| by Victoria A Brownworth

Resistance Of Trump

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Life in the time of Trump.

Life in the time of Trump.

A Muslim friend who wears a hijab was harassed on the subway. A lesbian friend and her wife were harassed on an evening out. A Nuyorican friend was harassed in a café.

Each of these women was told the same thing: Go back to your country. America is their country. This is life in the time of Trump. This is the new normal, which is anything but normal.

This is my last politics column of the year. Usually I write about major events that happened to women and LGBT people over the previous 12 months. I often write about how lesbians are still being erased throughout global society. That year-end column has had the same basic structure for over a decade.

It will be different, now. Everything will be different, now.

Lesbians are still very much kept on society’s margins. For three years I have been researching and writing a book on lesbian erasure and have been stunned by the brutal facts of everything from the de-lesbian-ing of the dead, to corrective rape, to honor killings. Lesbian erasure is literal as well as metaphoric. I have written about it here often.

This year I expected my last politics column of the year to be about Hillary Clinton’s impending presidency and what it would mean for women and LGBT people. I expected that column to be brimming with hope as I expected myself and everyone I know to be feeling that hope. But as First Lady Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey in a final interview on Dec. 19, “We feel the difference now. See, now, we are feeling what not having hope feels like. Hope is necessary. It’s a necessary concept.”

Mrs. Obama is right: Hope is necessary. But for everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton, whether because her message was resoundingly hopeful and meaningful or simply as a vote against Trump, hope is beyond our grasp. Hope is a bit of ephemera for which we can no longer reach.

Ever since Election Night I have felt a roiling combination of loss, anger and fear. A hardcore realist, I have been subject to fits of magical thinking – small glimmers of hope – that somehow January 20, 2017 will be the inauguration of Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

I hoped that Jill Stein’s quixotic quest to uncover the 79,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that would shift the Electoral College back to Hillary Clinton would be found. How could it be possible that Clinton only lost the winner-take-all madness of the Electoral College by a mere 79,000 votes when she won the popular vote by an astounding 2.85 million more than Donald Trump?

I hoped that President Obama would say something in his final press conference on Dec. 16 that would shift the narrative, that would make it possible for Clinton to be president, when he had spent a third of that presser talking about Russian interference in the election. Obama said that Clinton was “treated unfairly” and “I think the coverage of her and the issues was troubling.”

Obama has never disguised his contempt for Trump nor his admiration for Clinton. He repeatedly juxtaposed her achievements and abilities against what he called Trump’s lack of qualifications. As Obama campaigned for Clinton with the same ferocity with which he campaigned for himself in 2012, his endorsement of Clinton was always ringing, never equivocal.

And like Clinton herself, Obama had railed against Trump’s demagoguery and xenophobia and dismissed the media’s fixation with Clinton’s every smile or lack thereof.

In the Dec. 16 press conference he asserted, “I’m finding it curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like disadvantaging Hillary Clinton because you guys wrote about it every day. This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.”

Obama talked about the impact of “fake news” on the election – again with regard to Clinton. “If fake news that’s being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being released through partisan news venues, it’s not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect,” Obama said.

But the President stopped there. He didn’t announce any investigatory process that would somehow put Trump and his team on notice that a smooth transition of power to them might never happen.

I hoped at least that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, would accede to the requests of dozens of electors that they receive an intelligence briefing on the Russian interference and that such a briefing would convince the Electoral College to vote en masse for Hillary Clinton. But Clapper refused.

I hoped that the Electoral College would read and re-read the Constitution: Article 2, Section 1, and the 12th Amendment and see that they had a job to do and it was solely to put the best person in place, to put country over party, to see that Donald Trump is a dangerous demagogue with an impulse control problem and ties to a foreign power and that the Constitution specifically addresses that very peril.

But Dec. 19 the states announced their votes, one by one. And although there were protests and one woman in Wisconsin was brave enough to demand that the electors do their job and vote Clinton (she was removed by police), the voting continued and Trump hit 270 in Texas.

I know I wasn’t alone in my magical thinking. Every day since the election I have skirted a line between neutral journalist and outraged citizen, chatting with the like-minded on social media, being trolled by Trump supporters who seem, inexplicably, more angry as winners than they were as potential losers. As the Electoral College vote solidified, I took to Twitter in a rant about the undemocratic nature of a system that denies voters their votes. It’s only happened five times in American history, but never to this degree and regardless – five times is five too many.

So now what?

There is no magic left. There’s a little-known bylaw to the Electoral College where one senator and one House member can submit, in writing, by January 6, a demand that the Electoral College reverse their vote. It seems unlikely that will happen, Russia or no Russia.

And so we are left with the most unqualified, most dangerous president-elect in American history when we could have had the most progressive, game-changing, feminist, LGBT-friendly, anti-racist, immigrant-embracing president in our history.

The dichotomy is as glaring as it is heartbreaking.

How do we go forward in the time of Trump?

How do we continue to be women, LGBT, black, brown, yellow, white, immigrant, native-born, Muslim, Jew, Christian, atheist, young, old, disabled, all of us – how do we go forward in the time of Trump?

We go forward in resistance.

We go forward as if we are under siege because we are.

We go forward as if tomorrow could be our last day and this one has to count for everything.

On December 17 I was listening to New Yorker Radio on NPR and an interview with Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org. Galland and I don’t always agree, but on this we most definitely do agree: The next four years must give no ground. Cede nothing.

