As half of America is not sure if Trumpsters are here to wreck the nation or govern it, I urge all of us to try a new perspective on Donald Trump. In this new perspective, Trump is a revolutionary, as different from all of his predecessors as George Washington was from King George.

Once seen as a revolutionary, not simply as the 47th president to succeed the 46th, it makes better sense that his first impulse is to destroy and change and, only as an afterthought, to rebuild and govern. In this light, we are now witnessing the first phase of Trump’s revolution. Aside from a vague foreshadowing of Orwellian Big Brother, nobody knows, not even Trump himself, exactly what kind of America would emerge from Trump’s political wreckage.

Whatever our future may be, it won’t be a return to liberal democracy. As a revolutionary — like the revolutionary Founding Fathers who would not allow kings to come back — Trump would not allow Democrats’ liberalism to come back to America. In short, there will be no more elections, in 2026 or thereafter, to allow liberals sneaking back to power. As on FDR’s death after a 14-year reign, on Trump’s death, most Americans would hardly remember there were other presidents. It would’ve always been Trump as our president — one and only. Trump and Trumpsters are here to stay.

Thanks to our current mental and technological habits in America, governments and corporations can easily erase or implant memories of events or history as needed. He controls the nation’s law, military, Congress and news media (and our minds), and such perfect-storm conditions for Orwellian rule would never happen again. With one flourish of signature, Trump can abolish elections over liberals’ protests.

Trumpsters mean business and they mean to stay in power — indefinitely. In their full fury and zeal in remaking America, we see a sense of now-or-never desperation and finality, not subject to second-guessing. Their swords are dripping with their enemies’ blood and, with no retreat plans, they are blowing up all the bridges they cross.

In their fury and zeal, Trumpsters look like a new political species seen only in revolutionary times in world history, certainly not in America’s past. Eyes blazing, feverishly in search of the next guillotine executions, they recall the most dramatic of political revolutions: the beheading of Charles I in England, the thousands of severed heads in the French Reign of Terror, the murder of the czar’s family in Russia and, in our living memory, the 100 men summarily executed the day Castro took power in Cuba.

Political transitions in America’s past were mostly festive and celebratory, and political power was always an even-break game for both Republican and Democratic players. But, just now, Trumpsters are too enamored with their own power to give liberal suckers an even break in which they could possibly risk losing.

It’s simply unthinkable that Trumpsters will give up their power prompted only by tradition or convention. No modern holders of power ever voluntarily gave up their powers, and Trumpsters are not going to hand America back to liberal democracy. There is no retreat for them, only going forward — even unto the destruction of everything. Awestruck by such savagery and difficulty of imagination, liberals are stunned like guileless children suddenly abandoned by their trusted adults.

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Then there is the reminder from Hitler’s ghost. It is no secret that Trump counts Hitler as one of his learning resources and often recycles ideas and policies from him. One important page from Hitler’s book that has undoubtedly impressed upon Trumpsters is the fact that Nazis never allowed an election in Germany while Hitler was in power (1933-45).

Strategically, it would be utterly foolish for the incumbent power, whether Hitler or Trump, to even bother with electoral formalities to restore the nation to its previous “liberal” form — Hitler back to the Weimar Republic and Trump to the Biden era of liberal democracy where toilets and sports teams could be unisex.

Even surpassing the power that Hitler enjoyed, Trump’s power in America is now approaching divine in its absoluteness (no consequences for his action). Certainly, he has no reason to pay for the real estate he already purchased with 77 million votes.

Providentially, history is smiling on Trump: He is in the right place (consumption-corrupted America) at the right time (end of “woke-confused” liberalism). Liberal democracy, having filled the space between yesteryear’s feudal kings and tomorrow’s Orwellian Big Brothers, is an idea whose time has passed.

Liberals brought on their own demise by trying to combine maximum private freedom with equally maximum public responsibility — just too much “liberal” and not enough “democracy.” They said, with help from capitalists, consume like children, but be responsible like adults. But in the cold reality of history, such a premise of society would merely create a lifestyle impossible to sustain, especially when assaulted by someone like Trump armed with skilled psychological warfare.

Now with virtually everybody unfulfilled and irritated, liberalism finally collapsed like a house of cards under the tremors of Trump’s emotive juggernaut — never to rise again. In the dustbin of history, liberalism is now joining feudalism to welcome an Orwellian tomorrow, our most likely next stage in American history, whose very first page hails Donald Trump as its founder.

To freely play with gender identities or be able to choose abortions, you need a society strongly blessed with either intelligent citizens (like Scandinavia) or unified social consciousness (like Japan). But in a society that allows people to demand only what their hearts desire (like America under consumer algorithm), liberal democracy cannot continue without making its citizens utterly childish and thereby destroying its national unity at its very foundation.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.