Then candidate Donald Trump participates in a Fox News Town Hall with Sean Hannity at the New Holland Arena on Sept. 4 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images).
When my dad was a kid, his favorite baseball player Roberto Clemente couldn’t stay at the same hotels or eat at the same restaurants with his white teammates when the Pittsburgh Pirates were on the road.
Only seven years before I was born, women demanded and won their right to bodily autonomy at the U.S. Supreme Court, only to be told they’d won too much and were to blame for the backlash that ensued.
I was 24 years old in 2004 when gay people had made some noise about wanting to have the right to get married so Karl Rove ran a campaign credited with driving voters to the polls to win George W. Bush a second term by putting a slew of state constitutional amendments on the ballot banning marriage equality.
I was 36 in 2016 when Donald Trump ran on protecting Americans from Mexicans (“they’re rapists, they’re criminals”), Muslims, and “politically correct” oppressors like women.
I’m no historian, but I am capable of identifying a pattern.
When the U.S. Constitution came into effect, Black, female, indigenous and non-landowning people could not vote.
Our Constitution would be a bankrupt document if Americans hadn’t explicitly amended it and also interpreted it in ways that give me and others rights that The Founders didn’t. Through a process of people demanding their rights and eventually winning them, we’ve made progress.
But what happens when disfavored groups start piping up is they provide a target for anyone trying to gain power who might benefit from having a punching bag. We have seen many variations in U.S. history of: “Fear this group and what they are taking from you. Vote for us and we’ll protect you.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
This election, Trump brought hell on Haitian immigrants in Ohio who are here legally; he had attendees at the RNC and his rallies wave printed signs that said “Mass Deportation”; he denigrated his eminently qualified opponent Kamala Harris by calling her dumb and making sexual jokes; he and other Republican candidates spent over $200 million on ads going after the smallest minority possible, transgender people.
There has been plenty of discussion about the fact that picking out groups to vilify, saying they are “the enemy within” and using the resulting fear to win power in an attempt to justify blowing up democratic institutions is the definition of the f-word (fascism).
But there is also something fundamentally American about it. Dividing people against each other who might otherwise gang up on the powerful is the oldest con in politics.
I would genuinely love to believe any theory of “it all came down to inflation” or “the Democrats did XYZ wrong.” But we should also consider the equally plausible possibility that half the country voted for Trump because a significant portion of them like what he says, what he’s done and what he campaigned on doing next.
It is by no means the first time a population has willingly elected an authoritarian leader.
It makes me debilitatingly sad that half of my fellow citizens voted for a man who has been credibly accused of sexual battery by nearly 30 women, attempted to extort a foreign leader into investigating his political rival, engaged in corruption to enrich himself and his family like we’ve never seen before, sought to use the military against protesting citizens, separated children from their families to punish migrants, made the pandemic far more deadly than it should have been, and told his angry mob “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol.”
He has now promised retribution for his critics and the dismantling of the federal government.
But there isn’t time to be sad, because things may be about to get very ugly.
I don’t want to catastrophize.
In the days after the election, I hoped maybe Trump, reveling in having vanquished his enemies and proven himself above the law and king of the world, would spend the next four years working on his golf game instead of exacting revenge and enacting far-right policies that that maybe his heart isn’t in.
Maybe Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, no longer needing to out-MAGA his rivals by attacking Missourians and filing performative lawsuits against the Biden administration, would now use his office to protect vulnerable Missourians.
Maybe the book banners and anti-diversity and inclusion activists could enjoy their dominance instead of treating their community members as threats.
No. The signs point to Trump following through on his promises in potentially spectacular ways. Even if he doesn’t, a proportion of his supporters will feel emboldened to “take America back” from his targets on the local level.
Hours after Trump was elected, people across the country began receiving threatening texts and emails with anti-Black, anti LGBTQ, and anti-immigrant messages. Within a day, “your body, my choice” went viral and soon made it to real life. This is reminiscent of the spike in racist and antisemitic incidents and hate crimes after Trump’s first election.
There was soon a Nazi march in Ohio and Nazis yelling “Heil Trump” outside a play about Ann Frank in Michigan. Ohio’s march was organized by St. Louis’s new neo-Nazi group, which I was introduced to when driving home with my family under an overpass of masked men holding swastika flags.
When I was a teenager, a handful of Klu Klux Klan members having a march meant thousands of us went out to protest. The KKK felt the need to get a permit in 1999. Today, these incidents are rampant and most don’t even make the national news. Proud Boys show up with giant guns outside drag brunch. Nazis are on our drive home. Protestors targeted a St. Charles library because a librarian looked gender non-conforming.
No one has any idea how Trump’s second term is going to go. The best I have is: there’s no time to be demoralized. This is America, where our battles for equality have not been won — get ready to stand up for whoever the Trumpists come for in our communities.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.