Tag: Racism

IMMIGRATION REFORM: TRUMP’S WHITE POWER MOVEMENT

Every once in a while, even as we grow numb with the clownish inanity of all things Trump, there arises a clarion call of meaning about this presidency, a diabolical message seeped in the worst traditions of America’s past. It was there in his nod to white supremacists in Charlottesville. It was there when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” And, most assuredly, it was there in a recent Washington Post analysis showing that Trump’s immigration plan would let white people cling to their majority status for up to five more years. In case there was ever a doubt, making America white again is what the Trump odyssey is all about.

The president is insisting that any immigration bill must drastically reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the country. According to the Post, such a move would disproportionately affect black and brown immigrants. Current census projections predict that whites will become a minority in this country in 2044. Trump’s proposed immigration restrictions could delay that seminal demographic shift until 2049. Those are metrics most of us rarely think about, but they represent the lifeblood of Trump diehards, angry white folks who feel they are being pushed aside by people of other races and ethnicities.

Racism isn’t merely one of many character flaws of our 45th president. It was the driving force behind his candidacy and it continues to fuel a cult-like base that worships at Trump’s altar and sees him as their last Great White Hope. This is not to say that the president is not also misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. There is no human right this guy won’t obliterate. Yet, the race card is always on top of his deck. And for good reason: Without the divide between white and non-white, this presidency is finished.

There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence that racism fueled Trump’s ride to the White House (here, here and here). He tapped into . . .no, he plowed into . . . a visceral strain of Caucasian anxiety and resentment, a feeling that white folks were being left behind in a country of people who no longer looked like them. Trump did something that no politician since the early days of George Wallace had even attempted: He made bigotry great again. For his followers, that is. He pulled it out of the darkness and onto the center stage of his campaign. Immigration policy is complicated, layered and nuanced, and Trump can’t be bothered with the details. All he cares about is the bottom line. If the number of black and brown people in this country can be significantly reduced, it’s a good day for Team Trump and the base.

As shocking as this phenomena may be to millennials – and to boomers with fading memories – there is nothing new here. Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ink was dry, Republicans were pushing their “Southern Strategy” to cash in on a raging white backlash against the end of Jim Crow laws. In every national election since, the GOP has milked white racism to its advantage, albeit with dog whistles through talk of “law and order”, “welfare queens” and “states’ rights”. Trump got rid of the dog whistles and dropped the subtlety. As much as we may have wanted the stain of our dark racial history to have remained in the past, it is very much part of our present. A major 2016 study showed that the number of slaves owned in southern counties more than 150 years ago accurately predicts the number of white voters who today identify as Republican and express racial resentment toward blacks. The higher the number of slaves, the more anti-black Republican voters.

A Richard Nixon campaign aide told the New York Times in 1970 that “. . .political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices.” Nixon’s Southern Strategy carried the day for him in 1968. According to historians, Nixon’s appeal to white racists came through his running mate, Spiro Agnew, a Trump-like persona with a larger and more alliterative vocabulary. Agnew once called an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap” and referred to the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativism”. He expressed nothing but contempt for black civil rights leaders, calling them “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type leaders.”

As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer observed, this Southern Strategy of turning white racial resentment into GOP votes was “the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.” Republican elites like Paul Ryan, who called Trump a racist during the campaign but has embraced him ever since, now own him and his unvarnished racism. “In truth,” as Heer put it, “he is their true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party pursued for more than a half a century.”

There is something to be said for clarity. As the unapologetic cheerleader for white supremacy, Trump has given us a binary choice, more stark, momentous and crucial than this country has faced since the start of the never-ending Civil War. He has put racism on the ballot. Now that bigotry is no longer disguised with code words and knowing winks, the choice is clear. If you believe in racism, Trump is your guy. If you reject racism, you have to reject Trump, and with him, all the Republican sheep in his flock.

Long live the Resistance! Either we nail this, or we slip ever further into the abyss of highly uncivil rights.

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

TRUMP ECLIPSES THE SUN & MOON IN SEARCH OF NAZI LOVE

Forget the eclipse. The biggest astronomical event of the past 10 days has been nothing short of a spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime sighting of presidential time travel. Some 72 years after this country and its allies defeated Hitler’s fascism, Donald Trump saddled up to the neo-Nazis. And, 152 years after Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army surrendered at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the Civil War, our president embraced and saluted those who fought to preserve slavery – past and present.

For us aging boomers, this has been a time warp from hell. We grew up with daily news of murdered civil rights workers and KKK lynchings, of frightened black children escorted by armed troops into previously all-white schools. We remember the pain, the fear, the hate. We also remember the powerful forces for change: Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Very slowly, things got better. Bigotry never disappeared, but it seemed to move off center stage, and into the fringes and dark reaches of a netherworld most of us rarely saw.

