Sunday's postcard, and reckoning with the venom of Trumpism

December 3, 2023

Rocks in the rapids, Spokane River

“You won’t convince us otherwise”

My first visceral experience with Trumpism was in my parents’ kitchen. This was in mid-2016, a few months before that year’s presidential election. I come from a large, Catholic family with several sisters. One of them was visiting and had tuned the small television near the toaster to Fox News. Something like an argument had begun to take flight and I asked, directly, what it was about Donald Trump that made her so enthused about him. She was quick with her reply.

“Because he’ll get rid of people like you.”

She said this with a flush of passion, pointing a finger and looking me straight in the eyes.

I was speechless. I left the house and walked around the long block, amid the big pines on Spokane’s lower South Hill. Whe I returned she met me at the front door. She apologized, blaming her outburst on a glass of wine. I could write that I tucked the experience away, but that would suggest I had a choice. But what she’d said and how she’d said it was not the sort of thing you can unhear.

I wish I understood this better. Before Trump came along my sister and I had vigorous disagreements over politics, including a wrenching argument, over the phone, about the invasion of Iraq. Through it all I at least felt like we were taking some care not to cross the line between disagreement and contempt.

But I have known, for some time, that the voices she listens to on the radio and at Fox News market in contempt, and traffic in dehumanization. It turns my stomach not because I disagree with their politics but because of their certitude that people who advocate for civil rights, a viable social safety net, for LGBTQ and reproductive rights, etc., are idiots at best, evil and disposable at worst.

Trump has harvested this passion and converted it—as he did on Jan. 6, 2021—to open violence, i.e. implicitly granting permission to those who brought a noose to the Capitol that day and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” It’s not just ironic that Pence (an anti-abortion, evangelical Christian) was hunted with murderous intent. It’s telling because his sin was betrayal of the Trump cause—the MAGA movement—not that he’d changed his mind about abortion. Because he hadn’t.

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