My First Post-Trump Substack

What began on an escalator, ends on an escalator.

When the escalator at the United Nations came to a wrenching and sudden stop this past Tuesday as soon as Trump stepped on it, I would like to believe that future historians will record that as the pivotal, split-second moment which marked the beginning of the end of the Trump Reign of Terror.

A Terror that began — and ended — on an escalator.

June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower — to September 23, 2025, at the United Nations.

When the escalator at the UN came to that sudden and unexpected halt, was that the sign we had been waiting for? The escalator! Is it possible that the escalator’s complete loss of power, its instant paralyzation, its seemingly abrupt and total collapse meant that this too was the end of the Reign of Donald J. Trump?

Go with me on this. I want us to imagine what life might look like in a Post-Escalator, Post-Trump World.

But you’re asking, how can I say we are in “Post-Trump” when right now you can turn on any TV and see him pouring the final load of concrete over the Rose Garden?

But what if from that instant forward on Tuesday, from the moment that escalator ground to a stop and he was frozen, stuck, unable to move, stripped of his strength and his powers to demolish the government, no more swinging that big black pen to sign hateful executive orders, incapacitated, emasculated, no idea what to do, immobilized, impotent, crippled, neutered — oh no, there goes Melania! — Trump’s deer-in-headlights look on his face — and all of a sudden millions of Americans everywhere took to the streets in a historic wave of protests and mass civil disobedience!

By the next week, a General Strike was called and the country was shut down!

Then a thousand “Mamdanis” across the nation took out petitions to run for office in the 2026 elections, many of them seeking to primary the Terror Reign’s chief enablers: the elected Democratic Party hacks who were incapable of fighting and representing the true will of the American people!

It didn’t stop there! More and more judges began ruling against fascist edicts. Out of work journalists in nearly every state announced they were starting worker-owned media outlets that would cover the real news. Numerous citizens from every region launched creative mass actions to disrupt the oligarchy, doing everything from cancelling their Disney+ and Paramount+ subscriptions, to offering car rides to women in red states in need of reproductive health care, to doing locally whatever the equivalent was to nonviolently sabotaging the teleprompters of a compliant media and shutting down the escalators of politicians on their climb to the top where they sought to crush our Democracy for good.

Yes, it was a new day in America! All it took was somebody hitting a panic button or pulling a plug. “You’re all going to hell!” he barked at the gathered nations on First Avenue.

But nobody heard him say anything as someone had cut the speaker system in the UN Assembly’s auditorium! The world had silenced him. 157 countries now recognize Palestine as an equal nation with full rights. The UN sent a strong message to the United States: We know who you are. You are the bank that funds and arms a horrific genocide. History will remember that about you.

Although this decrepit state we are in did not start with Trump — its origins can be traced back to the election of Ronald Reagan (and specifically, to August 5, 1981, when he fired all 11,345 striking air traffic controllers) — I, for now, will skip taking us further back to the founding fathers declaring that Black human beings were only 3/5 of a human being, and then, these wise old white men, they made sure women went entirely unmentioned in the Constitution as if they didn’t exist at all (which was essentially reaffirmed in 2022 by Alito, Kavanaugh & Co. in the Dobbs decision, stripping all women of their reproductive rights).

Yes. Imagine! The crash of a teleprompter, a sound system and an escalator, all within minutes of each other, brought an end to all the madness. Trump would never recover. As the great poet T. S. Eliot once wrote in his epic poem “The Hollow Men”:

“This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends:
Not with a bang
but a whimper.”

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Photo by: Kylie Cooper/Reuters

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** In order to have a troll-free, hate-free comments section — and because if there’s one thing I know about my crazy haters, they would rather spend an eternity in hell with Marjorie Taylor Greene than send me $5 if forced to become a paid subscriber — my Comments section here on my Substack is limited to paid subscribers. But, not to worry — anyone can send me their comments, opinions and thoughts by writing to me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. The solution here is not optimal but it has worked and my Comments section has become a great meeting place for people wanting to discuss the ideas and issues I raise here. There is debate and disagreement, but it is refreshing to have it done with respect and civility, unfettered by the stench of bigotry and Q-anon insanity.