by Kevin Ellis
You gotta give it to Donald Trump.
His story is now the biggest, most unbelievable political story in American history. It’s not a good or just story, but it is an incredible one, filled with unexpected upsets, head-scratching victories, and the defeat of some of the biggest names in American history.
Just look at his track record. Donald Trump has vanquished the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, and the Bidens.
He beat the media. The industry, once championed by reporters like Woodward, Bernstein, and the New York Times is now owned by oligarchs who either bend to Trump’s whims or bend Trump to theirs. With no responsibility to the public good, these greedy men use their platforms as play toys (Washington Post, Twitter, and Meta) to enhance their own power and gain.
Trump has beaten the Democratic party. It wasn’t the Republicans, it was Trump. At his hand, the democrats are now wandering in the political wilderness, lost and afraid. They are run by 80-year-olds who don’t understand social media or the Internet and ignore the next generation (AOC, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Andy Kim) and the man who warned them all this was coming (Bernie Sanders).
And most of all, Trump has beaten – and is destroying – the post-World War II world that our parents and grandparents built and died for. Roosevelt beat the Nazis, and his New Deal pulled us out of the depression; JFK and LBJ’s Great Society of civil rights, the Peace Corps, NATO, basic scientific research, vaccines, the Internet…
I can’t argue this world was perfect. The Post Office is terrible, the roads stink, wealth is lavished on armaments, and we ignore the needs of hungry children. At many levels, the government is beset with rot and inefficiency. Indeed, because of the Republican attacks since 1980, it is now accepted that our government is incompetent at best and malicious at worst. But that WW2 world was one of optimism, hope, and progress. One where the ideal of America didn’t seem like a pipe dream.
That’s all over now. Trump has defeated the American Dream.
It is the ultimate insult – although we are just getting started – that Trump was inaugurated on the same day as Martin Luther King’s birthday. I rode the subway in Washington, DC, on Monday, surrounded by Trump people wearing their MAGA hats and their smirks at how their guy had won. I couldn’t help but think about how they don’t understand how a society works.
I wanted to ask them who paid for the subway cars they were riding and who dug the tunnels that made their trip to the inaugural possible.
I wanted to ask if they flew on an airplane that takes off and lands safely because some inspector checked it out.
I wanted to ask if they had taken a taxi to downtown DC and how they felt about the government-regulated taxi commission that makes sure the drivers have a license.
I wanted to ask them how they feel so entitled, so safe in their hatred, that they could travel to DC without worrying about violence. That same violence their president and comrades fomented four years ago that killed police officers, threatened the lives of members of Congress, and turned this city into an armed camp. All that violence, but this time, all was quiet because they won the election. Sore losers all.
I wanted to ask them if their guy had lost the election, would they have accepted the loss the way the Democrats did? Would they have pulled together and swallowed their pride like Kamala Harris?
I wanted to ask them if they supported the pardons of more than 1,500 of the rioters who aimed to overturn an election, hang a sitting vice president at the gallows, kill the speaker of the House and members of Congress and anyone else who stood in their way.
But I didn’t ask them. I resisted my anger. Instead, I thought about the man whose birthday it was and what he would think of modern-day America.
Martin Luther King stood against the very basic tenet of Trumpism – hatred.
On policy, it’s easy to assume King would have opposed Trump at every turn – the false stories about immigrants, the wiping away of decades of progress on civil rights and equality, tax cuts for the wealthy, destroying our health care system, the imperative to understand our dark history of racism.
I wondered if King would have agreed on a few issues around the margins – like bad trade deals that shipped jobs overseas and poisoned food that enriches corporations. Sure. On the margins, I agree with that as well.
But where King would focus – I believe – is the sickness that currently engulfs America – the sickness that Trump embodies. Hatred.
Watch his inaugural address. He gave the same one in 2017. America is a dumpster fire, and only he can fix it. It’s all about him and the need to cleanse American society of an enemy he has created in order to speak to the insecurities of frustrated white men.
But watch – if you can find it – his speech to his lunch customers in DC after the inaugural. It is much of the same: the 2020 election was still rigged, Biden perverted the Justice Department, criminals from mental hospitals are destroying our country, and America is disrespected around the world.
But buried deep in Trump’s words, which he knows all too well, is a racial, nationalist war. It is the Klan, and the Confederacy wrapped up with the anti-vaxers, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It is a brilliant, if lethal, combination and a dangerous new coalition that would do away with elections and turn America into the opposite of what Dr. King envisioned: a cruel society filled with hatred and resentment of others.
From the White House on down, fear and hatred are the order of the day. We should not be surprised when it gets much worse.
The author is a WDEV morning show host and a former Vermont State House lobbyist and newspaper reporter “with sharp opinions about threats to Democracy and inequality with capitalism and markets at the root,” according to the bio on his ‘Conflict of Interest’ Substack page.