Yet, there they were, more than a half century later, hundreds of them, all white and mostly male, marching through the streets of Charlottesville, waving Confederate flags and Swastikas, shouting vile chants against Jews, blacks, gays and immigrants. It was a convention of wickedness: the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, the so-called “alt-right” and white nationalists, all united in a common bond of white supremacy. Once confined to whispering their bigoted messages through code words and dog whistles, Trump’s election unleashed these hate mongers from their caves and ushered them into the daylight of a world unprepared for a relitigation of basic human rights, dignity and decency.

It was a rare moment of totally unambiguous moral clarity. The bigots represent an evil world view, long ago dismissed as despicable by decent people everywhere. A high school student council president could have easily delivered that message. Donald Trump, however, neither could, would, nor did. Those marchers are part of his cherished base, and he spent days entangled in linguistic gymnastics, trying desperately not to lose the love of those who hate.

It was a huge turning point in this presidency. Trump has always been obsessed with branding, from luxurious high-rise condos, to wine, steaks, neck ties and bottled water. Let the history books note, with unequivocal clarity, that the Trump brand now stands for neo-Nazism, the KKK and white supremacy. Unlike all of the other political issues he has botched with his utter incompetence, petulance and arrogance, this one has legs. The president’s post-Charlottesville moment called for a simple, clear-cut, binary, which-side-are-you-on choice. Trump picked the wrong side. He will forever be the president who brought the Nazis, the Confederacy, and the KKK back from the dustbin of history. He will spend the rest of his life paying for that decision. Rest assured, it will be part of his obituary.

In fact, the ramifications of the president’s moral weakness and waffling have been mounting daily. For example:

• News magazines – in the U.S. and Europe – produced covers showing Trump in either a Nazi salute or some version of a KKK hood.

• Republican officials at every level have repudiated the President’s handling of the Charlottesville march, including at least 23 members of Congress and eight current or former GOP governors.

• So many major business leaders resigned from two presidential commissions over Trump’s remarks that he was forced to abolish both groups.

• All 16 members of the President’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities resigned, telling him: “Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.”

• More than 15 large charities have canceled scheduled fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo Club in Florida, all concerned with losing major donors as a result of Trump’s embrace of the hate groups.

• For the first time since the Kennedy Center Honors program started in 1978, neither the president nor first lady will attend, nor will there be a pre-show reception at the White House. That move was made after some of the honorees talked of boycotting the event because of Trump’s recent comments.

Of course, the country has been sharply divided over Trump since election day. Some saw him as the only hope for a very sick system. Others saw him as an emblem that went to the very heart of that sickness. Both sides made credible points. Workers and the middle class have been losing ground for decades, and their needs have been ignored by too many politicians – from both parties. One view had it that only an outsider like Trump could turn that around. The counterpoint: Trump was way too self-absorbed, inexperienced and rich to successfully navigate a meaningful redistribution of wealth. Or so the arguments went.

Charlottesville totally changed the game board. It removed all of the gray, leaving behind only black and white. As the late, great Pete Seeger sang, “Which Side Are You On?” There are no nice Nazis, vintage or neo. There are no good Ku Klux Klansmen. White supremacists spewing hatred toward Jews, blacks, gays and immigrants are worthy of nothing but our deepest scorn. What they represent is, simply and purely, evil. That’s one side. The other side, filled with olive branches for hateful hooligans bearing Swastikas, is the one that Donald Trump chose. That choice tarnished the White House so badly that repair can only come from a new occupant. Until that happens, more than a century of human rights’ gains hangs in the balance. Seeger’s question has never been so easy to answer. Choosing a side right now means moving forward or backward. It’s the difference between right and wrong.

FUELING FIRE & FURY: HOW TRUMP SPENT HIS SUMMER VACATION

It’s too early to tell for sure, but a former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard might have seriously messed with Donald Trump’s concept of what it means to win. More on that later, after a recap of the president’s winning ways of threatening nuclear annihilation.

A few days ago, I suggested in this space that President Trump, as a result of his inability to grasp the difference between a strategy and a tactic, had become the embodiment of what losing looks like. So, why doesn’t he do a course correction, or, in the parlance of organizational change, order a reset? The answer is simple: he is absolutely convinced that he is winning. A win to the Donald is any day that he can see himself as the most important and powerful man in the universe, the only person capable of solving the world’s problems through the sheer force of his strength and will. That, and the adulation of his base through constant public attention, is what winning is all about to this president.

