This political moment feels like a rocket

We could make it to Mars — or it could blow up at any moment

A friend asked: What does it feel like to live through the current political moment? This is my answer.

If I’m lucky enough to have grandkids someday, and they ask what it was like to live through this moment, I’ll tell them about the night I watched one of Elon Musk’s rockets rise from 30,000 feet — an image that felt like a metaphor for everything happening in America right now.

It happened on my flight to Washington DC the other night. The pilot announced that a SpaceX rocket could be seen off to the right-hand side. I pushed up my window shade and saw a fiery streak of light cutting through the night sky.

The image stuck with me. It felt like humanity was strapped to that rocket, racing full speed into the future. It offered a glimpse into Elon Musk’s world, a stark reminder of our fragility, and yet was hopeful and beautiful too. I couldn’t help wondering: What happens if it doesn’t make it?

I didn’t take this picture (credit: david mcnew), but this is what it looked like.

Trump’s first weeks in office have felt like a rocket — blazing fast, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore. The engine roars, the ground trembles, and there’s a heightened sense of danger, possibility, and turbulence. Rapid-fire executive orders, aggressive policy maneuvers, and wild proposals are the combustion forces shooting it up. The fasten your seatbelts sign is on.

It’s not just anxiety or worry. There’s adrenaline too. Maybe the rocket will push through, correct its course, and make it to space. Or maybe it will explode midair, undone by failed engineering and too much pressure. No one really knows. But unlike an actual rocket launch, the stakes are on an entirely different scale: the government, the country, the world order are all caught in the fallout. My kid’s future is too. I am not trivializing this.

The rocket energy is affecting me. I feel the pull of political g-force but am trying to stay clear of the heat and turbulence. I’ve said no to opportunities to join the administration because I value my independence and couldn’t pledge loyalty to Trump. Instead, I am following it from the sidelines while sharing my perspective here and elsewhere.

I’ve been a ball of tensions the past few weeks, my thoughts spinning in opposite orbits. The cultural vibe shift is refreshing, but I’m skeptical of Trump’s modus operandi. I admire the boldness of DOGE but also see recklessness. Maybe Trump 2.0 is a smash-and-grab coup, maybe it’s a much-needed course correction, maybe it’s something murkier and in between. For now, I’m keeping an open mind, calling balls and strikes as I see them — though trending in a more critical direction.

My hesitancy may seem like a cop-out to people who want me to pick a side — to fight, fight, fight — but not jumping to conclusions has felt right to me so far. I’ve been burned by having too much conviction too early before. Besides, I am a citizen-spectator this time, not one of the geeky astrophysicists organizing the launch or an earthy activist boycotting it. I am allowing myself to be independent, living in the contradictions, and letting my interior world breathe. I am experiencing the moment as a human, citizen, and dad rather than a partisan operative with a singular agenda. Why else would I be writing an essay about feelings right now? Lol.

Yet, even as I write these words, I am tempted to call bullshit on myself. Despite my fondness for the vibe shift, I can feel a growing, critical conviction percolating within me. I sense a question growing in the air around the launch pad: Is this rocket hurtling us toward a Constitutional crisis?

My stance is very different from Trump’s first term. Back then, I was a true believer who wanted his movement to succeed. But as his presidency unfolded, I grew disenchanted and formally cut ties after the 2020 election. Last November, I plugged my nose and voted for Harris. I’m still friends with many Trump supporters and have branched out to the left and center. I want Trump to succeed in the way I wanted Biden to succeed — not for their sake, but for America’s. Some might say I’ve lost the fighting spirit, and maybe I have. Fatherhood and gray hairs have changed me. These days, I’m trying to operate at a higher human frequency, as woo as that sounds.

On Wednesday, I dropped by the anti-DOGE protest at the Department of Labor. I went to listen and understand the vibe. It was cold. About two hundred people were there, holding signs like Protect Worker Data and Nobody Elected Musk. The crowd was a mix — maybe 15% antifa, but mostly office workers with backpacks, grad students, and a few tourists who looked like they stumbled in from Oklahoma. I was nervous someone would recognize me from my past, but that didn’t happen. Most people were nice. I sympathized with their concerns about sensitive data, job losses, and Elon Musk’s power.

One takeaway: Musk, not Trump, was Enemy No. 1. To them, he’s an unaccountable oligarch, manipulating events from behind the scenes and on X. If Trump is the familiar narcissistic foe, Musk is something scarier — a supervillain with galactic ambition, who thinks in decades rather than election cycles and is using MAGA to fuel his thirst for interplanetary power.

At one point, the protesters led a chant, yelling: “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go.” It reminded me of a notorious scene at Stanford, the decade before I was a student there, when Jesse Jackson led a protest against the Western Civ requirement in 1987. Jackson and about 500 students marched down Palm Drive yelling, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, they were challenging the canon of Western thought. Now, they’re challenging the singular role of Elon Musk. The irony wasn’t lost on me: different chants, same energy, and a similar fork on the road, so to speak.

The thing about rockets is that sometimes they make it, and sometimes they explode. SpaceX has come a long way from Falcon 1, which suffered spectacular failures before achieving success. I salute Musk for his epic entrepreneurial achievements, for risking catastrophe in pursuit of something bigger. But America isn’t a rocket. If we explode, there’s no next prototype, no containment zone for the fallout. We have to get this right as a country.

Watching that SpaceX rocket from the plane, I felt more awe than unease. Its smooth trajectory was a testament to SpaceX’s relentless iteration. But the political rocket of this moment feels more like an earlier prototype — unproven, unregulated, held together by ambition and sheer force. I don’t know if we’re witnessing a historic ascent or an imminent explosion. All I know is that it feels impossibly distant, yet closer than ever.

---

---

Special thanks to CansaFis Foote for the sharp edits and creative rocket fuel.

Music inspiration

Other essays to check out

• Will the broligarchy save the world or destroy it? by me

• The aesthetics of Trump 2.0 by me

• Trump’s executive branch revolution by Richard Hanania

• The chaos has arrived by Noah Smith

• The DOGE boys take DC by Christopher F. Rufo

• Constitutional crisis? by Gabe Fleisher (NYT)

• Override by EKO