You can't but be struck by the dramatic difference in the way the news is reported by the mainstream media on TV, in print, and online by the more respectable media.  It's like reading about the state of the world in 1916, at the height of WWI, and at the same time at the height of the Roaring Twenties, about 1926 – but with both represented as the world right now.

To read the MSM, you get the feeling that the president is on the very edge of being impeached and thrown out of office in disgrace.  All of America but a handful of toothless white Nazis despises the man.  The rest of the country is ready to stand up and, with one voice, scream guilty to whatever the New York Times pronounces him guilty of.

In the more respectable media, you find Trump and America happy.  The economy has never been better; Hispanics and blacks are looking at Trump with new respect.  This president really does know what he's doing.  Gradually, America is returning to the country of hope and good cheer that attracts people worldwide as the president makes America great again.

I think we all know we're headed for an armed clash – not because Trump-supporters want it, but because the left refuses to accept anything short of unconditional surrender in its war on America.  The Love America side is willing to go halfway to keep the peace, but the Hate America side won't have it.  The tension of the political schizophrenia is almost palpable.

The Love America side can't compromise anymore and remain true to itself.  Partly through negligence, partly through laziness, partly for other reasons good and bad, we have allowed our country to be jerked so far from our Judeo-Christian roots that the Founders wouldn't recognize the system they bequeathed us.  Their Constitution is in tatters, their high principles mocked.  Mostly what has kept us from totalitarianism are our inherited liberal traditions.  Certainly, America has not functioned according to the Constitution the last forty years, arguably the last hundred years.

Another thing that has also kept the totalitarians at bay: concern that things might run out of control.  They want to advance their agenda as far as possible out of sight, so that we (most of us, anyway) won't know for sure what's going on until there's no chance of stopping their takeover.  Our uncertainty, our unwillingness to move against them without absolute proof, works to their advantage.  We are inhibited by our own morality and dedication to constitutional principle.

Hence the screaming and screeching on the left.  Russian totalitarians did this in 1917, Italians in 1922, and Germans in 1933, so history shows what lies ahead.  It's the price of political schizophrenia in this day and age.

Richard Jack Rail, a frequent contributor to American Thinker, is the author of A Diary of the Trump Era: Year 1, with Year 2 in the making.  Available at caktusjakk@gmail.com.