and investment bankers do to their victims. We have now murdered five human beings in the streets due to actions of the Administration’s shock troops, while starting a war and occupying a foreign country and that’s just in the past week. Of course we’re angry and in fact, downright furious.

I don’t say this for left or right politics but to restore reason about an urgent and rapidly evolving threat called the Trump administration and a subservient Republican Party. In fact, I despise the concept of political parties, and for the same reasons that a top tier hero of mine, President George Washington warned us about in his 1796 Farwell Address to the nation.

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it."

- Washington's Farewell Address
- National Constitution Center

The more I thought about this realization, the more I believed that many of you have come to the same conclusion. As I pondered this, I thought that maybe I would offer some insights that I mused over in coming to terms with my anger. I hope you find them helpful to you as well.

---

Step 1, admit you’re angry too

Most people don’t like to think of themselves as an “angry person.” For the most part, this is true although we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t admit that there are times that we exhibit the traits of or have the feelings of ongoing, simmering anger about something or other. I am one of those who didn’t want to admit that I was always angry on some level, and have been since the GOP stopped believing in America while cheerleading a buffoonish grifter devoid of a moral spine and who is flushing 250 years of American liberty down the toilet-bowl of history. Okay, you get it… I am very angry.

After plenty of self-reflection, I classify my anger at the moment, “justifiable,” or what some call, “righteous anger.” There is though, a only a very fine line between righteous and self-righteous anger. Employing anger as fuel for combating what lies ahead, must always stay on the “righteous anger” side of that all important line. This frees my moral conscience to employ my anger as a powerful motivator and the fuel of my resilience, not as vengeance. I can assure you that I am not a self-health expert of any sort but after a long and widely experienced life, I’ve learned that either you drive anger, or it drives you. Situations are going to make us angry throughout our lives. The only question then becomes, what you choose to do with it.

By my estimation, somewhere between 65-70% of America is somewhere between frustrated on one end a scale and enraged on the other regarding our current national crisis. As a nation, we must consider where this collective anger goes from here. My suggestion would be to harness that anger and use it to fuel the full and accountable restoration of our republic. To not act on that anger in a healthy and active manner, leads us to what Freud was talking about in his quote, “depression is anger turned inward.”

Not acting now and especially in support of each other, is to sentence our nation to increases in our already historically high, national depression rates. This is the last thing we need in these uncertain times. Unity is a key piece of of our resilience to the certain challenges ahead. From now through the midterms, this is an, “all hands on deck” year and we need every American that isn’t brainwashed by decades of far-right programming, to work together in support of a fair, legal administration that is accountable by law to we the people. As the GOP learned in recent elections, people are fed up with their clownish conspiracy theories, never fulfilled promises, political Vaudeville and overt corruption.

For those who are depressed and exhausted, we all feel your distress. This is why we must remain united and offer support to one another, because this gets much harder as the year progresses. When young I often heard the phrase, “right makes might.” If we stick together, we will prove the phrase prophetic and righteous anger is just the glue we can use to hold us together and moving ever forward.

My very best for the rest of your weekend,

Paul