Everyone is familiar with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, an old man who has lost his wits through over-immersion in chivalric romances and become disconnected from ordinary reality. He sees windmills as menacing giants, an old washbasin as the glorious “helmet of Mambrino,” and roams the countryside on his broken-down old nag Rocinante (whom he perceives as a powerful war horse) righting “wrongs” which exist mainly in his own fevered imagination.

Fewer people have noticed that his demonic doppelganger has emerged from the pages of fiction and now occupies the White House. Where people with unimpaired perception see violent rioters, he sees “patriots” and “hostages.” Where the former see the wholesale destruction of our democratic institutions, he sees the heroic restoration of the American republic. Where the former see a conduit of lies and invective, he sees “Truth Social.” Responsible law enforcement becomes a “witch hunt.” And where the former see a scripturally-based sermon appealing for unity, honesty, humility and mercy for those suffering, he sees a lecture, a rebuke, “nasty in tone” and delivered by a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” (AP article titled “Trump demands an apology from bishop who asked him to ‘have mercy’ on LGBTQ people and migrants,” Enterprise, Jan. 23).

In that sermon, Bishop Mariann Budde provided in passing a key to understanding this terrifying disconnect from reality, something far deeper than a mere difference of opinion. About halfway through her homily she mentioned Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s image of a line between good and evil that runs through the middle of every human heart. The source of that image is The Gulag Archipelago, volume 1 Chapter 4 (“The Bluecaps”), where Solzhenitsyn is trying to understand how ordinary decent people can become capable of inflicting the cruelties he experienced in his eight years as a prisoner during the Stalin era.

Drawing on his knowledge of threshold magnitudes and phase change in physics, he writes, “Evidently evildoing … has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life … But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains … But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”

How does the world look when one has left humanity behind in this way? Biologically, humans are affiliative primates hard-wired for cooperation. When one steps over Solzhenitsyn’s threshold, therefore, the first effect is to feel oneself alone in a world suddenly full of adversaries who must be neutralized. This “bottomless paranoia,” as Charles Mathewes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, describes it, ignites what St. Augustine called the “libido dominandi” — the lust to dominate, our universal desire to “be as gods” — as well as the curving into the self (“curvatus in se”) which he saw as the essence of sin, a pathological state where compassion looks like a contemptible form of weakness. Donald Trump’s outraged reaction to a simple plea for mercy confirms that he has indeed crossed the threshold into this shadowland of inhumanity. His recent executive orders reflect that crossing.

Quixote’s phase change from sanity to madness resulted from his unrelieved immersion in tales of chivalry that pushed him over the threshold between the two. The same has happened to Trump. The density of a long career of shady, fraudulent business dealings, combined with the tremendous power of wealth and access to the presidency, has propelled him over the edge into a fantasy world devoid of empathy. Quixote, even in his madness, at least kept his good heart. Not so the president. Projecting his own hatred onto everyone else, he sees “hardline Trump haters” everywhere.

The same dynamic operates on a broad social scale in the phase change that has overtaken America in just the last decade. This is a projection of Trump’s “bottomless paranoia” now superimposed onto a whole country infested, he imagines, with mortal enemies. Hence his war on DEI, “vermin,” “globalists,” you name it.

The change originated in a constant immersion in disinformation similar to Quixote’s as peddled by “the big lie,” the 24/7 drumbeat from Fox News, and the relentless right-wing propaganda of Sinclair Broadcasting in the American heartland. Under this pressure, tens of millions, like Quixote, have succumbed to an illusory Trumpian world view, where the new “normal” (e.g., 34 felony convictions are now a badge of honor!) was unthinkable only 10 years ago.

The end point of this process is best expressed by Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s outspoken political rival who was murdered in prison a few months ago by the KGB. In his posthumous memoir “Patriot” (not to be confused with the Proud Boys), he writes, “I regret having been a blind admirer of [Yeltsin] and of that part of Russian society which, only too ready to support everything he did, paved the way for the lawlessness we live with today … The aspirations and hopes, the trust, including the blind trust of such nave and muddleheaded people as me in my youth, were betrayed and cynically bartered.” Writing in January of last year from solitary confinement in Siberia, he characterized today’s Russian regime as “lies, and nothing but lies. It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable. One day we will look at it, and it won’t be there.”

All this mirrors our present situation in the U.S. Millions of brainwashed voters, befuddled as Quixote, have mistaken a delusional inhuman paranoiac for a patriot and God’s Anointed One. As a result, America is now speeding down the same road that Russia took 35 years ago away from democracy and the rule of law toward a Putinist/Orbanist/Trumpist mafia state ruled for their own benefit by strongmen and oligarchs like Elon Musk.

At the end of Cervantes’ long novel, Quixote regains his senses and sees things as they are. The American people need to do the same: call out Trump’s treason for what it is and take forceful action to stop it before he destroys us all.

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John Radigan lives in Saranac Lake.