Thoughts on the Trump years

You were a young mother when he was elected. Your first kid was only two and you thought, at least he won’t remember the days of crying. You lived in Red Hook in a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment that you thought you’d live in for the next 20 years. You were still married.

This wasn’t the first election you cared about, or worked on or canvassed for. But you were as shocked as almost everyone else in the country and world the night you heard the tone in Steve Kornacki’s voice and saw what was happening. You were as shocked and as shamed, because even at 9pm that night you understood the gravity of the mistakes you all had made - confusing hope for effort, thinking it would be so easy to stop misogyny and racism with slogans and pantsuits and Rosie the Riveter, but even worse, thinking that what you were doing then to fight it was actually hard. You didn’t yet know hard.

Your first thought the next morning was fear that you would be alone. Alone in your grief, alone with the weight of what it meant, how bad it could get. You worried that the people you most loved and trusted would somehow turn on you, telling you to give him a chance, abandoning you in your heartbreak. You worried most about your mom and step dad, the most loyal and stalwart of Democrats, the most knowledgeable of all the people in your life about history and other Presidents and the rise of fascism and the way governments work. You worried that when you spoke to them they would have resignation in their voices, saying “well honey, he’s the President now…”. You were worried you’d be the only one who would never accept him as your President.

This was a worry borne from your life, as all worries are. Your life spent caring - unabashedly, nakedly caring. You were used to being the one who cared the most, and because you now knew that seeing that in another person when you yourself are too scared to care, because it means you want something that you might not get - or worse, that you wanted something you didn’t get - makes people want to offload the idea that they too have permission to care, and to do that they laugh at you, or dismiss you, or roll their eyes at you, or assign identities to you that turn your caring into a trait rather than a compulsion of the heart, a prerequisite for living. You were worried that, once again, you’d be the one who cared the most, and the proverbial world would sigh and roll its eyes at you - this again? Calm down.

But you were wrong. When you called your mom she was in tears too and she said we’ll impeach him in the first few months, there’s no way he will serve a full term; Republicans will defect, there will be marching in the streets, this won’t stand. When you dropped off your son at daycare, in a grief drenched fugue state, his beloved caregiver opened the door and wrapped her arms around you and you both sobbed as he toddled off to join the other kids of parents who had also had sleepless nights, or tear filled ones. When you went into the city later that day and every day for the next week, you saw people weeping openly walking down Broadway, in line at the bodega; a woman sitting on the B train reading the news on her phone as you held onto the handrail above her looked up, her eyes as red as yours, and just said quietly, shaking her head, “the supreme court.”

Was it comforting or scary to see everyone around you care as much as you did? To see that not only were you not abandoned in the horror of this moment, your grief was being confirmed by every trusted source, your devastation was being reflected back in every interaction, your worries weren’t exaggerated? For once, you weren’t being too sensitive. You weren’t overreacting. The only person who rolled their eyes at you was the only person you know who voted for him, who said “Jesus, get over it! It’s just politics - it won’t affect your life!”

Everywhere you looked, people understood that it would. By the hundreds, flocking to airports to protest the Muslim ban; lawyers camping out overnight, sitting in dingy corners of JFK and LGA, LAX and DFW, to file petitions for citizens unlawfully detained by an unlawful president.

You found solace in the ravings and information shared by a wide cast of characters on Facebook - the mother of a girl you hung out with once on a Carnival Cruise after you graduated from social work school, a kid you went to church with 30 years ago, your beloved kindergarten teacher, a good friend of your parents’ whom you had never met in person. You get reminded of those early posts - about Betsy DeVos, the Paris Accord, the ACA - and are shocked by how verbose and clear eyed you were. You weren’t yet weary, it was still about #resisting; there was a sense that the sheer will of the people could be heard loud enough to make him go away.

The problem of course was that the chorus of people caring wasn’t ubiquitous. Call it the algorithm or your bubble or whatever the new concept is for the fact that people who think alike, who worry about the same things and dream about the same futures, tend to want to talk to each other and share information with each other and be supported and heard by each other. It doesn’t feel good to have someone who doesn’t think your trans kid has the right to exist in their own body tell you that every day, so you tend to avoid them. You see now how companies exploited that - the basic human need for safety and belonging - into fortunes they use to accumulate an infinitely widening reign of control.

There were millions and millions of people who barely registered the election beyond a “yo, that’s crazy.” There were millions and millions of people who were too sick, too addicted, too sad, too heartbroken, too lonely, in too much pain, too exhausted to care.

There were also people like the truck driver you met outside of a gas station on the way to Atlantic City the Friday after it happened who said “I really didn’t think he had any chance of winning. If I did, I never would have voted for him.”