Take nuclear war, for example, which Trump has latched onto like an obsessed teen with a new video game. Military expert Herman Kahn introduced us to the treacherous and dystopian world of nuclear bombast with a 1962 book called “Thinking about the Unthinkable”. Every U.S. president since then has spoken of nuclear devastation in measured and carefully chosen words. Not Trump. Nothing unthinkable to him about the prospect of obliterating millions of people.

With almost manic glee, he warned that North Korea will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Two days later, he became the first world leader to threaten war on Twitter, warning North Korea that the U.S. is now “locked and loaded”. Predictably, most sober-thinking adults in Congress were stunned and chagrined by the presidential war mongering. So were most heads of state, including our allies. North Korea responded with a threat to fire missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam, saying, “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason (Trump) and only absolute force can work on him.”

As Armageddon anxiety set in, Trump basked in his own glory. He was, after all, winning. At least in his own head, the only venue that matters to him. He argued that millions of Americans are cheering him for his tough North Korea talk. “It’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country,” he told reporters last week.

While North Korea readies its rockets for Guam’s shoreline, the island’s governor, Eddie Baza Calvo, used the right passwords to secure a soulful telephone exchange with Trump. “Mr. President, . . .” Calvo said in opening Saturday’s phone chat, “I have never felt more safe or so confident, with you at the helm.” It was another winning moment for the commander in chief, who quickly agreed with the governor. “You seem like a hell of a guy,” Trump said. “They should have had me (as president) eight years ago.” Despite the fact that that Guam’s existential fate rests in the hands of two would-be nuclear bombers, who together lack anything resembling a full deck, Trump had good news for the governor: “Eddie,” he said, “I have to tell you, you’ve become extremely famous. All over the world, they’re talking about Guam . . . your tourism, you’re going to go up like tenfold with the expenditure of no money. I congratulate you.”

That pretty much captures Donald J. Trump’s life story: get the name out there any way you can, build the brand, then monetize it. To our president, nuclear war is just another profit center. His tough talk is drawing attention, and that keeps his juices flowing. Trump reportedly spends hours a day glued to television news. For an attention addict, cable news is the fix that never ends. According to the Washington Post, the three top cable news networks rarely cover any subject other than Trump during prime-time hours. For this president, Trump-All-The-Time is winning.

But wait, David Duke and his fellow neo-Nazis may have inadvertently punctured the contours of the Donald’s delusional winning loop. Duke, the former KKK wizard, and hundreds of angry white supremacists violently took to the streets in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. Remember those poor forgotten white guys Trump championed on the way to the White House? The Charlottesville disaster was all about them. One person was killed and 19 others were injured. While political leaders of every stripe immediately decried the protest’s bigotry and racism, Trump, the Twitter insult king, was at a loss for words to describe the repugnant evil of white power nuts, many wearing Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again caps, staging a violent rampage on Virginia streets.

For the first time in his life, Trump tweeted with delicately selected words. He condemned violence generally, but avoided specific criticism of his own supporters, that shrinking base that keeps him “winning” by cheering his tough rhetoric. Even his stilted messaging drew this Twitter response from former Imperial Wizard Duke: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency. . .” One neo-Nazi web site praised the president for his reaction to the Charlottesville riot: “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. . .No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good.”

This must leave the president highly confused. He rains down insults on his own party’s congressional leaders. He uses graphic imagery to threaten a nuclear holocaust. And he believes he is winning because his base cheers his toughness. But now, part of that base – sheet-wearing bigots and red-caped goons – have slithered out from behind their rocks in answering Trump’s clarion call to make America white again. A stunned and saddened nation looks at pictures of Charlottesville’s death and destruction, waiting for their president to renounce these domestic terrorists. But how does a man renounce part of himself, part of what he created? If he does, who will cheer for his madness? And without their cheers, what becomes of his winning? Forget nuclear war. For Donald Trump, this is the new “Thinking about the Unthinkable”.

HIDDEN FIGURES, ALTERNATIVE FACTS AND ANOTHER WEEK IN TRUMP LAND

The latest stupid alternative fact spit out by the netherworld of the racist right is that the compelling and award-winning film, “Hidden Figures” is a falsified piece of “politically correct” propaganda. A number of creepy websites, all to the right of Breitbart, are insisting that the untold story of three African American women who helped launch NASA’s space program in the 1960s is a total fabrication. (Here, here and here.)

One of the downsides of Internet technology is that crazy people have a platform. The nuts, bigots and lunatics have been with us always. I used to work nights in a newsroom. People called with all sorts of idiotic story ideas, particularly after the bars closed. One man insisted he had proof that thousands of Jews were quietly moving into town and planned to take complete control of all financial institutions. Another guy was certain his backyard squirrels were wired by the Feds to monitor his conversations. It was no big deal. We just hung up on them. Now they all have websites. Including, no doubt, the squirrels.

