He is the Master of Our Fate
We are the captains of our souls

ELIZABETH GEORGE
May 26, 2026

Right now, our lives are in the hands of Donald Trump, a man who daily demonstrates a staggering unfitness for office. This unfitness does not manifest itself merely in his obvious mental incapacities, however. It also manifests itself in his complete lack of ethics, morals, courage, ideology, and backbone. It surfaces in his cringeworthy self-glorification and self-regard, as well as in the lack of respect he shows to everyone who ventures into his company: be it a world leader or a journalist attempting to do her job. He is a man of crude taste and cruder sensibilities, and he is utterly indifferent to the suffering that his catastrophic command of the government has inflicted on ordinary people. In short, he is someone who should never have become President of the United States in the first place and should never have been re-elected. He is so subject to flattery that he is as malleable as Play-Doh in the hands of a five-year-old. As long as his personal desires are fulfilled, as long as his diatribes are listened to, as long as his ravings on social media are religiously commented upon, as long as he is never held to account, and, more and more, as long as he is never ignored, he holds the fate of this country in hands that he happily uses to choke off the life force of the Republic.

As a leader, Donald Trump has failed in every respect. As a showman, grifter, and conman he seems without equal. What he has understood from the first is now so obvious that it’s incredible to consider the failure of the GOP to see it: a fast moving object is nearly impossible to control. He knew that daily scandals, outrageous statements, sordid revelations, vile exposures, and blatant displays of abhorrent traits of character would serve to create a chaotic flood of information that would not harm him because it was a flood, because it was constant, and because it was chaotic. As long as he kept up the pace of daily outrages and improprieties, he knew that he could exhaust those of his opponents who might otherwise take a longer and more incisive look into what he was really doing behind the screen of moral decay.

One wonders who among his sycophantic underlings to whom he has given a modicum of power might do something to stop him at this point. One wonders if they simply fail to see that, while he holds the fate of this country in his hands, they are also of this country, just like the rest of us. If there is going to be a last man standing, do any of them actually think that last man will be he? Puck said it best. He might have been referring to Donald Trump’s cabinet when he made his comments to Oberon about the foolishness of mortal beings.

The times, in the words of Jane Austen, feel “hopeless of remedy.” If we are to survive Donald Trump’s wretched dominion over the country, how will we ever create— from the rubble that remains— a country that we can actually celebrate, a nation upon which we citizens can look with pride? It seems an insurmountable task. The country’s founders comprised an exceptional group of individuals with extraordinary talents, dedicated to the creation of a nation of citizens who could do what at the time seemed impossible: actually govern themselves through a system designed in such a way that no single person would ever independently hold the reins of power. But we seem to have no such exceptional group now. Individually, they are probably out there: in universities, occupying positions in think tanks, serving obscurely in state offices, writing treatises against fascism, against oligarchical power, against kleptocracy. But they do not at the moment represent a combined force and, as such, they have no leader to speak for them and, through them, for us.

So here we are, fellow Americans: exhausted, dispirited, trying to hope but finding it more difficult every day to do so. And yet we—not Donald Trump nor a single one of his worthless minions—are the captains of our souls. We feel powerless because we have been made to feel powerless by three branches of the United States government the majority of whose members have actually caved in to one of the foulest and most pitiful creatures ever to walk the planet. He is an orange-faced buffoon whose dearest wishes—whose only wishes—are to enrich himself and to be remembered as a great leader. He’s managing the first quite nicely, and he feels no compunction as he openly and corruptly does it. However, he has no control of the second. He wants to be deemed the equal of Abraham Lincoln, of Thomas Jefferson, of James Madison, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But within this misshapen orange-faced ghoul there is not a sliver of greatness, not even a fingernail clipping’s worth of the kind of stature possessed by those individuals to whom monuments are built. He knows this, so he must build them himself: from his laughably vulgar ballroom to his utterly absurd Arc de Trump. He has mistaken power for substance, irrational ravings for a philosophy of governing, name-calling for political debate, lunacy for workable ideas. The world knows this, the world sees this, and so do we.

And now, here we are: citizens under the the tiny thumb of a moron. We are angry, exhausted, and afraid, but we are also the captains of our souls because we—and not Donald Trump—determine our daily actions. We decide whether to cooperate with the fascist systems he is allowing his minions to put into place or to resist those systems in every way possible. It’s in our power—not in his—whether we will stumble, crumble, and fall or refuse, fight, and protest. We can alter the course upon which Donald Trump has set the country. We can do it because we are not alone.

Ultimately, we are our brothers’ keepers, we are our neighbors’ keepers, we are the keepers of the poor, the ill, the struggling, the unemployed, the despairing, and the weak. We are not the keepers of Donald Trump, his criminal family, or his cohort of incompetent clowns. We are not the keepers of the billionaires committed only to increasing their billions. We are not the keepers of the law breakers, the seditious conspirators, the stock market manipulators, the corrupt Supreme Court Justices, the intransigent MAGAs who refuse to see what’s playing out in front of their faces. But we are the keepers of each other and together we are far stronger, more intelligent, more patriotic, and more committed than anyone pathetically licking the soles of Donald Trump’s shoes or worshipping at the base of his tawdry golden statue.

During the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine wrote that “these are the times that try men’s souls,” and we are in the same kind of dark time now. The difference is that we are not trying to rid ourselves of the burden of monarchical rule. Instead we are trying to rid ourselves of the burden of maniacal rule. We can do this, but only if we see each other and ourselves as worthy of the effort.

Black feminist poet June Jordan wrote, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” President Obama adopted the line as part of his Presidential campaign. The meaning behind the words is clear: if there is to be a rescue, the only kind possible is the rescue that comes from us.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104