This is trump’s legacy. There is no hiding from it. Everyone who yelled, “build the wall,” “lock her up,” “law and order” is complicit. Everyone who believed Fox’s lies, who deflected to some other issue, who failed to fact check a meme because you didn’t care if it was true as long as it comforted your cognitive dissonance is complicit. Every. Single. One. Of. You.
There is nothing more for me to do tonight. I’ve voted. I’ve phone banked. I’ve argued. I’ve tried to persuade. Now I wait to see if the American experiment ends. trump has spent four years tearing down the restraints that keep us from autocracy. Without those restraints he’ll be free the next four years to do it all. To lock up political opponents and critics. To destroy more families. To line more of his pockets and to enable more criminals. If he wins, there will be nothing left to restrain him and the gang of criminals with whom he’s surrounded himself. If he wins, we might not have another election. None of the trump supporters I know would be bothered by that.
And if he loses? If he loses, 40 percent of the voters in this country, minimum, will have voted for unrestrained police violence, denial of rights to LGBTQ citizens, forced sterilization, systemic racism, arbitrary detention, torture. If you are reading this and saying to yourself “Not me, I’m not for those things, I just like the tax cuts,” you’re lying. We’ve gone past the point where a vote for trump might not mean you’re racist, it just means you don’t have a problem with racism. No, a vote for trump now means you are complicit in everything he’s done. It means you’ve seen the bad and decided it’s worth it because you’ll come out ahead.
If he loses, the country is still in trouble. We’ve seen the hate in the heart of the trump supporters who cheer as cars get run off the road, who decried the burning of the Minneapolis police station, then suddenly went silent when it turned out it was a white trump supporter. And those who attempted to deflect attention and blame from such things are every bit as complicit. There will be violence. There will be riots and looting. And the complicit will suddenly find their taste for law and order growing stale when the law and the order is applied to white people. Like Kyle Rittenhouse. Like Ivan Harrison Hunter. Like the men who charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Michigan. The more malleable will riot. The more sedentary will cluck at the violence and try to deflect with more “whataboutism” as they project their own wishes of an autocracy that will serve their entitlement onto those of us they’ve long believed to be enemies.
A Biden win, even a landslide, doesn’t get us out of the woods. It only puts us back on the trail. We need to keep walking down it. We need to stop normalizing fascism, whether its from the president or at the dinner table. We need to make sure everyone can vote, we need to find ways to make it easier for more people to vote and we need shun — politically, socially and personally — people who want make it harder for anyone to vote. American is at stake, not just tomorrow, but in the days and years to come.
trump will go away. He might file some motions, but once he establishes his martyrdom and victimhood, he will go away because he is a coward. He’s not willing to do the work it takes to embed fascism, thank God. But his supporters will remain. They will walk among us. We can never forget what they did.
Oran Today 