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GUEST COMMENTARY - My inbox is full of lament (and encouragement).
My Instagram feed is full of anger and “the arc of the moral universe bends slow but…”
My Facebook brims with exhortations to focus on the positive, on what we can control, on the next fight.
I live in a poor Democratic stronghold in southeastern Connecticut. Kamala Harris won our state by more than 200,000 votes. Our seven paltry electoral votes went blue. Here, Jill Stein got a lot more votes than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but nowhere near enough to swing the Nutmeg State red.
I didn’t plant a Harris/Walz sign on my front walk. I didn’t knock on doors in Pennsylvania. I didn’t give any money in response to the desperate and constant text messages I received from Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and dozens of other Democratic pen pals. I also never figured out how to stop those texts from crowding onto my phone.
Now that the election — the longest for Donald Trump (he started campaigning and fomenting insurrection even before the White House door whacked him on the bottom in 2021) and the shortest (just 107 days) for Kamala Harris — is over, there’s a small voice in my head asking why I didn’t go in hard for Kamala’s politics of JOY.
I love joy! I love her laugh! But I also know the answer: 43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy. Continued shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel didn’t make me happy. For all their good vibes alchemy, the Harris/Walz campaign failed to depart from the Biden administration’s blank check for Benjamin Netanyahu’s version of saturation bombing.
There’s a lot her campaign should have/could have/might have done differently (if they had more time, if they had listened to different strategists) in terms of their ground game, how they spent their money, and who they focused on. There’s already a cottage industry of podcasters, pundits, and policy wonks at work figuring out just how and where the Harris/Walz campaign went wrong. But at the end of the day, of course, she lost because Trump won, because white men, atheist men, born-again men, Catholic men, rich men, poor men, men of all colors voted for him. They embraced his misogyny; his nativism; his racism; his Teflon-Don persona; his tall walls and barbed wire; his hatred of trans kids and gender as a spectrum; and his well-financed, loudly declared, legislatively-wired hatred of just about anyone who isn’t like him. Or maybe, just maybe, they held their noses against that foul hate-fest and voted for him because of some small, single, shining promise that rang out for them amid the cacophony of his raucous, roadshowing campaign. Who knows?
I’m not a pundit, a podcaster, or a policy wonk. I’m not a Democratic Party insider. In fact, I’ve often (but not in 2024) voted Green. I’m a mother of three bright, opinionated kids, two of whom don’t fit neatly into the rigid gender-presentation box now mandated by the Republican leadership. All three of those gorgeous human beings love peace and kindness. They’re friendly and trusting, as well as sharp and capable of sniffing out hypocrisy and equivocation. The day after the election, I sent them off to school with a warm lecture on staying true to our values of kindness and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person — even those who voted for Trump. “No one we know would vote for him,” my son asserted with the confidence of the young. He is incorrect. More than 75 million people in this country voted for him. We certainly know some of them… Some of them are our friends.
I have to keep explaining to my kids why Donald Trump won and what having him at the helm of our government (again) will mean — for the next four years (or forever). It’s not an easy task. But I have to try because I’ve got three reasons not to luxuriate in despair and nihilism. Instead, I have to tap into the power of my imagination to get me through the rough days ahead.
Imagining Our Way Through the Nightmare
They say that we have to imagine a thing before we can make it a reality. The moon shot, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (first imagined almost 20 years before it took place in 1963), robots, nuclear weapons and the anti-nuclear movement (both imagined, however inadequately, before they became realities), solar panels: all were ideas, dreams, or even nightmares first.
Amid my own fracturing in this post-election moment, all the shards of sadness and disappointment, I’ve been seeking out friends and strangers in a structured but informal way. In one community conversation, someone suggested we hold an inauguration un-watch party where we would share our vision for the next four years. I immediately latched onto that bit of wisdom, hoping we might indeed organize such an event with a booming sound system, poetry, pomp, and a podium.
Since that idea was shared, I’ve also been crafting the 47th president’s inauguration speech in my head — not the one he’ll give, of course, but the speech I wish he would make. I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway. Maybe getting them out into the world will give me the energy I need to do my part in bringing such words to life in spite of him. So, here goes:
A Speech for the Ages (All of Them)
My fellow Americans, and all those of you who still look to the United States as a land of opportunity, I, Donald J. Trump, am inaugurating a new era today. I’m stepping down from this post, which I barely won. My whole political career started out as a gag, a gig, a side project in my vast empire of hustle and hucksterism, and here I stand again on Inauguration Day. How wild is that?
Even crazier, this very day, the nation also honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And maybe it’s the ghost of that great justice-seeker that’s led me to make a very different speech than I planned or you expected.
I wanted to drain the swamp, but I’m the one who feels drained right now. Ditch diggers the world over will tell you that it’s hard work. I’m exhausted and so, later today, I’m headed home to Mar-a-Lago (or to jail). Before I go, I want to share a few thoughts — one last weave — with all of you. So here are some of the mistakes and missteps I’ve made and the new thoughts I’ve recently been having.
The Environment: I’m a city guy, a golf-course guy. Nature makes me uncomfortable. It’s too big and I don’t understand it. Once in office, I wanted to smash it, drill it for its riches, and make it smaller. But I’ve rethought that. We should, I now think, protect nature. The United States is such a big country and we’re lucky to still have any nature at all, or maybe it’s less luck and more the hard work of environmentalists, but that’s a story for another day.
Racism: How loud can a dog whistle be and still be a dog whistle? Kamala Harris had a little more than 107 days to run against me. The missteps, delays, and infighting in the Democratic Party establishment were delightful to watch, but my campaign made it all about misogynoir — that’s a new word for me and one I had to practice saying for this speech. Throughout my career as a real-estate developer, a man about New York, a TV personality, and a politician, I have been a racist. I still am a racist.
