If, beyond every abuse, this is yet America, where the Great Leader’s administration recommends that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not use the words “fetus,” “transgender,” “science-based” or “diversity” (but it may still, according to a New Yorker cartoon, be able to use the word “moron”), and climate change is no longer a strategic threat (or even an admissible term in government circles), then it is time to heed the poet’s admonition: “Being lied about, don’t deal in lies.”

If this is America, our America of government for the people, by the people, and you cannot believe how low the Great Leader will stoop, how much lower he will go than seemed possible, and sometimes you feel the need to wash the ambient crassness and vulgarity from your skin, for they seep into you whatever protection you may wear, and you are aghast at how the G.O.P. has morphed into palace courtiers outdoing each other in praise of their plutocratic reality-show prince, then it is time to ponder the poet’s words:

“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; if you can think — and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”

If this is America, where the Great Leader wants you to believe that 2+2=5, and would usher you down his rabbit hole, and struggles to find in himself unequivocal condemnation of neo-Nazis, and you recall perhaps the words of Hannah Arendt, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist” — if all this you have lived and felt and thought across this beautiful and spacious land, then you must be prepared to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.”

If this is America, and you know where militarism and nationalism and disdain for intellectuals and artists, and the cultivation of enemies and scapegoats, and contempt for a free press can lead, and it pains you to see the world voting against the United States at the United Nations with the exception of Micronesia and Nauru and Palau (and a few others), then you will see that this, Trump’s American travesty, is in fact a lie and an affront and a betrayal.