And then there were bubbles and algos and feeds and whole communities of people who thought - we won. Look at us, owning the libs. You know these people. You grew up with them. Wherever you grew up, you grew up with them. There were groups of people throughout your life, the ones for whom your radical vulnerability was the most triggering because they were at some point punished for wanting something, for needing something, and the pain of that punishment was too great to bear, so instead of feeling it, they agreed to be separated from themselves. They put themselves, their child selves, their wounded selves, their needy selves, the ones who sometimes wanted to cry, who yearned to be listened to earnestly and held gently and without judgement, behind a no trespassing sign in the darkest brambles of their souls, and with every year that passed the hatred grew more and more for the ones who refused to do that, who refused to cut off their tenderest parts for a facade of strength. They saw in you what they see in trans kids, in dykes, in fierce brilliant Black prosecutors, in immigrants finding community in this country without being forced to sacrifice their culture, in women who not only have abortions, but aren’t ashamed of them. They saw a life that was possible, that could have been possible, that instead they chose to reject because, in the reverse of Anaiis Nin’s words, the risk of blossoming was more painful than the risk it took to remain tight in a bud. If someone, anyone, has that life - a life that has blossomed, a life of self-friendliness, a life of belonging, a life without shame or self-hatred - then that means they could have blossomed too. Seeing you live it, and not only live it but fight for other people to be able to live it, made them so violently angry at themselves and the dwindling prospects of a happy future that they wanted to steal it from you, to prove that there wasn’t some defect with them, that it wasn’t a choice to be this miserable but something all humans are destined to endure.

Your mom used to say, when someone was mean to you - look for the pain. And it was so, so easy to see the pain. Because there is no greater pain, you know, than the pain of thinking the only way for me to be happy is if someone else is less happy than me.

There were times when you had pity in your heart for them; there were times when the pity was transformed into true compassion. And there were times, the darkest times, when you felt hate peering around the corner of your heart, red eyes glowing. You wanted to hate him, the cult leader of the sad bullies. It would feel satisfying to. You lost count of the number of people who said - he’s the first person I ever hated. And sometimes, yes. You hated him, and what he had unleashed. The locusts emerging from the billowing smoke of a bottomless pit. The basket of deplorables. The magats.

But any time you went too far in that direction there was a little thread that got caught in the zipper. You couldn’t hate them for being told to hate other people. You saw where that cycle led. It led to stealing your joy, making you quicker to anger, more resentful of what you didn’t have, territorial and being pulled under a quicksand of scarcity.

Because the truth was that even in the worst of what he wrought, even in the crushing despair and dread of the pandemic, even when your own marriage was ending and you were scared about your future, you didn’t want to be someone else. You didn’t want to take something from someone else. You didn’t want to be in another life.

Somehow, some way, your life got even richer for fighting him. The organizations you now work for and lead were born in the aftermath of his illegitimate rise. The people you met - the lifelong friendships, the sisterhood, the solidarity, the memories. Understanding what it means to have true comrades. Your kids canvassing with you, your kids canvassing for you when you decided to run for office. The vastness you learned about politics and the world and the systems that work and the ones that are broken, and how sometimes they’re the same. How you saw that, despite the centrifugal forces pulling it in opposite the directions, the center mostly held - due entirely to all the people who cared enough to hold it. How you laughed, and laughed, and laughed. How some of the funniest moments of your life came after the hardest losses, in the trenches, picking up the pieces, and still, somehow, some way, so glad to be alive.

You spend the last four days of these years in Pennsylvania, going door to door to the houses of people who voted by mail in ballot and had that ballot rejected. Whether because of a signature or date or secrecy envelope issue, you get a list texted to you from a voter protection volunteer sitting at his kitchen table named Robert, with names of people in Wayne or Upper Darby or Chichester, and you painstakingly research what the issue may be and figure out how to cure their ballots, and you give them - Maryanne, Elijah, Tang, Wanda - your cell phone number and tell them that they are welcome to call or text with any questions at all, because their vote matters. And because, you know, you care. And every one of them you meet cares too.

You know these will be the last days of these years because whatever comes next will no longer be about him. If he wins again, you begin a different fight, a bigger fight, a scarier fight, against the forces who have been using him as a limp, willing puppet. If he loses, the cult he built will begin to dwindle. The people who saw in him someone even meaner and more soul sick than they fear they are, who believed him when he said “there’s a reason you’re so sad, and that reason is someone other than you" will slink out the back door, after the florescent lights get flipped on at 4am, revealing everyone’s booze slick faces.

These were the hardest years of your life. Your understanding of humanity - yours, and everyone else’s - changed forever, and with it changed the topography of your heart. You grew up. You learned a lot more than you knew before, enough to know how much more there still is to learn. You became a person you’re proud to be. You fucked up and hurt people, and sometimes you were brave enough to admit it. You stared down those red eyes of hate and said, leave me alone. You’re too good for that. Your country is too good for that.

You’re still, you suppose in some relative sense, a young mother. That two year old just turned 10, and he has a younger brother who started kindergarten two months ago. You only lived in that apartment in Red Hook for another two years, not 20. You’re not married anymore.

You can’t be sure of what comes next. In your life, or in this country, and how the two will affect each other. But tonight on the last night of these years you know one thing you didn’t know before they started - that you aren’t alone, that being alone will never again be a worry in your heart - and it feels like the most important thing, and maybe the only thing, and you feel so grateful to have realized it that you almost - almost - feel grateful to him.

He didn’t give it to you, but you learned it nonetheless. And you get to take it with you when he’s gone.