The Observer is a bit late with this, but we felt we needed to say something about passing a year in Trump’s America. We won’t hit a complete orbit around the sun with Trump in charge until the deep freeze of January, of course. But this anniversary is, in some ways, even more important: a full year since many of us woke up to the idea that we would have to get off our asses and on our feet if we wanted to have a country worth saving in four years, or eight or however long it takes to push the hateful darkness emboldened that night back to the dustbin of history.
So many have responded to the call, getting labeled snowflakes and crybabies and sore losers but marching, painting signs, protesting, making umpteen-jillion phone calls to their congressmen to warn them of the perilous drop should they follow The Great Orange Lemming over the cliff. Speaking of, we’ve noticed that the catcalls about snowflakes have slowed. The Observer suspects it’s because people who voted for the golem that is currently rampaging through the countryside, destroying windmills and tossing children down wells, are themselves waking up to the fact that they done fornicated with the canine, even as half the country warned them not to stick the shiny copper penny of their vote in the electrical outlet marked “Trump.” But, as ol’ Sam Clemens once remarked: It’s easier to fool somebody than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled. Might we add, Mr. Twain: Convincing somebody they’ve been snookered is a damn sight easier than getting them to admit it.
There have been wins, of course. There’s Virginia, where voters just this month crushed the hateful pseudo-Trump running for governor while wiping out a Republican supermajority in their statehouse. In a victory as sweet as a lute, one of those elected there is a transgender woman who unseated a bigot who once bragged he was the state’s chief homophobe. Then there was the defeat, for now, of the Affordable Care Act repeal, a battle won by millions of regular folks making phone calls to Congress and the courage of a bare handful of Republican senators. Then, of course, there is the ongoing investigation by former FBI director Robert Mueller, who is doing his duty for God and country by putting on a miner’s helmet and crawling up the b-hole of the rotting whale carcass that is The Trump Empire. One can only imagine the gilded bricks being shat by Donnie T and his pirate crew right now, even as he distracts and obfuscates, puts on his Twitter Tough Guy act and pretends not to worry while imagining himself in a jumpsuit. It is truly a joy seeing him made afraid for a change.
There have been myriad bad moments in the past year, of course: the tiki-torch rallies of proud white supremacists; Heather Heyer mowed down in the streets in Charlottesville by a Nazi; the bowls of warm, taxpayer-funded cream set before the jowls of the fattest of fat cats; the systematic dismantling of the regulations and agencies that protect our health and the environment; the wounds inflicted on our international standing and national morale by the childish, divisive, daily assaults from a narcissist who has proven he doesn’t have the temperament to manage a Burger King restaurant, much less the most powerful country on the planet. The reality of Trump’s America is better in some ways than what we feared, but worse in other ways too numerous to mention. But this is our reality now. There is no reverse on this train. So keep on. Keep sticking up for what’s right. Know that The Observer is proud of you. Someday, when all this is over, you can tell the children what grandma did in The Resistance. Shorter term: After Virginia, Yours Truly has a feeling that a year from now, the good people of this country are going to clip some political wings. And in 2020, we’re going to see about sending Agent Orange packing, to skulk away the rest of his days in his golden phallus over Fifth Avenue. How sweet it will be.
Three years to go, friends. They will, no doubt, be years to remember, one way or the other. Stay frosty.