It’s been that kind of week. There was a Muslim ban that the president said wasn’t a ban. Then Alternative Facts Queen Kellyanne Conway defended the ban by pointing to the “Bowling Green Massacre”, only to find out later that there never was such a massacre. And now we have the white power nuts totally outraged over the notion that the white men launched into space 50 years ago might have had some support on the ground from black women.

I saw “Hidden Figures” on Inauguration Day. It was a wonderful, uplifting diversion from the installation of a president whose campaign was fueled, at least in part, by a longing for the good old days of white male privilege. The film was made from Margot Lee Shetterly’s book with the same name. Both were based on the following established facts: Prior to the days of IBM and Apple, the calculations for space exploration were done by mathematicians and their slide rules and adding machines. In NASA’s facilities in Langley, Virginia, these folks were called computers. During those Jim Crow days in Langley, there was a “Computer East” for white employees and a “Computer West” for blacks. The film tells the story of three female computers from the west group: Katherine Johnson, (Taraji P. Hensen), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Their work, and particularly the genius-level mathematical skills of Hensen’s character, Katherine, played a vital role in a number of NASA’s most spectacular achievements, including John Glenn’s orbit of the earth in 1962.

In many ways, the story was as sad as it was compelling. Those women persevered through the abhorrently oppressive conditions of segregation. Yet, thanks to their spirit and incredible skill, they made it possible for a very white America to achieve greatness in space. The depressingly sad part of the story is that it took more than 50 years for it to be told. Of course, the racist webmasters point to that delay as evidence of fabrication. It was well known, they say, that the space agency was all white in the 1960s and that “Hidden Figures” is simply an attempt to erase white history.

Actually, the racists were partly right. The space program, according to Smithsonian research, was lily white back in the late 1930s and very early 1940s. But, thanks to pressure from civil rights leaders, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1941 demanding that the Langley operation and other federal agencies immediately open their doors to black employees. That was back in the day when presidential orders were based on inclusion instead of exclusion. Not only that, the star of it all, Katherine Johnson, is very much alive at 98 and continues to tell her own story. She was awarded the Medal of Freedom by former president Obama in 2015.

Of course, bigotry has always lurked in the shadows of the web. Sadly, it has now left those shadows and is performing on the main stage. The sites decrying the whitewash of “Hidden Figures,” are filled with posts of support and alignment with the Trump administration. For example, these pieces: “Trump Them Again – Use Executive Orders to Stem Creeping Bilingualism”; “Racketeering Refugees: What the Million Marching Pussyhatters Really Want”; and “Trump’s Wall Says to the World ‘This is OUR Country, We Decide Who Comes Here.’”

No, not every Trump voter is a racist. Yet it is undeniable that the right wing populism that propelled him, like similar movements around the world, was fueled by anger over changing demographics that have diluted the power of white privilege. Writer Zach Beauchamp, in a fascinating and well-researched piece for Vox.com, argued that the outcome of the 2016 presidential election had less to do with economic angst in the heartland and more with white antipathy toward a changing population. Wrote Beauchamp, “What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.”

The challenge for those of us who believe that America’s greatness lies in those differences, in our embrace of diversity, is to draw a bright line for the battles to come. There can be room for compromise on health care, tax reform, education funding and the environment. But when it comes to matters of basic human rights, dignity, nondiscrimination and equal opportunity, there can be no retreat, no surrender. If we return to the days of Hidden Figures, America will not only have sacrificed its greatness, it will have lost its soul.

POST ELECTION BLUES? YOU’LL FIND NO ESCAPE IN FLORIDA

Having just returned from a protracted stay in Florida, I’m still trying to untangle the state’s incongruous dualism. There is nothing more radiant than ocean waves glistening under a January sun. Yet, you don’t have to venture far from the beach to find a sea of tacky souvenir shops offering, in almost parody fashion, blow-up sea urchins and plastic alligator heads that glow in the dark. They can be ignored if you try hard enough, focusing instead on the elegant palm trees and luscious greenery adorning Florida’s highways and byways. Then again, such aesthetic vegetation is interspersed with gigantic billboards, split evenly between adult sex shops and personal injury lawyers. Florida folks are pragmatic. If a marital aid breaks at an inopportune time, they know who to call for punitive damages.

