Thank you, President Trump. Thank you, Republican Party!
You see, our democracy has gotten lazy and out of shape. It’s been happening for a while now. Our democratic muscles just have not had enough exercise, both in quantity and quality. We’ve been weaker than many of us ever imagined.
So thank you! Your election and the continuing Republican majorities in the Senate and House have now removed any pretense of American democracy’s health and well being (at least on a national scale.)
Thank you for giving us Americans an all-expenses paid (or borrowed, most likely) four-year hands-on workshop in rebuilding our democracy, making it vibrant, well, effective, and fair. You and the Republicans have done us all a big favor by your party-over-country approach to diminishing our collective and individual rights, liberties, and quality of life. Those of us who care about these things, who actually believe in the values underpinning our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution now have the “opportunity” to put those theories into practice. Granted, many of us should have been doing much more much sooner, but now you’ve put us in resistance boot camp. This is not a drill for our nation. You and your crony-capitalist brand of incompetent, deceitful, uncaring, hateful, intolerant, power-hungry, and greedy deplorables represent the very antithesis to true democracy. We are the only ones who can fix this — and thanks to you, class is is very much in session.
Oh, but there is more to be grateful for:
- Thank you for winning the majority of those Electoral College votes! Your electoral triumph and popular vote loss have exposed our arcane Electoral College rules and requirements for the imperfect alchemy of a bygone era of gross inequality and cruelty for the relics that they are. #YoureNotPopular
- Thank you for making it crystal clear what you and the Republicans think about women. To you all, women are objects, property, optics, and accessories. Women and (let’s be real here) girls are just things to be desired based on their looks and vacuousness, later to to cast away when the next younger model arrives, indeed literally in your case. People say that you want to take America back to the 1950’s. It turns out that in terms of women’s rights to themselves, their bodies, and their lives, you are more thinking about the 1590’s. #PussyGrabber
- Thank you for showing all of us who do not look like you, talk like you, have a crapload of money (or a least a chain of highly leveraged ostentatious resort properties) or otherwise do not fit your mold that we are truly, if you get what you and the Republicans want, fucked. We will all be relegated to a second or third class citizen status and probably get giant ‘T’’s tattooed or branded on our bodies since you have to get the labor for the wall somewhere. #TrumpBrand
- Thank you for ripping off the veneer of patriotism from the Republican Party. There wasn’t much left after you shamefully attack the Kahn family last summer. But since then, you and your team’s repeated and nonchalant entanglements with Russia have relegated any claim of the Republicans actually putting “America First” to the dustbin of history, well before you ever uttered that neo-fascist phrase at your inauguration debacle. From now until proven otherwise, you and the Republicans lose the right to claim to be American patriots. On the plus side, you all get to own the word “traitor”. To be fair, there is one Republican who still can legitimately call himself a Patriot: Tom Brady. And, like you, President Trump, he had to give his balls to someone else in order to win. #PutinsPet
- Thank you for laying bare the hypocrisy of the religious right in our country. Thanks again to you and your fellow Republicans who supported you regardless (or perhaps because of) your philandering, constant lying, sexism, mysogeny, racism, classism, and general ill will and plain dickishness towards anyone whom you do not like for any reason, the rest of us will never have to in any way give a shit about what they preach in terms of morality, family values, behavior, truth, or faith. Jesus himself surely is on a 12-step program for loss as we speak. At least thanks to you we can simply laugh right (or left) in their fundamentalist faces whenever they attempt to claim any kind of superiority. #Timesaver
- And thank you for making it super clear that our nation has failed over generations to educate our citizens about actually being citizens. About the constitution. About the responsibility of voting and being informed. About social justice. We need to do better, and now more than ever, we have to do better. We will either do better or we will lose our democracy, our freedom, and even more of our lives. #DoOrDie
This is just the tip of the iceberg on reasons for “gratitude”, unfortunately. We look forward to seeing you and your side on the streets, at your offices, on the interwebs, and wherever else you dare to show up. While you may take the weekend off (or for that matter your entire term) know that we are on the job 24/7. And we intend to win.
PS: For an angrier read, please feel free to substitute “Fuck You” for “Thank You”.
PS: Note: I worked for months to ensure that this Red Wave would not happen in PA; I am not in any way saying that having to get our democracy back to health against these evil people and these structural barriers and odds is in some way better than having President Clinton in office. They’d be plenty of work, just not under the threat of loss of sovereignty or nuclear holocaust.