Molly Jong-Fast’s article in the latest Vanity Fair, “Let’s Not Sleepwalk Into Another Trump Presidency,” suggests an unsettling proposition in its title.

Indeed, if you add everything up, all the legal charges and salacious claims against Trump, his poor track record in elections since 2016 and revelations about his intentions on the infamous January 6, it is incredibly troubling indeed that he remains the undisputed frontrunner to win the Republican nomination to be their candidate for a second term in the White House after the 2024 elections.

All the very considerable efforts since 2015 to knock him out as a political force in U.S. life have failed. The polls now show he’ll be everything from a landslide winner to neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the next election. This can’t be true, can it? To what extent is it our own hubris that prevents us from acknowledging this? Or lack of creativity?

As for Trump, none of the efforts to derail him have succeeded at all, as much as just saying that may upset people who are working so hard at it, myself included. Is this the time to panic, at least in hopes that might do some good?

This writer doesn’t pretend to have the answer, except that we may be needing to go more to the heart of the matter. At its most basic this is a battle between good and evil, although that, too. offends many people who don’t like the idea of evil. 

But life experience, mine at least, suggests otherwise. It is not pandering to proponents of superstition or cult brainwashing to take a much broader look at this cosmos in which we find ourselves, such as we’ve had an unprecedented opportunity to do with the functioning in the last year of the Webb Telescope broadcasting images from deep space. Here, for my money, we’re learning that in this range of perception between the ultra big and ultra small, there seems to be a developing pattern.

Light is good. Darkness not so much. Formation of infinite numbers of stars that generate light and heat provides for us on this planet, at least, the preconditions for life, and life is good. The reason it is good is simply that it affords the ability to knowingly grow itself. More light. More life. More good.

But it is also evident that darkness, or lack of light, is not simply the absence of light, but functions in the universe as akin to “black holes,” gaping spaces that devour and knock out light. Except for theologically, shall we say, this is a recent discovery. In fact, it could be said that the existence of a force that stands against light is the only real reason to have theology at all.

We, us humans in this time and space, may not have been around that long in cosmic terms, but the stuff in us has been for millions of years. Embedded in our stuff is the experience of the universe, living in each and all.

It should not be lost on us that in our recent experience as humans, we’ve learned that there is a relation between light, warmth, connections between us and the phenomenon we identify with the term, “love.’ This connection can be extrapolated to the entire cosmos and there is nothing to oppose that notion, except for that which we observe is actively against it.

Could it be that it is in our very DNA, the million-years old molecules that make each of us up, we recognize this?

Why would the essential prayer given us centers on the lines, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil?” 

I believe we all know this in our bones, so to speak. We sentient beings are smarter than most we know of; it is our calling to resist evil. 

Trump is aligned with evil. He’s made the conscious decision to emulate its forms, such as Hitler. But more than that, he is the face of a generation of highly immoral men who now are the wealthiest one percent in the world, who own and control everything, and are determined to tamp us down.