President Ronald Reagan's inauguration took place on January 20, 1981 — this while we were living in a South American country.  It was the first time that a U.S. presidential inauguration appeared on television in that particular country.  Afterward, several people seriously asked us, "Why was Jimmy Carter on the platform?  Why wasn't he in jail?"

With their recent history of corrupt governments, military takeovers, and social division like nothing we have experienced in the U.S. (at least since the Civil War era), the idea that a former president should be marched off to jail or worse was simply a reflexive thought.

Now it's our own country that is sliding into that third-world category of political criminality and revenge that we previously thought was reserved for a set of anarchic countries far from our shores.

When Donald Trump won the Republican primary, I, like many, was not impressed with the man; he came across as a brash businessman and typical big-city braggart.  During his first term, I gradually came to respect him, if not all of his mannerisms.

What I have watched with growing alarm has been the festival of hate that has consumed the media and Trump's political opposition for the past four years.  The downright loathing of the man and everything he has done and said, much of which would have been quite acceptable or at least put up with had our president been anyone else, has been so extreme that it seems we are living in a dystopian fantasy that some novelist invented simply to provoke nightmares.

Any psychologist can explain unambiguously how extreme emotions tend to cloud our better judgment.  Clouded judgments have been the order of the day as political hacks and media pretenders have looked us in the eye and proclaimed with total seriousness that Trump was a Russian agent, that Biden's family business was all above-board, that there was absolutely no fraud in the recent election.

But now we are being faced with the logical conclusion of the recent super-sized hatred and specious moral loathing; to the progressive cabal, it seems most reasonable that the perpetrators of the past four years of Republican "lies," "mismanagement," and "traitorous" actions must be marched off to jail or at the very least expelled from civil society.

How often have we been told that the Trump era was a "festering pit of ongoing corruption"?  Such extreme convictions truly have their own consequences; now that those who were out of power are getting ready for the in-power experience, they must do all in their "power" to erase these interlopers from society itself.  Only extreme remedies will placate the rabid passions that have run unchecked for years.

Trump and his family need to be investigated, but we already know the outcome: they will all end up in jail.  Even new Republican legislators cannot be seated in Congress because they are "traitors" who backed an appeal to the Supreme Court over the recent election.  The new outcasts and political lepers not only will have to distance themselves from the morally pristine leftists, but will need to cover their faces (a simple mask will do) and call out "unclean, unclean."  And at the very least, if they can find a restaurant open, they will not be allowed to dine in peace; they will be identified, shamed, screamed at, and spat on.

Will Donald Trump attend the inauguration ceremony if Biden actually assumes the presidency?  Of course not!  That decision will not be his prerogative — by then he will have been arrested and marched off in chains to the inevitable purgatory he so richly deserves.

If, contrary to all prognostications, Donald Trump does end up on the platform for a Biden inauguration, a huge segment of the political class, the media types, and a good portion of the population will be asking that hellish question: "Why is he on that platform?  Shouldn't he be in jail?"

The Third World has come to the First World with bottomless wrath.

Image by Pxhere.