Good morning, America. You find yourself a battlefield.
This morning, John Kasich made the decision to withdraw his candidacy for the Presidency. With his withdrawal, there is one candidate running on behalf of the Republican Party, real-estate baron and reality-TV star Donald J. Trump. The rest of the pieces have been swept from the board; the old guard of Jeb Bush and Rick Perry, the New Republican technocrats of Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio, the eccentrics (Fiorina? Carson?), the theocrats (Cruz and Huckabee) and the desperate failures, craving for a purpose to stay relevant (most of the rest). All stood against a reality star yelling about Megyn Kelly menustrating or Mexicans paying for a wall. All lost. Trump won.
I would argue that the Democratic primary is done and that my candidate, who I love and to whom I sent many dollars, has lost. Many of his supporters disagree with me. That is, here, irrelevant. What is relevant is that as of this morning, whether it’s Clinton who’s nominated or a surprising Sanders, we are facing down an election against Donald Trump. Take a second to acknowledge what that means in context of our history. The last six nominees of the Republican Party were, in order from most recent, a governor, a veteran Senator, a Governor with a Presidential father, a veteran Senator and Senate Majority Leader, an ambassador and Vice President, and a veteran Governor. Now, do I think that, between Romney and Reagan, there was a single Republican nominee who wasn’t a destructive figure? who wasn’t a sociopath and a sellout to the rich? who wasn’t racist, xenophobic, intolerant? Of course not. But, at the end of the day, it was impossible to call them unqualified. Trump’s experience in governance? He ran businesses and only had to declare bankruptcy four times.
Trump’s lack of qualification, while undeniable, is still not the issue that disqualifies him from holding the Oval Office, however. Since the last summer, we’ve been stewing in the mire of post-Trump America, where new perspectives are being legitimized, ones that should never have been legitimized; the Milo Yiannopoulouses shouting “feminists are hideous obese lesbians who should all be ashamed of themselves”, the Twitter alt-righters who target so-called “faggots” who won’t get on the “Trump Train”, the old men at his rallies telling black men to “get out of my goddamn country”, pepper-spray and swinging signpost in hands. And in that, we’ve lost sight of how atrocious Trump is as a man and as a man of policy.
Imagine, if you will. Somewhere in Arizona’s Maricopa County, sitting alongside the border, there is a nine-year-old boy sitting in a poor family’s apartment. That family fled across the border in 2006, when that boy was but six months old, to avoid the Zetas who had taken over their town. That boy is brilliant and is being brought up by a family that wants him a future. She speaks English much more comfortably than she speaks Spanish. He is headed, in our America, to Harvard or Stanford or Williams or Amherst. He is heading, in Trump’s America, back to a nation where he is not home, on the basis of his parents’ desperate desire to protect him from the worst of that nation.
Somewhere in New Hampshire’s Carroll County, there is a sixteen-year-old girl who’s pregnant and who’s terrified, both by the possibility of raising a child she does not want with a father who will not be involved and by the reality that her conservative, religious parents will reject her when she starts to show the signs of pregnancy. In our America, she will be able to choose a clean, safe and legal abortion freely and without difficulty or cost. In Donald Trump’s America, the “abortion-factories” will be closed and she’ll have to choose; risk my family by having the child, or risk my life in a back-alley or self-induced abortion.
Somewhere in Michigan, there’s another sixteen-year-old girl, depressed to the point of being suicidal from the taunting of her peers over her weight and her splotchy skin. In our America, she’ll have a chance, buoyed by leaders that affirm the value of every American and who fight our mental health crisis by overhauling our underfunded crisis-care and mental health care system. In Trump’s America, she’ll see her President ridiculing women based on their appearance and saying that conventionally-unattractive women should be ashamed to leave their bedrooms. She may commit suicide.
Somewhere on Stanford campus, there is an activist who stands with me in supporting Bernie Sanders. He thinks Hillary Clinton is corrupt and moderate, to the point where he plans to write in Sanders as a protest vote if she’s nominated. In our America, he will, at worst, have a President who is nearly the same, politically, as President Obama, and though that might not be a pleasant choice for him, it will do. In Donald Trump’s America, he will be in a nation where Mexicans are hated, where women are objects, where the poor are bugs, where Muslims are there to be tortured and expelled from the country, and where he will be in Hell.
Somewhere in inner-city Chicago, a black family raised by a poor, aging grandmother mourns their dead mother’s eldest son, shot in the street by a racist cop. In our America, our leaders will feel their pain, will fight to bring the officer to justice, and will fight to enrich that family who never, under our broken system, had an economic chance. In Trump’s America, when that family’s neighbors take to the streets shouting “black lives matter” at cops who think that black lives are not lives, those officers will shell them with tear-gas and rubber bullets and unlawful searches and water-cannons and possibly more live rounds, and their President will look on and laugh and voice his fervent opposition to black families, or in his parlance, thugs, who are literally fighting for their lives.
Somewhere in rural Mississippi, a white man is gearing up for the election, buying a hundred-dollar large-canvas Trump sign and putting it on the side of his thirty-thousand-dollar home. He’s supporting his candidate because he believes that Trump will make America a whiter country, possibly one white enough that he’ll be able to get a manufacturing job again. In our America, we’ll fight his atrocious social values and his regressive beliefs, but won’t let that stand in the way of giving him a chance in an economy bent against him. In Trump’s America, he’ll be seen as a useful idiot, ready to fill the stands at a rally, ready to punch a protester and earn his President’s public support, he will get poorer, his community will grow more addicted, more discouraged and more inescapable, and his former boss, who outsourced his factory’s jobs to Bangladesh, will grow even richer.
We stand at a crossroads in America today. Do we choose Trump? Do we choose a man who would build a wall around our nation to keep the world out? Do we choose a man who sees a woman wearing a burqa at a rally and has security put her outside the convention-center’s walls? Do we choose a man who would isolate us from the world and who would make us the rogue agent and pariah of the international community? Or do we choose civilization by, on Election Day, voting and voting against the villain Donald Trump and his allies downballot?
America, this is your chance to choose civility and civilization, or the 21st-century warlord banging at your door. That warlord is Trump. God save us all if you make the wrong decision. Because we know that our government, One Nation Under Trump, won’t save us.
