I recently saw the movie “Wicked,” and felt a truly creepy chill when the Wizard of Oz tells Elfaba, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

The Wizard took power during turbulent times by making up an enemy for people to hate and fear (in this case, animals). He made up this “problem” so people would unite around him to let him “fix” it, and then he started carrying out a persecution of this “enemy” so people would stay loyal to him and he would stay in power.

How many times in the past 10 or so years have I seen someone use the divisions among us to try to unite us around someone or something he tells us we should see as an enemy? Donald Trump has used this strategy so many times to try to make so many villains for us to hate and fear, from “Crazy/Crooked/Lyin’ Hilary” Clinton in the 2016 campaign, to immigrants (but only dark-skinned ones, from what I have seen, not light-skinned ones, like Melania Trump or Elon Musk), to Ron “DeSanctimonious” when it looked like he might win the Republican primary, to all the Democrats in the “Deep State” “enemy from within” — from campaign opponent “Crooked/Sleepy/Slow Joe” and his “Biden crime family,” to campaign opponents “Comrade/Crazy/Laffin’/Lyin’” Kamala and “Tampon Tim” Walz, to California Governor Gavin “Newscum,” to congressional Democrats “Crazy/Nervous Nancy” Pelosi, “Shifty/Sleazy” Adam Schiff, “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer, “Goofy/Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Bernie” Sanders, to DOJ Special Counsel “Deranged Jack Smith.” (To see more people Trump has wanted us to hate or fear at different times, check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Donald_Trump#cite_note-14.)

I know for me this strategy has been so exhausting. Either we throw our hands up and laugh at it and try to write it off as nothing (no matter how riled up it makes us feel), or we believe it without questioning it, or we spend energy and effort trying to see for ourselves where the truth is. Regardless, we have to spend energy and effort trying to figure out where in all of this Donald Trump has let us know how exactly he will lead and serve his country instead of just telling us who to hate and fear.

Today, this strategy became utterly despicable. The families and other loved ones of 67 people are living a hell on earth, as their child, parent, sibling, relative, friend, and/or coworker are pulled in body bags from the icy waters of the Potomac River after the horrific helicopter-airplane collision. And what does President Trump do? He uses this tragedy that we can’t even wrap our minds around to get in front of a microphone and try to get us all to hate our latest supposed common enemy, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

With no evidence even gathered yet about what caused the crash, “common sense,” he says, is how he knows that it was caused by DEI. I guess the only thing I should really find surprising about this is that I even find it surprising that Trump would focus on how this can help his agenda and not on how this tragedy is affecting anyone else but himself.

I’ve thought for a long time that when Trump talks about not being a “loser” that the person he is really talking to is his father, who from what I have read would not have tolerated anyone ever being one. But this time, Mr. President, I really can’t see how you can ever “face your father” again and try to convince him that what you have just done in the face of this unimaginable tragedy for some of the people you serve can be seen as anything but what someone who is a total loser would do. Today, you have not demonstrated the qualities of a good leader or a good human being.

Janice Fleuriel lives in Buckland.