Many observers might reflect with alarm on the summer of discontent, 2019—the endpoint of the Mueller investigation and the beginning of Trump's impeachment—and compare the contemporary scenes of American politics to the 1951 epic film directed by Mervyn LeRoy. In Quo Vadis a corrupt Emperor Nero fiddles while Rome moves toward the precipice of socio-political collapse. His persecution and scapegoating of one group (Christians), after burning the capital himself, ultimately results in his demise at the hands of the angry mob that chases him off to death. But if that film ends with Peter's crosier giving rise to Jesus's flowering words that “I am the way, the light, and the truth,” the truth about the direction of the Trump presidency, and the trajectory of the nation, remains very much in the eye of the beholder.

As an embattled President Trump moves inexorably toward his fourth year in office, “fears that once existed only in fiction or in the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there is talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.” Amidst the sweltering heat of summer 2019 were senseless mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, El Paso and Midland/Odessa, Texas, and Gilroy, California. Trump's critics charged that his divisive immigration rhetoric was a key motivator for the El Paso shooting.Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis (“Beto”) O’Rourke called the president a white supremacist and thundered that Trump “poses a mortal threat to people of color” following the gunman's rampage. The president and his supporters, on the other hand, accentuate the connection between the Dayton gunman and his support of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and antifa, and further contend that it is progressives’ discrediting of law enforcement that led to multiple attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities around the country.