I Can’t Believe the Things We’ve Lived Through During Trumpism
And they just keep happening.
I got a memory on my Facebook page (yes, I’m an old person with a Facebook page) from 2019 about the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. For those who don’t recall, a white man (because it is always a white man) shot and killed 51 Muslims during prayers and injured 20 others.
He published a manifesto, because many of them do, in which he talked about a lot of things. Some of those things were sarcastic — he makes a comment about how video games made him a killer — and it’s pretty clear that he had been influenced by his time on places like 4chan and 8chan.
One of the other things the manifesto references is Donald Trump. More specifically, how Donald Trump was “a symbol of renewed white identity.”
This is a thing that happened in 2019. A mass shooter and white supremecist praised the President of the United States as a symbol of white supremacy and identity. The President of the United States. Let that sink in.
This is, of course, after we already knew that he was, if not a racist and a bigot, than someone who is more than happy to wear those hats if it gets him ahead in the polls. All of this is after the “very fine people on both sides” comment from the Charlottesville riot in 2017, referring to African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018, his 2015 speech announcing his run for president where he called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and many, many others before and after that. It also paved the way for his future racist comments, which he continues to make to stir up his base while deflecting any wrongdoing on his part.
We are also more than a year out from the attempted coup on January 6, which Trump both denies starting while also saying that the people who participated in an attempt to overthrow democracy on his behalf are being treated “unfairly.” You know, because we need to give people who attempt to overturn a free and fair election a slap on the wrist.
All of this seems outlandish if you said it back in 2015. The fact that any of this happened at all seems completely and utterly ridiculous. But we all lived through it, and continue to live through it together.
Republican congresspeople have praised a killer and offered to arm-wrestle over who gets to have them as an intern. Pretty much anything that comes out of the mouths of Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, or Matt Gaetz seems like a bad SNL parody of itself. And yet, here we are.
My partner, back in 2016, was afraid of what Trump would do to the government. She was terrified that he would tear things down, strip rights for women and minorities, and generally trample all over everything. I did my best to reassure her that the American system of government is too robust to let one man tear the whole thing down and that we as a country would be fine.
Man do I regret saying that.
We are not fine. Trump did untold damage to American democracy as president, and continues to damage it now that he’s out of office. He is undermining faith in our institutions as part of his everyday rhetoric and promising that only he and his chosen few can fix things. This is the language of a tyrant, and another Trump term is tantamount to the death of America as far as I’m concerned. Heck, he’s done so much damage already that I’m not even sure America will survive regardless at this point.
We have lived through more than six years of Trump trauma as a country that all of the things I describe above and more — and there are so, so many more — make me feel more numb than anything. I spent the Trump presidency so outraged and scared that at this point, I am burnt out. So many of us are so very burnt out because of Trumpism.
The thing is, we can’t afford to be burnt out. We need to show up in 2022 and 2024 like we did in 2020 so we can keep Trump and his cronies out of office. We will never keep all of them out — gerrymandering and the political right’s inevitable march toward fascism will ensure that — but we need to show them that these actions are not acceptable.
We cannot let the collective trauma that is Trumpism keep us from saving democracy, saving America, from becoming a fascist Christian ethnostate. We may not be the greatest country in the world anymore, if we ever were, but I think we can be. However, to get there, we need to show Trump and his cronies that we aren’t going to roll over and accept their racism, their bigotry, and their hate.
The 2022 midterms are here. Let’s show them that they cannot and will not win.
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