The last shit I ever want to write about Donald Trump
This one's from The Archives: a journal entry *turned* voter plea *turned* aborted draft *turned* time capsule that, like the title says, is the last shit I ever want to write about Donald Trump. Some people write their thoughts down on paper and then burn them; posting to Lifting Fog is the next best option!
Close your eyes for a second and picture an easy June morning, 2021. You wake up and grab your phone from under the sheets. On Twitter: indoor dining resumes in New York, the United States rejoins the Paris Accords, 'Black Widow' premieres to tepid reviews. There's an overnight text from your friend about some big group outing. COVID cases have been going down for months and, with a working vaccine, life has resumed some semblance of normalcy. You haven't thought about toilet paper, as a subject, in forever. America is not currently on fire.
...This isn't even that exhilarating a fantasy ("tepid reviews for 'Black Widow'"? That’s the best you could do, Henning?), but I'll tell you what: it sounds nice. It sounds normal. And after four years of Trump's lies, vitriol, incompetence, and just... exhaustion, "normal" may as well be a coke-fueled Vegas bender. Me and the boys are f**kin' READY.
Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, is going to lose re-election. Not today, probably, maybe not even this week. Hell, the rest of 2020 may very well be dominated by a legal battle for the presidency! [EDITOR'S NOTE: It was!] And you KNOW the guy will be rage-tweeting through it all, dragging us into cultural hell as he desperately clings to the only thing keeping him from being dragged into jail. We're hardly out of the woods yet.
What I look forward to more than anything -- and I suspect I'm not alone -- is finally evicting this dude from a brain he's been living in rent-free for four+ years. Trump has been the fucking worst roommate of all time: practicing his drums late into the night, moving furniture first thing in the morning. Each new week, each new day, pulling some shit that forces you to come up with an entirely new system of evaluation. His shtick was kind of funny at first! But now you're genuinely concerned, not wrongly, that the guy might actually murder you. I just want my security deposit back*.
*this metaphor implies I voted for Trump in 2016 and who do you think I am, 53% of white female voters?
Listen: Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. doesn't cut much of an inspiring profile. In the past I've compared him to "a can of orange La Croix" (at this point I'd really only be willing to upgrade him to, like, tangerine) and most of us would rank him at least fourth on a list of Democratic candidates. But that part's done; this election, unfortunately, is now less about staking our claim to some bright future than preventing disaster. Biden is, best case scenario, merely a Trojan Horse for younger, more progressive politics. At the same time, he's -- not to get melodramatic or anything -- our only shot at even beginning to turn this country around. Under Trump, that possiblity isn't just squashed, it's rendered forever impossible.
So yes, I can concede that on side of the electoral coin is a largely uninspiring moderate relic... but on the other side? A Cheeto-dusted rapist, a brain-damaged Play-Doh mold of America's collective sins.
Even if we were to take absolutely every one of Trump's horrific actions out of the equation -- forget about four years of failed policies and ineptitude and, you know, fomenting white supremacy -- do you really think this assclown has done a good job these past six months? And even if, we're getting crazy-hypothetical now, no nation-quaking shit is engineered in a second four year term... do you REALLY still want to spend those years with this guy's toxic cloud of greed, selfishness, and incuriousness (not a word but it works) hanging over our heads? Fucking COME ON if you try to tell me the answer is within a thousand miles of yes.
Biden's only fine. But when I consider the rampant insensitivity his opponent has displayed over COVID (a virus, we hardly need a reminder, that has killed 300,000 people), the sheer psychological badness with which he and his fucking idiot goons fill our contry -- well, then a "dotty old man" (who's barely older than Trump, mind) espousing kindness and responsibility feels like a practically revolutionary choice. Or at LEAST a no-brainer.
You could tell me that Trump will ensure American prosperity for generations (not true), protect our nation from foreign attack (not true), carry us all into a bright, beautiful future (come on!). But even if all these things were true, he'd still be achieving them standing at the helm of an America I don't believe in, that I'm ashamed of, that I know is denying some fundamental part of its moral promise. And all for fucking what?
A vote for Trump is a vote for a rapidly dying past, one that will only die quicker with more environmental regulatory rollback. You want any semblance of a livable planet for future generations of climate change deniers to enjoy? Then vote for Biden, aka the only candidate who even gives that planet a fighting chance. If there's any good Trump has done, it's in the way he's forced this confrontation with moral and actual apocalypse to the surface; forced us to "reckon with ghosts" as Ta-Nehisi Coates would put it. We couldn't see them before, or more accurately didn't want to. Now we've got some ghosts to bust!
So let's cast Trump aside like Rumpelstiltskin; leave him to die on one of his gold-plated toilets, keeling over reading Twitter comments. If nothing else, when he goes, I'll never have to write a post this bad again!
