This story is part of America @ 250: The Questions Before Us, a series from IPM News and the Illinois Student Newsroom.
CHAMPAIGN — A birthday is a time for celebration and reflection: Where have we been? Where are we right now? And where are we going?
IPM is celebrating America’s 250th birthday by inviting people from across east-central Illinois to share what they think are the most important questions facing Americans at this historic moment.
Mattoon resident Diane Lathrop was born and raised in east central Illinois. She was valedictorian of the Mattoon Senior High School class of 1971 and attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Lathrop retired in 2023 after working in the financial services industry for more than 40 years. She supports local conservation through the Grand Prairie Friends land trust and enjoys spending time with Zumi, her greyhound.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I don’t like the way I’ve changed since the Trump era.
At one time, I used to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I was open to meeting new people, and I wanted to hear what they had to say. But now that I know that 70% of the people in my area voted for Trump, I’ll just be walking around — I’ll be shopping at Walmart — and I’m just side-eyeing everybody. Are they a Trumper? Are they a Trumper?
And I’m suspicious of everybody now. I never used to be.
I’m not open to being friends with anybody who could support someone like him and all of his minions destroying our economy, trying to destroy separation of church and state, destroying diversity, equity and inclusion, trying to destroy the media, destroying our relationships with our allies, completely upending the entire world order and leaving the lead position to China, environmental protections gutted, spending like a drunken sailor, cutting billions cut from Medicaid, health insurance premiums going up, and then there’s this just monumental corruption and grift, and the war, and everything costs more. There’s got to be a screw loose somewhere.
Every day I get up and find out about a new horrid thing they’re doing. I’m enraged all the time, every day, 24/7.
I lived through the 200th anniversary, but now, 50 years later, in 2026, seems to me like we are in an era of democracy in grave danger.
We have our own government basically working, working hard, to destroy everything that I was ever taught about how our government is supposed to work, and that was dear to me — the things I really cared about.
It’s always been a pendulum, I realize that, but I don’t think it’s ever swung this far toward the destruction of democracy that I’m not just really sure Humpty Dumpty will be able to be put back together again.
I just feel like there’s been a total breakdown, and I can’t believe how fast it happened.
And I can’t believe that anyone would accept this. And the fact that 33% of people actually are still in support of all of this, or claiming to be, leaves us with really one shred of power, maybe, and that’s our vote. And we’re always told, oh, that’s our power as citizens, we can vote.
Well, guess what? They’re tearing that down too. They’re trying, trying really hard. And it appears the Supreme Court is on their side, and we know the Justice Department will be on their side.
My big hope is that people are so fired up now and so just disgusted with everything they’re seeing and how it’s affecting them personally now — it’s not somebody else, it’s them personally — that they will just troop to the polls in numbers never seen before.
And then my hope would be, if and when the Democrats can get control of Congress, that they can do two things at the same time. And one is, start the process of accountability. There have to be investigations. There have to be prosecutions.
But then they also need to put some policies in place that can prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again.
So my big question is:
What was it — or wasn’t it — that was in place that allowed the breakdown of everything we thought was so strong about our government? All the mechanisms that we thought would protect us against an authoritarian takeover, basically.
Then my next question is: What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do to recover our democracy after these people are gone?
This story was reported by University of Illinois Journalism Professor Charles “Stretch” Ledford. If you have an idea for the America @ 250 series or would like to be featured in an upcoming story, please contact Stretch at stretch@illinois.edu.