-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Many sane people are reporting that their mood has lightened and their state of mind has improved since January 20.
Of course it’s because the twice-impeached viral orange dung heap who needlessly killed 400k-plus Americans, and outright murdered 13 federal prisoners on his way out, has actually left town.
Our national exhaustion is only beginning to abate. Mass suicides have been avoided. Actual life has begun again.
Donald Trump was NOT* our worst president (that was Woodrow Wilson).
But Trump’s lethal legacy includes:
A failed “herd immunity” viral non-strategy protecting the stock market while we died en masse. Amidst a botched vaccine roll-out, thousand more die from other untreated ailments.
TrumpNazis still screaming about wearing masks as we suffer a Corona Terror unseen here since Wilson’s last Pandemic killed 675,000 of us a century ago.
The ultimate thrill-killer, Trump trashed innumerable legal protections to slaughter 13 federal prisoners, mostly of color (and including a brain-injured woman), far more than any US president dating back to 1789.
Trump’s kill-them-before-Biden-comes murder spree completely soiled “Pro-Life” fanatics who mourn the “unborn” while executing conscious adults, many of them wrongly convicted.
None of Trump’s “Pro-Life” Supremes moved to save these lives, forever branding their movement as a pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Trump’s Evangelical Army of violent fascists made him the “imperfect vessel” of a “fundamentalist movement” happy to kill for a serial rapist, bankrupt mobster, pathological liar, psychotic narcissist. Even Jesus would never grok what they do.
With clear insider collusion, Trump got this racist, Jew-hating mob to try a neo-Nazi Capital coup, aiming to kill Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and many more.
Had this armed KKK/Gestapo been able to summon a nation-wide grassroots assault, the US would now be a hellish dictatorship run by the nauseating likes of Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Rudi Giuliani, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsay Graham.
Only mailed-out, hand-marked/digitally scanned/hand re-counted paper ballots prevented Trump from effectively claiming victory after in fact losing by 7 million votes; with touchscreen computerized tabulators, he’d be ruling the Reichstag again.
Only an astonishing multi-racial grassroots campaign left the Democrats with narrow control of the US Senate, and thus the chance to move our nation toward the actual social and ecological change it needs to survive.
The psychological impact of this VERY close brush with utter catastrophe is easily underestimated. For the past four years, we’ve experienced a relentless, gut-wrenching, nerve-destroying, utterly satanic assault on Truth, the planet, and every aspect of human compassion, core competence, basic decency, and common sense.
Only a savvy, dedicated grassroots movement fighting for ecological preservation, social justice, racial equality, LGBTQ rights, election protection, and much more has saved us from a truly hellish fate-- and not by all that much. To say the challenges ahead of us are epic and immense is to understate the case. We are far from a guaranteed success.
But our saving graces abide: our diversity and a rising Millennial/Zoomer demographic tsunami with a deep commitment to democracy, social justice, ecological harmony, and Solartopian survival.
We’re emerging this week from an unthinkable nightmare. It has seemed as surreal as it has been torturous. How, after all, do we explain Donald Trump to our grandchildren?
So if you’re feeling residually traumatized and depressed while at the same time giddy and lightheaded, it’s more than understandable.
Take some time off. Get your bearings. Thrill to the mobsters fled south to their personal banana republic (Florida) to fight extradition. Be thankful you don’t have to clean up the mess in the White House and that plane ride you paid for. Hope that the Government Accountability Office inventoried that sheets, blankets & silverware before they left (they did apparently grab at least one museum-owned bust of Lincoln).
Kick back. Smoke a joint. Get into the woods or the ocean. Walk the dog. Make some love. Eat some good food. Sleep for a few days or a week or a month. Maybe catch a few hours of Impeachment, The Sequel.
Then let’s construct an actual democracy so this never happens again. Meantime, we're all at least 250 pounds lighter. It feels great.
*[Editor's Note: Trump was unquestionably the worst president in history, incalculably worse than Wilson many times over.]
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-convene the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition, which focuses on remaking our democracy. Join our Monday 5 p.m. zooms via www.electionprotection2024.org. Harvey’s THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY is at www.solartopia.org. Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org, along with their many books on election protection.