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When I look back on that period, which admittedly is not very often—the pain is still there—I refer to it as the American Autostereogram. (Don’t worry, I had to look it up too.) Surprise! Believe it or not, you already know what that means. An autostereogram is popularly known as a Magic Eye. It is one of those colorful images that at a glance appears to be one thing, but if you stare at it long enough or close enough, you see the hidden image. It was right in front of you all the time.

This was the most unsettling Christmas season of my life. Almost 250 years ago, when the colonies were busy forming a nation, the powerful Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin supposedly created elaborate stage-like sets to convince his sometime lover, Catherine the Great, that great towns and villages were flourishing in the Crimea. The term, a Potemkin village, has come to mean a shiny facade being used to conceal decaying conditions secreted behind it. That was the United States. On the surface, there were signs of stabilization and the roots of real recovery. The Christmas lights and joyful Santas were hung, happy holiday jingles were bursting from every platform, the Salvation Army pots were out on every corner, the smell of Christmas pine was in the air, and people moved with holiday determination in and out of stores burdened with gaily wrapped packages. If you were just plopped down in the city, it would look like normality was returning, finally. But it wasn’t—not even close.

While the Labor Department continued to report booming economic numbers, the reality was far different. Doctored employment figures issued monthly by the administration couldn’t hide the ugly reality that millions of jobs no longer existed. The economy had essentially been destroyed by Trump’s tariff tantrums and the pandemic, and the Democrats’ attempts to breathe life into it had been smothered by the multitrillion-dollar debt they had inherited, complicated by the drought and famine that devastated the third world. International supply chains were about as reliable as the colorful paper chains third graders made out of construction paper. Wrightman’s efforts to repair the damage by lowering or even eliminating tariffs had resulted in an upturn in exports his first few months in office. The passage of the multitrillion-dollar Rebuild America infrastructure bill had buoyed markets and led to the creation of good-paying jobs, but it didn’t last. It couldn’t; those markets wrecked by Trump’s trade wars were gone forever, and the bureaucracy and environmental lawsuits stalled the largest infrastructure projects.

The healthcare system had been devastated by Trump/Pence in collaboration with the right-wing Congress, leaving too many families without health insurance or the funds to pay for medical attention when they needed it. The Biden Band-Aid, as the Democrats’ healthcare plan became known, temporarily stopped the bleeding but did little long-term to cure the problem. As a result, there was a steadily increasing number of violent attacks on healthcare facilities by people unable to afford lifesaving care for themselves or their family.