An American flag is flown upside-down near the U.S. Capitol on Sept 29, 2007. Photo by Brendan Smialowski | Getty Images
Today feels like a new America, one I don’t recognize. One that doesn’t make sense. One that has abandoned the promise of our great country. One I now fear. One I weep for.
We have transformed ourselves from the shining city on the hill to a monument to the grotesque, an experimental empire set to be destroyed in a madness of our own making.
The ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 was terrible, and ushered in all manner of national embarrassment, scandal, destructive policies and political violence, but his defeat in 2020 left us with the belief that America realized it made a mistake and corrected its course and the nation would resume its course toward the exceptionalism that had defined us for more than 200 years.
This is different, and demonstrably worse. In 2016, no one knew exactly how Trump would govern — or that his incompetence was consistently an impediment to his worst instincts and kept him from implementing the most noxious parts of his agenda.
No longer. This is a new and far more dangerous Trump, one hell bent on revenge and with the backing of a conservative movement that has turned him from a morally bankrupt real estate tycoon and reality show huckster into a deity. Those allies have spent the past four years devoted to ensuring he can carry out every terrible thought that enters his mind, and whatever other radical policies they want.
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Trump has told us all of this, and he’s been frighteningly explicit about what he will do as president this time, particularly in the final weeks leading up to yesterday’s election.
He will seek to root out every undocumented immigrant in a “bloody” and violent mass deportation. He will build concentration camps. He will institute ideological screenings for legal immigrants and end birthright citizenship.
He will end the prosecutions he is facing for fomenting a coup on Jan. 6 and illegally hoarding classified documents, and he will sic the Justice Department on his political enemies. He will pardon his violent supporters who sacked the Capitol in 2021 to overturn an election he lost and tried to kill members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president.
He will use the military to violently suppress dissent and round up “the enemy within,” which amounts to anyone who criticizes him. He will deploy soldiers to take over cities run by Democrats.
He will replace the civil service with his cronies to ensure there is no resistance to implementing his policies, no matter how un-American or unconstitutional, and to dismantle the government from the inside.
He will oversee the implementation of a national abortion ban, undoing the will of the voters in Arizona and other states — many deep red — that voted decisively to guarantee a right to abortion.
We have transformed ourselves from the shining city on the hill to a monument to the grotesque, an experimental empire set to be destroyed in a madness of our own making.
He will appoint lunatic anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee public health.
He will target transgender people, particularly children, and seek to erase their existence from American life. He will aggressively attack LGBTQ+ rights.
He will impose 1,000 percent across-the-board tariffs that will cost the average American family an extra $3,954 per year and eliminate 1.4 million American jobs.
He will eliminate the Department of Education and withhold funding from American schools that teach truths, be they about the nation’s history of racial inequality or the existence of gay and transgender people.
He will withdraw from NATO and give Vladimir Putin a green light to attack our NATO allies. He will cede Ukraine to Putin and abandon a critical ally in the fight against the Russian dictator’s desire to reestablish the Soviet Union.
He will scrap policies that aim to mitigate climate change and accelerate the use of fossil fuels, which will drive America further into crisis with worsening droughts, deadly heat waves, dangerous winter storms and increasingly intense and frequent hurricanes. He will roll back the incentives for electric vehicles that are a key part of reducing carbon emissions.
He will do nothing to stop gun violence, and will instead take aim at existing policies like expanded background checks and regulating ghost guns.
He will remake America in his fascist image.
Arizona will be the epicenter of any deportation effort, with families being ripped apart. We just passed a constitutional right to abortion that federal action will either overrule or make irrelevant. Our increasingly scorching and interminable summers will become more extreme, with more deaths and higher utility bills and less water. Our Indigenous brothers and sisters, who have been prioritized by the Biden administration in a way never before done in America, will once again be cast aside and, at best, ignored.
And Americans, it seems, can’t wait. Arizona and every other battleground state has gone for Trump, and decisively handed him a second term. My colleague wrote recently about the deeper meaning of the “promise of America” that Kamala Harris invoked on the campaign trail.
But that America is not the one we live in today. This America is cruel and vicious, uninterested in equality or justice, instead intent on indulging its basest desires.
I hope my kids inherit some semblance of that “promise of America.” But I’d be lying if I said I believed, in this moment, that we will.
But the greatness of America has always been our resilience and our commitment to truth and justice. We may not be championing those ideals right now, but I have to believe that we will once again find our way.
If we don’t, then there won’t be much of a country worth saving.
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