Over the past ten years, I have watched my country change in ways I never expected to see in my lifetime. At seventy-eight, I carry the long memory of someone who grew up believing that democracy, however imperfect, was durable. I believed in the resilience of institutions, in the value of dissent, in the idea that facts mattered and that power was something to be questioned, not worshiped.

I am not a political theorist. I am an observer. What troubles me most is not disagreement but the normalization of cruelty, the dismissal of accountability, the erosion of shared reality. When power demands loyalty over law, when institutions bend to personality, when difference is framed as threat, the foundations of democracy weaken.

Orange runs through many of these photographs. It stands in for one man, the figure so many have chosen to bend to.