And then there’s politics. Florida and its 29 electoral votes have long been the southern belle of presidential elections, drawing more attention than any state below the Mason-Dixon line, and most of them above it. Its hanging chads took center stage in the 2000 legal battle that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court decision handing the presidency to George W. Bush. President Obama carried the state in 2008 and 2012. Two of the supporting actors in last year’s Republican primary drama – Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio – are Floridians. But Donald Trump beat them both and went on to capture the state’s electoral prize in November. With that sometimes-you-win-and-sometimes-you-lose background, you’d think Florida voters would be in a Que Sera, Sera kind of place over the pending Trump inauguration.

That’s decidedly not the case. The most dramatic evidence of the deep personal tension felt by many Floridian liberals came in an unlikely venue. Micanopy is a small, beautifully peaceful, antediluvian town a few miles south of Gainesville. Its main drag is filled with shops selling crafts, antiques and home furnishings. We spent an hour in one of those stores and drew an occasional glance from the owner, who undoubtedly marked us as out-of-towners. She approached us after the other customers had left and asked where we were from. Upon learning that we lived a few miles outside of Washington, D.C., she withdrew into a brief and pensive silence. After mentally calculating the political demographics, she took a chance.

“I just don’t know what to do,” she told us. “This whole thing with Trump. I’ve never been so scared.” My wife, Melissa, and I nodded and smiled, much to the store owner’s relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, “I figured you were safe. You just never know. So many customers are for Trump. It’s just awful. I can’t let on and I don’t even want to talk to them. I’ve never been through anything like this. My candidates have lost in the past and life goes on. But this time is different. I am scared of this guy. Some of his supporters scare me even more. The day after the election, I thought I would close the shop and sell the business so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. But it’s been my life. I don’t know what to do.”

It’s not just a Florida thing. New York City is offering employees counseling services and other support for dealing with Trump’s election. Therapists throughout the nation have reported an overwhelming caseload of patients needing help with their anxiety and depression over the incoming Trump administration. Staffers at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline say they have been swamped with calls from people in deep distress with feelings of hopelessness and betrayal over the election.

It’s a safe bet that this level of angst has to do with more than differences of opinion over tax policy or climate change. By campaigning against what he called “political correctness,” Trump, intentionally or unintentionally, validated the misogyny, racism and homophobia that progressives have been fighting for decades. For people affected by identity politics, this is deeply personal.

A man who sexually assaulted women and made disparaging comments based on race, religion and nationality will become president of the United States by the end of the week. A bully who delights in punching below his weight and demeaning anyone who gets in his way will soon be the leader of the free world.

Those of us who are bothered by our new reality have been counseled by Trump voters to “get over it and move on.” They are half right. We will never – and should never – get over the fact that our new president is the antithesis of the character and values we struggled to instill in our children: kindness, inclusiveness, fairness, decency and honesty. He is who he is. We need to accept that and move on. As of 12:01 p.m. Friday, we’re playing for keeps. It’s no longer about obnoxious early-morning tweets or a Fox news soundbite. Now it’s about policies and programs, legislation and executive orders. We who believe that America’s greatness lies in its diversity, including all of those struggling in the shadows, need to focus on keeping our dream alive.

Yes, this week’s inauguration represents one of the finest attributes of America’s unique democracy: the peaceful transfer of power based on the will of the electorate. Yet, another equally powerful piece of our system is one that allows citizens to rise up in agitation and peaceful protest when leaders betray the values and principles that made our country great. That’s why Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington is just as important to this inauguration as Friday’s swearing in.

Although our candidate lost, her campaign theme continues to thrive. Starting with Saturday’s march, and continuing every day for the next four years, we are, indeed, Stronger Together.

TRUMP NATION ONE WEEK LATER

It’s been a week now since our election earthquake, and true to seismic form, our life has become one aftershock after another. White nationalists, formerly known as bigots, are crawling out of the shadows of the netherworld en route to the West Wing. Muslims, Latinos, blacks and Jews are being brazenly attacked by emboldened racists, freed from their closets by their victorious shake-things-up change candidate. Meanwhile, many on the left are feeling shockwaves from President Obama’s seemingly sanguine acceptance of his successor.

Nobody escaped the severity of these aftershocks, not even the quake’s walking epicenter himself, President-elect Donald J. Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump left his White House meeting with Obama Friday totally stunned over the depth and breadth of the job he just won. Apparently, it has now dawned on him that this presidency gig may take more than a few 3 a.m. tweets to pull off. Obama has agreed to spend more time mentoring Trump before the inauguration. The president also told reporters he believes The Donald will soften many of his more provocative campaign promises.

