Have you ever been so wrong about something that it shakes your belief in everything? If you’re on the Trump Train, now would be a good time to stop reading this. It won’t make sense anyway. Maybe we can find common ground in another time, in some other place – likely in a galaxy far, far away.
Like a lot of people, the majority in fact, I was “with her” in 2016. Many years ago, I was with her husband, too. He turned out to be rather disappointing. I don’t know what he did to which women or when, and never will, but I certainly don’t hold him up as a pillar of anything. I could square being with her in spite of him. Maybe that’s justification and rationalization – I’m certainly capable of both. In any event, I chose her for her. Smart, decent, capable, strong … I chose her.
When she lost, I cried human tears, not liberal ones. I had seen enough of the man who would be fake king to know that we were in trouble. But the fact is, in no way whatsoever could I have foreseen what was to come. While the time between November 2016 and January 2017 felt like an obscene gut punch, there was some part of me that truly believed that this man would defer to better men. That naïve person thought: He’s unequal to this task, he knows it and he’ll let institutions and experts lead the way. Surely one man, no matter how flawed, could threaten democracy itself. Not in four years anyway.
Today, I laugh at 2016 me. She thought, this, would have a way of working itself out. She believed Lincoln Project thinking would ooze its way into every corner of the House, Senate, and maybe even the halls of Fox News. She was so sure that a couple people would be brave enough to speak the truth and the less brave would draw on their strength. She was convinced that one malignantly self-centered voice couldn’t silence so many others.
The me who I am today, the more jaded and cynical one, still hopes we can exercise the power we have as Americans on November 3rd to do what our elected and appointed officials wouldn’t. And in my current period of resentment, I hope history will be unkind enough to remember the people who would only speak ill of their party leader anonymously, behind closed doors, or after serving in his cabinet for exactly what they were: Accomplices.