On a February morning in 2026, the opening days of Black History Month, something unthinkable appeared on the official social media platform of the President of the United States: a video inserting the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama onto cartoon apes, set to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

When federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon and independent reporter Georgia Fort in connection with a protest inside a Minneapolis-area church, many commentators framed the incident as a straightforward defense of sacred space. Worship was disrupted. Congregants were frightened. Law enforcement restored order.

Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to blame Democrats for the slide of the United States toward fascism. As one enraged commentator put it recently, “the Democrats” have “let us down day by day by day.”

The shoes were placed carefully on the frozen sidewalk outside a downtown Minneapolis hotel. Hospital clogs. The kind worn by nurses who work long, unglamorous shifts keeping strangers alive. A handwritten sign leaned against them: Alex was here. Alex mattered.