I only have a short time to unlearn a lifetime of prejudice and I might not get all the way there. Of course, this is a fantasy speech, but even in such a situation people don’t transform overnight. I have a lot to atone for, but Black women deserve a special apology from me. I am sorry. If I have any money after this election campaign and all my lawsuits, I will gift some of it to Howard University in Kamala Harris’s name and more to support whatever Stacey Abrams is up to right now.
Women: There’s no excuse, no apology I can make for how I’ve treated you. So, I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to make this suggestion to other men: Don’t follow my lead. Don’t become a Trump. Being a man shouldn’t mean using your strength to hurt or denigrate others. I’m a misogynist and don’t deserve to be president.
This election demonstrated that, as issues, reproductive rights cut deep. I’ve stood on both sides of that chasm (even in the same speech or at least on the same day), promising the Christian right abortion bans, telling awful lies about late-term abortions, and then backing away from all of that in a word salad of vagueness.
About babies, uteruses, fetuses, and choice, I have nothing to say. I have no authority when it comes to them and should do nothing but listen.
War: I tapped into something fundamental in my speeches on the campaign trail, didn’t I? Besides surfacing the hatred, homophobia, and misogyny that so many Americans have, I also struck an odd note about militarism. As you know, I’m no pacifist, but I did pick up just how dismayed and angry so many Americans are by the money this country spends globally fighting wars, donating weapons, and offering military aid. I then turned that discomfort into a gross nativism to serve my ego, fitting it into my narrative of American exceptionalism — keeping people out, while keeping our money and weaponry in, and leaving the otherwise shut border door slightly ajar for the cheap goods of the world. It hardly matters that none of that will work, since it played so well in Peoria.
I will say, though, that the United States should not be supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, a war that’s killing so many civilians, destroying so much infrastructure, and seeding future grievances and conflicts you’ll be dealing with for generations. Good luck with all that. I’ll be over here working on my golf handicap (and it honestly does need work).
Beyond the Middle East, the United States clearly needs to rethink its relationship with the rest of the world and, believe you me, I’m not the guy to do that kind of hard work.
Immigrants: I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible. Did you know that your lifestyles wouldn’t last 20 minutes without all those illegally employed at low wages doing dangerous, difficult jobs for major corporations? When was the last time you slaughtered and dressed a chicken, changed the sheets on king-sized beds and cleaned rooms in a big hotel, took care of a whole nursing home full of elderly people, or worked in an industrial laundry? Everyone loves going apple-picking in the fall, but have you ever picked apples for a 12-hour shift? Of course, I should talk, given that I employed lots of undocumented workers across my many businesses.
In truth, for all the storm and fury I created over illegal immigrants, our economy needs workers. That same economy creates enduring inequities and spews out enough climate-changing greenhouse gasses to propel people in the Global South off their lands and out of their communities, searching for better prospects here in the U.S. The last time I was in office, I separated kids from their families and made a traumatizing mess that people still haven’t recovered from. I don’t want to do it again!
Trans People’s Rights: If you haven’t watched the ads that my campaign put out about trans people, you’re lucky. They’re unconscionable and show that I’ll stop at nothing to get elected, not even demonizing a small, vulnerable group of Americans. It was like scapegoating Shakers or Zoroastrians! Instead of spending $400 million on ads that vilified trans people, I literally could have given each trans person more than $1,000, because they represent about under 2% of the U.S. population. So, here’s what I’m going to say now from this huge platform you’ve given me: Trans people are people. They deserve freedom, have the right to make a living, stay personally safe, play sports, go to the bathroom, and be left alone. The Republican Party writ large should stop being so transphobic, a word I just learned that feels weird in my mouth.
Electoral Reform: This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd. We worked harder and spoke louder to fewer people on more divisive and fear-pitched issues. Some were literally drowning in text ads, mailbox stuffers, emails, and phone calls. Others barely knew there was an election coming. This has to change. Our electoral system is broken, not because of phantom ballot-box stuffers or other gross lies I told, but because of the Electoral College and the outsized influence of corporate interests. There are smart people out there with reasonable ideas about how to change that. We should listen to them — and I should stop talking!
The Economy: They say, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and they’re right. I flogged that horse hard on the campaign trail. What does it say about us that cheap gas, cheap eggs, and cheap consumer goods all come at the expense of the damage I’ve promised to do to this world? Imagine for a moment the real expense, environmental and otherwise, of cheap and plentiful gas and groceries, and the havoc my economic policies will wreak internationally.
Being an American is expensive. Being a Hegemon is climate destroying. Living a First World lifestyle exacts a huge toll on the environment. Nationally and individually, we should be paying massive reparations, indemnities, and fines for the damage our domestic and foreign economic policies have caused. That money could buy a heck of a lot of sea walls, windmills, and electric mass transit systems as we make meaningful changes to mitigate the coming climate disaster and build resiliency. Of course, I’m too old to do anything except to get out of the way so that the work that I held at bay for too long can start in earnest.
And One Last Thing, America: I am the Great Disrupter and I almost broke America. There are those who would say it’s been broken for a long time. Those who would say that it was broken from day one. You can debate that to your heart’s content. For me, this all started as a big scam, an ego-boosting game, another hustle. Still, as you can see, I learned a thing or two along the way. Now, I plan to get out of the way and only hope that all of you who voted for me can learn something, too.
(Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She is a TomDispatch regular, writes occasionally for WagingNonviolence.Org, and serves on the Board of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer. This article was first published in TomDispatch.)
