Opening

I’m John Kliewer. Welcome to my new blog. I’m new to blogging and figuring this out as I go.

I decided to start this blog in response to the actions of President Donald Trump upon taking office in 2025 that pose a clear and present danger to the United States. I don’t know how impactful I can be, but I’ve decided not to let those doubts hinder me from speaking out against Trumpism. Each one of us who believes in American values has to ask: if I don’t take a stand now, who will?

I’ve always had at most a passive role in politics. I consistently voted in the presidential and statewide elections. I’d also written to my state and federal level representatives, probably no more than I could count on 1 hand. Otherwise, I was content to live my own life and let live. That’s no longer enough, if it ever was. Conscientious citizens must become more engaged, both in oversight and communicating with our leaders and among ourselves. Translating that to work, that mostly means doing our homework: reading introduced legislation on issues we care about, taking it upon ourselves to study those issues in depth, and sharing our thoughts and findings with like-minded (or not) individuals. For me, that’s partly what this blog is about. That’s not to exclude other things like contacting our representatives, organizing, public outreach, holding protests, etc.

Throughout my life I would have been embarrassed to say I was involved in politics. And for good reason: politics in my lifetime has been an embarrassment. It’s always been a domain of pettiness and schoolyard taunts. Just think about campaign ads. It reveals a shocking lack of seriousness about something so consequential as governance and statecraft if you think about it. Yet, most people accepted this as acceptable enough. In these times we are jolted out of our complacency and forced to reckon with just how consequential governance really is. What Trump’s reelection, and the years of degenerating political discourse, has made clear, is that the status quo of minimal engagement by the citizenry has failed. I think we were on borrowed time for decades, coasting from a bygone era of greatness in statecraft. Time’s up.

Beyond resisting Trumpism and preserving what actually makes America great, we must learn not to settle for mediocrity. As we’re resisting Trumpism, we need to contemplate what a post-Trump America should be like. Part of that is returning to our American ideals, but it doesn’t mean returning to the way we were pre-Trump, for at least 3 reasons:

1. That got us to Trump.
2. The past is past.
3. We were better off then that now but even so well short of our ideals.

We didn’t get here because of Donald Trump’s existence but because of societal decay that has festered for decades. Trump merely figured out how to exploit it.

This blog isn’t all about Trump. Now that I have a blog, I’ll use it as an outlet for my other interests too.

We’ll see where this goes.