The president’s subdued reaction to the guy he once called a “carnival barker,” has riled progressives and prompted a Washington Post think piece to speculate that Obama is still working his way through the denial stage of the grieving process. I think there may be a better explanation: after an eight-year search, Obama finally found a Republican in Washington who will listen to him. As a longtime advocate for special needs students, I wholeheartedly salute this tutoring project.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of Obama’s lessons will be geared toward procedural matters, maybe with a shot or two at trying to nudge his student’s policy positions slightly forward from deep right field. What Trump desperately needs help with is that other part of the presidency, the one that aims to reach people’s hearts and pull the country together in times of severe distress. You know what I’m talking about. It’s what Obama did after the Charleston church shooting; what George W. Bush did after 9/11; what Bill Clinton did after the Oklahoma City bombing and, what all presidents have done on so many difficult occasions.

No, there has been no terrorist attack, no mass shooting. But large portions of this country are hurting right now. Given his campaign’s vitriol and rhetoric directed at various ethnic and underrepresented groups, the fear and trembling of living in Trump Nation has been rampant everyplace, from elementary schools to college campuses and beyond. For some time now, at least in most communities, overt racism has been a cultural taboo. People have been fired for using the N word. Those who openly attack others based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity are quickly called on it and ostracized. It’s what most of us call civility and decency. Sadly, there is a faction of Trump voters who see it as a state of political correctness that just died in the electoral college. Unleashed since the election, this cabal has spread its hate and ugliness throughout the land. For example:

In Delaware, a black woman was accosted by four white male Trump supporters boasting how they “no longer have to deal with n*****s.” She said one asked her, “how scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now, you’re a waste of air.”

In San Jose, a Muslim student said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage by a man who pulled at her hijab and choked her.

In Texas, fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, were distributed throughout Texas State University. Here’s what they said: “Now that our man Trump is elected, (it is) time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.”

In Maryland, a sign advertising Spanish services at an Episcopal church in Silver Spring was ripped and vandalized with the words, TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, Lesley Stahl asked Trump to respond to reports of racist attacks by his supporters. He seemed stunned by the news. Asked by Stahl what he would say to his supporters doing things like that, Trump said, “I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, because I’m going to bring this country together.” Pressed by Stahl for an even stronger response, Trump tried to crank it up a notch, like he was in a role playing exercise: “I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it—if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’”

Therein lies the problem in elevating to the presidency a man whose only notion of leadership is making decisions and barking orders. Even a city council member in the smallest of towns has a better instinctive feel for reaching out to people and appealing to their better angels. Trump has never had to do anything like that before. He doesn’t know where to begin. He is a fish out of water. What makes it even more sad is that it is in his own interest to reach out to America right now, to condemn the attacks and the racism, to apologize for any hurt he caused in an overzealous campaign moment. No, such an approach wouldn’t change the minds of the never-Trump voters, but it would mitigate his negatives a bit, soften his tone, make him seem a little more human, a little more caring. It’s the thing good leaders do. Unfortunately, it is simply not in his wheelhouse. And that’s one more thing we’re just going to have to get used to here in Trump Nation.

GOP’S ANSWER TO TRUMP PROBLEM IS BLOWING IN THE WIND

When our newest Nobel Laureate wrote that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan had never met the current crop of Republican politicians. These folks desperately need emergency meteorological assistance. Their old windsocks of public opinion are no match for the velocity of the October gusts of Donald J. Trump.

Ordinarily, politicians publicly shower fellow party members with obligatory superlative prose that has all the sincerity of an Eddie-Haskell-to-June-Cleaver compliment. That’s only when the mic is on. Behind the scenes, it is more Jerry Springer than Leave it to Beaver. Alas, this is no ordinary election. The challenge for Republican congressional candidates has been how to distance themselves from a toxic presidential nominee without losing votes from the deplorables who love him. After anguishing through months of tortured Trumpisms, each raising the level of racism, misogyny and xenophobia one step higher, most GOP leaders and candidates managed to stake out deeply contorted positions on The Donald. They were tightly parsed and highly nuanced, a natural result of simultaneously condoning that which they condemn. Then the Access Hollywood tape hit and all bets were off. And then on again. Consider, for example:

Darryl Glenn, Republican Senate candidate from Colorado, withdrew his endorsement of Trump after the tape hit the news. In it, the presidential candidate boasted about using his star power to get by with sexual assaults. Glenn told Fox News that “America cannot have a man who speaks this way about women be the face of our country to the Free World.” After 48 hours of backlash from Trump supporters, however, Glenn reversed course and threw his support behind Donald to be the face of our country to the Free World.

Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) came out against Trump on Saturday, telling Politico that the Republican nominee’s remarks were “disgraceful” and that he “is not fit to be president of the United States.” By Tuesday, however, Byrne was back on the Trump Train, regardless of how disgraceful and unfit he may be.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has outdone the Kama Sutra in finding unique positions. She clearly loathes the guy but is involved in a very competitive reelection battle in a state where Trump has a solid base of support. Initially, Ayotte refused to endorse him but said she would vote for him, a dubious status akin to being a little bit pregnant. Then she was asked during a television appearance if she thought Trump was a role model for children. She said yes. The next day, however, she reversed herself, saying that Trump was no role model but that she would still vote for him. After the groping tape was released, Ayotte made a clean break and said she would not vote for Trump, a stand she says may end her political career.

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) had supported Trump until the tape went public. She immediately reversed course, according to the Omaha World-Herald, saying that his comments were “disgusting and totally unacceptable under any circumstance.” She reversed herself once more on Tuesday and said she will vote for Trump.

The list goes on and on, with changes occurring hourly. There has been far less fluctuation in the stock market this fall than in the Trump positions held by Republican leaders. What remains unknown at the moment is whether any of the un-endorsement “recanters” will flip once more on the heels of new allegations by women who say Trump sexually assaulted them. The only law that matters right now is the uncertainty principle of physics: positions constantly change based on the momentum of events.

Even those who have gone a few days without a reversal are left with some curious juxtapositions. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) says Trump is a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.” Yet, he has endorsed him. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) characterized Trump’s remarks as “textbook definition of racist.” He refuses to campaign with him. But, for the record, the Speaker has endorsed the racist.

There is, of course, an unprecedentedly long list of high ranking Republicans, who have publicly repudiated their party’s presidential candidate. For the most part, they are the ones not up for reelection this year. As for those who are, this is my plea:

Donald Trump is a very mean man, a man who brags about the women he has forcibly groped, a man who has denigrated every minority group, a man who can’t tell fact from fiction, a man who has most of us frightfully scared over what will become of our country, our world, should he be elected. For the love of God and America, please don’t let this man bring us down. No job is worth that price.

PUSSIES AND THE UNMAKING OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

So let’s recap. Prior to last Friday, we knew that Donald Trump believes:

Laziness is a trait in blacks;
Mexican immigrants are rapists;
It’s funny to mock a disabled reporter;
Muslims should be prohibited from entering the country;
Megyn Kelly had blood coming out of her whatever;
His money should be counted only by “little short guys that wear yarmulkes”; and
The Pope is disgraceful.

Yet, Trump was only a couple of poll points behind Hillary Clinton and enjoyed the backing of most Republican office holders. Then came the Pussy Tape and all hell broke loose. At least now we know there is a line never to be crossed. This will be helpful for future campaigns. You can denigrate blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the disabled and the Pope and still be acceptable to most Republicans. But boasting about grabbing women by their pussies is a deal breaker.

Well, maybe it’s not quite that linear. There is another explanation. Jacob Riis, a 19th century photographer and social reformer, taught that progress comes from the cumulative effect of many events. The same is true of regression. Here’s Riis:

“. . . I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Applying the Riis paradigm to Trump’s fall from GOP grace, it took more than a pussy grab to throw the Party of Lincoln into a cataclysmic frenzy. As Hillary suggested in Sunday night’s debate, if Donald’s bus ride peroration on groping, extramarital seduction, furniture shopping and Tic-Tacs had been a singular aberration, he might have gotten a pass, particularly if he promised to forever keep his two small hands to himself. But coming as it did, on the heels of serial character flaws, rarely seen by someone not on a registered sex offender directory or a terrorist watch list, it was almost too much to take. Even open-minded, understanding Republican congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan called the boys on the bus dialogue sickening, repugnant and unacceptable. And then, just to hedge their bets, continued to endorse Trump to become the leader of the free world.

Pussygate’s most fascinating feature has been the Rorschach quality of responses from party leaders. See if you can pick out a unifying theme in this sampling of reactions from GOP White Guys:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (Trump’s running mate): “As a husband and father, I was offended by the words and actions described by Donald Trump. . .”

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: “As the grandfather of two precious girls, I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump’s reprehensible comments degrading women.”

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: “Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters. . .”

Utah Senator Mike Lee: If anyone spoke to my wife or my daughter or my mother or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person. . .”

Get it? Thank God these men have women in their families so they can muster enough empathy to recognize that forcibly grabbing them by their genitals is not an appropriate precursor to the presidency. Then again, neither is calling blacks lazy or denigrating Muslims, Jews, the disabled or the Pope. It’s just that those demographics don’t have a seat at the table in most white Republican households. Some foibles are easier to overlook, but this talk of groping white women really hits home with these guys.

