Fear Itself
Please let this be the last goddamned time I have to think about Donald Trump
I had every intention this week of writing a fun piece about movies that scared me as a child.
But there are too many real things to be afraid of right now.
The world sits entrenched in multiple wars resulting in large part from the death-throes of long-calcified interests enacting the violent endgame of a dying hold on power, even as the hatreds they have stoked become increasingly clear for what they are.
Climate change resulting from decades of fossil fuel overuse is melting permafrost and heating our oceans to a degree that the southeastern United States is currently under a barrage of successive historical-grade hurricanes. The dumbest people alive think that these storms have been created by democrats and/or scientists, because they have been told as much by the worst people on the planet.
And speaking of morons, Donald Trump is dangerously close to a second term in the White House that, were it to begin, would likely not end until his heart finally [redacted] or until JD Vance1 gets the word from his programmers to [redacted]. Millions of Americans think that this is a great idea, are in fact willing and excited to put back in power a man who would destroy what little semblance of a free and equitable country we have left, a man who stands for nothing but hatred, avarice, and venality and who, were he asked, would be unable to spell any word used in this sentence.
It’s incredible to think that we’re back here yet again. Not surprising, but incredible. There are people graduating college this year who had not started high school when Donald Trump began running for president. Take away everything terrifying that he stands for and represents, every horrible thing that he will get back to doing and every horror he will add to his arsenal should he be re-elected, and even still, at a very base level, I’m just tired of hearing from this gibbering imbecile.
There is an additional weariness that comes from two fronts: exasperation that there are still those who would support him, sure, but also just as much with those who would continue to feign surprise that this would be the case. We know who Trump is at this point, and what we have to deal with now and beyond his omnipresence on our political and media landscape is the fact that the people who support him are not blinkered - they also know who he is. And they like it. They don’t support him in spite of how terrible he is - they support him because of it. They want either a strongman dictator, or someone who will look out for interests which they hold dear and yet also happen to run counter to everything that threatens to give this country the innate potential of its supposed promise. In some cases they like him simply because they are fascists or bootlickers themselves.
It’s been interesting since the beginning of the Trump phenomena to see not only Republicans, but even the media and some Democrats treating Trump as if he were an aberrant offshoot from the GOP when he is in fact its apotheosis - the final form of its efforts to undo every piece of social progress this country has ever made. There is a considerable portion for whom this really starts at the abolition of slavery; the capital-C Conservative apparatus as we know it today really gets going in the wake of the Great Depression. They saw in those days how government intervention and social safety nets actually worked and, fearing that the public would rightfully embrace them as a result, they wigged out. And when Lyndon Johnson enacted some of the most progressive policies since FDR, they cracked open the door for the Birchers and other loonies to peer in and start looking for a space within their walls; once Reagan took the door off the hinges and let them flood in, it was only a matter of time before it was all over. The natural extrapolation of that is the Z-Grade white trash reality show casting call the contemporary GOP has become.
Reagan’s embrace of the Religious Right in particular feels key here. Reagan becomes more and more obviously, in hindsight, the fulcrum point at which American bent towards its decline, eradicating as many of the social strides made during the 60s and marrying religious zealotry to political conservatism. I see a lot of people wondering how Christians could support Trump and it makes complete sense to me not only in this context - its an intertwining that was established decades ago and has been interconnecting more strongly since - but also when you realize that the Christians who do so are from the fundamentalist strain who have built their faith around a dogma based not so much on the teachings of Christ as on the vindictive deity of the Old Testament, filtered through the increasingly moralistic and discriminatory epistles of Paul and the restrictive church that grew under their influence. I grew up around these people and they still, to various degrees, surround me. They do not worship a loving god - they obey a god who is himself a strongman; a god who in their mind will cast the people they’re afraid of into hell so that they no longer have to worry about them for all eternity; a god who will affirm their belief in their own righteousness by casting his damning finger outward at “them.” Trump has carved his political personality largely in that image, confluent as it is with his own ingrained hatred and prejudices.
I’m hoping this election won’t be as close as it seems. I’m hoping the promise of a nail-biter is largely a mirage created by a flailing polling industry and a media that has continued to fail us by treating this all as if it were business as usual. I yearn for a time in the near future where the only headlines about Donald Trump I have left to pay attention to are 1) he’s lost, 2) he’s going to prison, and 3) he’s dead.
I am happy to vote for Trump’s opposition based on her merits alone, but I would vote for almost anyone or anything else put in that same position. I will also freely admit that my interpretation of a citizen’s duty in the voting booth may differ from some: I see it as less about an expression of my own individual voice and more about making a choice that will achieve (at the very least the potential for) the most good for the most people. Those who think their conscious can withstand a third party vote, ask yourselves why no third party candidate has ever stood a chance in the modern era or why their disruptions have never moved the needle systemically (Nader syphoned enough votes to tilt the scales in George W Bush’s favor in 2000 and what did we get four years later? John Kerry). We have a two party system, for better or (mostly) worse. We do not have a coalition government. Perhaps that changes some day, but that day will not be within the next month.
The fears I mentioned earlier effect everyone. They make life worse for everyone except perhaps a very select few. And Trump will only exacerbate them and introduce new ones.
I don’t love writing about politics this directly because I don’t know that it accomplishes much. I think people are fairly ingrained these days especially. We also know the things that actually need to be done to make any kind of difference - donating, canvassing, engaging with people one-on-one - and we know by now whether we like it or not that the real work of a democracy comes in between elections. And I know that this kind of piece can feel hectoring. But this is serious shit, and it has dimensions that are also very personal to me. The Project 2025 agenda would by page 5 of its introduction lay the grounds to put me in prison. I fear that the constitutionality of my interracial marriage may not survive another Trump term. A Trump left to his own devices would further decimate women’s healthcare, perhaps including the kind of gynecological care that saved my wife’s life this past year. And if Tiffany had suffered under a Trump/Vance administration the miscarriage that ended our first pregnancy in 2018, there’s a chance she would be investigated as a criminal during one of the most vulnerable and painful periods of her life.
Early voting starts this week.
Maybe I’ll get around to writing about scary movies next Sunday.
-cs
A dead-eyed homunculus who is basically “Presentable Trump” run through generative AI in the sense that he’s everything terrible without the vigor or oddball charisma, though who also shows that Trump’s policies are here to stay for a long time (at least as long as they are politically viable on such a wide scale).