Detoxifying from Trump
Ahead, a long twilight struggle over reality
Think of the presidential transition as a couple buying a fixer-upper. Before you install the furniture, hang the art, hook up the electronics, and devise a lighting scheme, you have to repair the plumbing, wiring, heating, cracks in the walls, leaks in the roof, and get the raccoons out of the attic — except it’s not raccoons but a gang of demented squatters.
Welcome to your new digs, Joe and Kamala!
“American democracy went through a near-death experience,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
A popular post-election song has been “Can’t You Feel a Brand New Day” from The Wiz. Alas, Evillene is still sending her flying monkeys to courtrooms to thwart the will of the voters.
Trump tweeted on November 27, “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained.” He treats everyone who rejects his magical thinking as if they are part of a vast conspiracy.
Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claimed Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez masterminded a plot to steal the election from Trump by rigging voting software. How must it feel to be defeated by a dead Marxist? And if Democrats were fraudulently switching millions of votes from Trump to Biden, why didn’t they retake the Senate while they were at it?
Justice Samuel Alito’s Nov. 12 speech to the Federalist Society almost made me apologize to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Imagine the persecution of having to sign a waiver! The mere thought of birth control makes the Blessed Virgin weep. Alito says, “You can’t say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman. Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”
In fact, making love in my own bedroom used to be a felony. Now apparently I’m infringing upon someone’s religious freedom by doing the thing that makes Jesus puke (as Sister Mary Ignatius said) without so much as being humiliated in the paper. Somehow, Sam omits entire classes of people from his appeal for tolerance. Well buckle up, because he is just getting started.
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in May that this year’s election was “not merely a political contest, but a referendum on Enlightenment values and on reality itself.” In a fine stroke of justice, the black people who are our petty tyrant’s favorite targets for erasure struck a mighty blow for reality by the simple act of exercising their voting franchise. Next up is a pair of Senate runoff elections on January 5 in Georgia, where control of the Senate hangs in the balance.
Some say the red in our flag represents the blood of patriots. How much blood do minorities have to shed before it counts? How many family members and frontline workers have to die before a demagogue’s devotees acknowledge that a virus is real? How many comforting lies do people have to swallow, how many times do their worst instincts have to be triggered, before they accept their part in the social contract?
The idea of testing a proposition, at the core of modern science, appears foreign to Trump’s troll armies, some of whom proudly wave Nazi flags. Jacob Bronowski, visiting Auschwitz in 1973, said, “Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”
To Trump’s mind, all who fail to worship him — from journalists to judges to Republican officials — are enemies of the people. He thinks the law changes at his will.
Trump’s “rigged election” charge is one of many things he tells reporters “You all know” when they do not. As Sen. Ben Sasse said, “A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.”
Our American house, as John Lewis called it, needs fixing. The trouble is, we can’t get rid of the crazy people in the attic for another seven weeks, and they want to burn the place down. Red alert.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at rrosendall@me.com.
Copyright © 2020 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.