It harkens back to some really messed up gender role stuff, a quid-pro-quo known as The Art of a Very Bad Deal. In days of old, when men ruled the roost, social norms required that they protect and revere their womenfolk. House Speaker Ryan actually touched on that notion when he explained why the Trump pussy tape “sickened” him. Said Ryan, “Women are to be revered and championed, not objectified.” The basic deal was that men would open doors for women, pull out their chairs, lift them to their pedestals and forever protect them from harm. In exchange, men called all the shots, held all the power, owned all the property and cast all the votes.

So here we are, in a new era. Not only can women own property and vote, one of them is on the verge of becoming the next U.S. President, thanks in large part to her blustery, braggadocios, bloviating, blowhard of an opponent. And his penchant for grabbing women by their pussies. Although we may not necessarily live happily ever after, there could not be a more delicious ending to this very grim fairytale.

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM EVIL WON’T HELP THEM ALLEVIATE IT

College campuses, once a hotbed of anything-goes radicalism, are morphing into antiseptic bastions of thought cleansing. The source of this depressing trend is a new breed of students, determined to avoid offense or emotional discomfort at any cost.

Harvard Law School students, according to The New Yorker, have asked their professors not to teach about rape law because the subject is traumatic for them. Northwestern University students filed federal charges, eventually dismissed, against their instructor for writing a professional journal opinion piece opposing prohibitions against faculty-student dating. They said it made them uncomfortable. Students in a number of colleges have been allowed to skip reading assignments that contain passages that might upset them. Here’s how Atlantic Monthly introduced a lengthy analysis of this trend: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.”

Indeed it is. The movement’s origins were benign and well intentioned. It started with infrequently used “trigger warnings” on assigned readings, designed as a heads’ up for students who had experienced trauma – sexual assault or other violence. They weren’t excused from the assignment, but the advance warning allowed them to consult with a therapist or take other precautions. In those same early days, human rights training for both faculty and students focused on a concept of “microaggressions”, a form of subconscious racism or sexism typically involving a stereotype. An example would be telling Asian students they must be good at math.

Those noble and sensible beginnings, however, evolved into darker outcomes. As a result of student pressure, backed by threatened social media attacks and the filing of federal discrimination charges, trigger warnings expanded way beyond the traumatized few and are now issued by more than 50% of the faculty, and for such subjects as racism, classism sexism, disregard for personal autonomy, spiders, drug use, suicide, indigenous artifacts, Nazi paraphernalia and slimy things. Worse yet, many schools report that a trigger warning now means students don’t have to read the objectionable material. Fortunately, leaders of some of the country’s leading educational institutions have recently tried to dial this movement back. American University, the University of Chicago and others have adopted policies against trigger warnings. Meanwhile, microaggressions have gone from a human rights learning strategy to a list of things that should never be said. In the University of California system, for example, the faculty has been warned against using a long list phrases, including, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Sheltering students from unpleasant thoughts and offensive ideas is anathema to what education is all about. How do you teach history without exploring the horrible trauma of war, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of American Indians? How do you teach literature if you have to trigger out Shakespeare’s “Othello” because of its violence against women, or his “Henry V” because of Henry’s use of warfare and threatened sexual violence as a way of obtaining political success? What about the suicide themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or the fear, pain and suffering caused by totalitarianism in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels? If the goal of education is to teach students not what to think, but how to think, you don’t get there by allowing them to remain in their comfort zones.

Trying to shelter students from racist and sexist microaggressions may alleviate momentary angst, but it does nothing to eradicate the broader problem that produced them. When they surface, why not use them as teachable moments so the entire class can learn what stereotyping is and the pain it causes? It is sadly ironic that this push to create a sanitized, safe and protective campus environment is happening at a time when this country is 30-some days and a handful of poll points away from electing as president someone whose campaign has been filled not with microaggressions, but with “YUGE” macroaggressions. Here is a small sampling of the headlines: (TRIGGER WARNING: These news reports are likely to cause anxiety, depression and a sudden interest in Canadian real estate.)

Donald Trump Eats a Taco Bowl to Prove His Love for Hispanics
Trump Campaign CEO Complained of Jews at Daughters’ School
Donald Trump: If Black Lives Don’t Matter, Then Go Back to Africa
Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering U.S.
Trump Wanted to Fire Women Who Weren’t Pretty Enough

That’s the world outside of the campus cocoon. The Donald Trumps out there do not come with a trigger warning. Dealing with them, resisting their vile hate and racism is not optional. That’s why we need college graduates who are ready, willing and able to work against the forces they’d rather not think about. It’s the only way we can move this evil trauma from the headlines to the history books.