Americans are overwhelmingly settler colonialists, some involuntary. When one contemplates that, Trump stops being a surprise. It’s amazing we’ve ever gotten anyone else, and the Democrats whom I vote for every time are in many respects, not only Gaza, hardly a lot better. I’m reduced to being like the liberals mentioned as here feeding and watering the passing Cherokee along their forced march into the wasteland: I send water to Diné but that is very far from doing anywhere near enough to remedy the record of atrocity. The academics whom Trump forces us to defend are, in my field political science at least, flatly unwilling to face the political consequences of colonialism. Even though they know all about it, they refuse even to contemplate its causation of representative democracy. If colonialism is its wellspring, how can good be expected of it?