I have always had tremendous faith in the Constitution and American democracy. The Union was preserved through a Civil War, two world wars, internment of Japanese Americans, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings, Jim Crow, civil unrest, protests over civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, gay rights, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, police violence and extrajudicial killings of black citizens.

After every presidential and congressional election there has been the smooth transition of power. The only candidate in American history to suggest he would refuse such a transition is Donald Trump.

Each and every terrible moment in American history had the possibility of sundering the Constitution.

It didn’t.

But now? Now we are at a precipice. Now the facts loom large. Now the time for magical thinking is over. Now the time for resistance is here.

America has had flirtations with authoritarian rule in the past, most recently under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Nixon attempted to subvert the Constitution. But he was caught, he was forced to resign and many of the people who worked with and for him went to prison. For months the Watergate hearings transfixed the nation.

Let’s not forget what Watergate was: a 1972 break-in at the DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. in the Watergate office complex. Nixon was trying to do exactly what WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin have done in 2016: hijack an election.

Nixon achieved his goal. So did the combined hacking efforts in 2016.

An NBC poll on Dec. 18 showed that Republicans don’t care much about a foreign power hacking into our political process and skewing an election in favor of one candidate over another. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats are concerned, while fewer than 20 percent of Republicans are.

That’s how fascism takes root. That’s why resistance is essential.

Calling Trump and his cohort fascists is hardly hyperbole. His entire Cabinet and inner circle are comprised of misogynist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic white nationalists. Trump is replacing America’s first black woman attorney general with a man who was rejected for a federal judgeship because of his racist views. He’s chosen a climate change denier for his Energy Secretary. He’s chosen an oil tycoon with deep and direct ties to Russia for his Secretary of State.

Trump has surrounded himself with a coterie of extremists of every stripe and his closest adviser, Steve Bannon, is a mouthpiece for the so-called “alt-right”–the hipster re-branding of neo-Nazi white nationalists.

Trump’s national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, is a conspiracy theorist who promoted the fake news story that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. For months Trump himself promoted the fake news story that Clinton was seriously ill and since the data about Russia was released, has asserted that the Democratic Party hacked its own server.

To paraphrase President Obama as he campaigned for Clinton, this is not normal. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, these are not American values.

The road to fascism is a deceptively easy one to take and millions of Americans have been, mostly unwittingly, primed to embrace its message. Whether frustrated Bernie Sanders supporters who bought his angry message that the primary was rigged against him (it wasn’t) or Rust Belt workers angry about jobs that left in the 1980s because technology supersedes all politics, Trump played them. He convinced under-educated tech-unsavvy workers he would somehow turn back the technological clock and manufacturing would come back, when it simply can’t.

He quoted Sanders at every rally, claiming the same system that had ensconced men like Sanders in sinecures on the back benches of government for decades and propelled men like Trump into the billionaire class without having worked for it were somehow victims – that he and Sanders had been tricked by “Crooked Hillary.”

That’s how fascism creeps in. It takes that nugget of resentment and rolls it downhill until it becomes a massive ball of roiling lava.

Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” as she covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, wrote, “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”

Trump and his elite are in love with totalitarianism. Their resumes document it. Trump’s speeches document it. Words like “freedom” and “liberty” – keystones of American democracy – are never mentioned. Trump’s heroes are all fascist dictators. He has praised Putin, Kim Jong Un, even the original fascist, Benito Mussolini.

Trump’s supporters have been lured by his propaganda. They parrot it daily on social media while his former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, tells the media white is black and black is white and few ever seem to question her facile lies.

Trump’s demagoguery doesn’t scare everyone. It should. This is a man who goes to bed angrily tweeting and wakes up doing the same. He’s frequently fixated on individuals and attacked them – a former beauty queen, a Gold Star father, a union leader – causing those people irreparable harm and leading his followers to attack them on and off social media. Trump has attacked some businesses and lauded others – causing stocks to plunge or rise in a matter of hours.

A few days ago he was enraged that President Obama had “let” China abscond with an underwater drone. When the administration had secured its return through careful negotiations, Trump first took credit, then tweeted that China could keep the drone.

This kind of mercurial and haphazard behavior is antithetical to governing.

Trump’s business and presidency are already inextricably linked. The day after the Inauguration Trump has already set up a hunting and fishing event to raise money for his son Eric’s charity.

This is, as Obama kept saying, not normal. This is unconstitutional. This must be resisted at all costs. Trump isn’t even president yet and he’s already made a mockery of the office. He has no mandate – that belongs to Hillary Clinton.

There is a long history in America of political resistance, from the Founding Fathers themselves to slave rebellions to suffrage to Martin Luther King, Jr to Stonewall to Black Lives Matter.

Galland was correct in her assessment in her interview with New Yorker Radio. We cannot bend on anything. We cannot cede one scintilla. The Montgomery bus boycott went on for a year. Black Alabamans walked rather than continue to support Jim Crow segregation on the buses. LGBT people resisted at Stonewall, led by black lesbian Stormé DeLarverie.

And so we must take care of each other in the time of Trump. We must acknowledge the very real danger he represents, with his conversion therapy fanatics and his white nationalists and anti-Semites and sexual predators and his own demand for a Muslim registry that could become internment camps in our time. We must protect ourselves and our friends and our colleagues. We must align ourselves with The Resistance and acknowledge it’s real and necessary.

We must survive.

To resist means to withstand the action or effect of. The time is now. We must withstand the effect of Trump’s creeping authoritarian fascism. We can do it. If we don’t, we have more than hope to lose.

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