On Day One

January 21, 2025

‘Shock and Awe.’ And the resistance of love

If the sobering truth about the 2024 Presidential election is that it defines who we are, as Americans, circa 2025, then it’s not going to be the sort of truth we can easily abide.

For starters, there is nothing in Trumpism that speaks to our democratic ideals—not the enumerated truths about equality and unalienable rights we find “to be self-evident” by our Declaration of Independence; not the inscription welcoming “your poor, huddled masses yearning to be free” affixed to the Statue of Liberty.

Under Trumpism, the poor and those yearning to be free are now cast as our antagonists and enemies, many of whom—refugees seeking asylum from oppression in their home countries—were actually queuing up for appointments at a designated spot in Tijuana yesterday morning. No sooner had Trump taken the oath of office than those in the queue were notified their appointments “were no longer valid.”

Anguish ensued, tears flowed.

By that time, Pope Francis had already weighed in on Trump’s plans to harass and persecute immigrants from Latin America. The Pope bluntly criticized Trump’s plans as “a disgrace,” and an assault on the poor, something that likely jostled some nerves among the majority of American Catholic voters who cast their ballots for Trump in November.

For now, the immigration crack down is but one part of the “shock and awe” campaign (as Bloomberg and other news services have termed it) that Trump and his advisors promised for the first hours of his second term as president. The list is long and some—like an executive order to protect free speech—are purely performative and (given Trump’s long history of using lawyers to intimidate witnesses, journalists and even pollsters) gilded in hypocrisy and irony.

In addition to the anti-immigration/deportation orders that drew condemnation from the Pope, here are some of the more consequential strokes of Trump’s flying pens, if the decrees can be enacted without being overruled by the courts.

•A vow to end “birth right citizenship” a fundamental right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. (It may go without saying that Presidents do not have unilateral authority to repeal sections of the Constitution, but with a pro-Trump Supreme Court that has already induced gasps by expanding Presidential powers (Trump v. United States) it’d be naive to rule this out.

•Pardons and commuted sentences for approximately 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, including those who planned the assault and scores who inflicted physical violence on police officers trying to control the surging mob.

•An expansion of the so-called “Schedule F” designations that he attempted near the end of his first term (President Biden repealed the earlier order after defeating Trump in 2020) which would greatly diminish the number of federal civil service positions that—heretofore—have been shielded from partisan politics.

As for the planet, arguably the most consequential strokes of Trump’s pen came a few minutes before 7 p.m. EST.

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I had my mind in better places for most of yesterday. But out of habit I flipped on the live audio feed from D.C. just as Trump signed two executive orders withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, something—at least implicitly— he promised fossil fuel executives last May in exchange for a billion dollars in campaign contributions. (It may be that historians will mark yesterday’s signing exercise as the formal opening ceremony for the new American pay-to-play gilded age—where corporations and high-tech billionaires like Elon Musk can openly and shamelessly pour boundless sums of money into political campaigns.)

Before he signed the orders Trump audibly stage-whispered to Will Scharf, the man standing next to his signing desk, instructing Scharf to announce into a microphone that withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords would save more than a trillion dollars. And Scharf, a long-time aide to Trump, did just that.

I think this moment deserves an asterisk, one that should read and sound like a planetary primal scream. As I noted in my previous post, Trump not only dismisses the science that the planet is rapidly warming, he actually mocked warnings about global warming and the resulting escalation in wildfires by telling concerned California officials in 2020 that the climate “will start getting cooler, you just watch.” We can now see how that worked out.

Last year was the hottest on record, as was the year before that. The science on climate is as real as the science that brings electricity to our toasters, or messages to our cell phones. Of course, Trump offers no evidence for his claim that withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords will save a trillion dollars. But the sum hardly matters— because it’s an insane argument. By the same reasoning you could assert that ending public funding of fire departments would save billions of dollars, so long as you didn’t account for the exploding costs in lives and property from the resulting infernos. But this is Trumpism, and this is the fools gold of macho-speak that millions of Americans either enjoy or find to be tolerable—if not entirely persuasive—when they vote. It is a thin but potent margin.

Marchers in yesterday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day procession through downtown Spokane

I knew the Trump inaugural carnival was at hand—internationally—so yesterday I started my day, locally, on foot, walking across bridges in Riverfront Park, through the clouds of water vapor rising from the Spokane Falls. It was 15 degrees out.

Inauguration Day was also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and it is celebrated every year in Spokane with a community march. At least for yesterday, at least for me, it was the perfect anti-dote to the performative bullying, inherent meanness and moral rot of Trumpism.

In political terms, Spokane is a blue dot of diversity in a red sea of conservative and overwhelmingly white Republicans, an important percentage of whom at least tolerate racism and discrimination against gay people. Let’s just say it creates an atmosphere. In 2011 it created more than that. A then 37 year-old white racist from a county just north of Spokane came to Spokane on Martin Luther King Day with a bomb—the Justice Department described it as “a weapon of mass destruction”—that he intended to detonate along the parade route during the parade. Blessedly, some alert park employees noticed the package on bench and alerted the police, who disarmed the device. The man who planted the bomb on the bench—Kevin William Harpham—is now serving a 32-year prison term.

I was out of town that day, but a dear friend of mine was there with my camera and other friends were there to march. If the device had exploded I would have lost people dear to me, but far more importantly, people essential to the soul and vibrancy of the city I live in. These are people who make this a kinder and better place than it would otherwise be, because their lives and spirits radiate beyond their reach and shadows.

I thought of that as I was standing and walking and chatting in the cold yesterday morning, watching hundreds of people arrive for the march, many with children on their shoulders, many with signs expressing the love and hopes of Martin Luther King’s dreams. The juxtaposition with the power-grabbing and seediness of Trump’s inaugural (he used the occasion to pitch Trump Bibles and other merch, including crytocurrency) was redeeming, like a release of doves.

It could not be missed and it could not, would not, leave you in despair.

—tjc

Dance troupe from Grant Elementary School leading the way for Spokane’s 2025 Martin Luther King Day march yesterday morning