Richard J. Rosendall

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Weakness in a President is Deadly

Here’s a Democratic campaign ad for you: show Trump speaking at a rally to a stadium full of people who gradually disappear and their cheers die away.

Weakness in a president is deadly.

The day after Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant and using ultraviolet light inside people’s bodies as treatments for COVID-19 during his daily improv routine in the White House briefing room, which resulted in a viral video of Dr. Deborah Birx struggling to compose herself, he walked it back and blamed the press.

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.” No you weren’t, clown. STFU.

Everyone from the Environmental Protection Agency to cleanser makers to song parodist Randy Rainbow urged people not to follow the president’s dangerous suggestion. Across the nation, the ridicule was as rampant as the warnings. Jokes about chewable Clorox tablets went around. During cocktails via Zoom with friends from Nellie’s Sports Bar, one couple drank what I am sure were not really “Lysoltinis.”

My first impulse after hearing Dr. Trump’s brainstorm was to say “Go right ahead,” but the thought of gullible parents poisoning their children stopped me short.

On April 24, a White House official threatened to summon the Secret Service when Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson refused to switch seats in the briefing room with CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins. Kaitlan’s questioning had displeased the Maximum Leader, so they ordered her back to Chris’s seat. Well sorry, but the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the Trump Administration, determines seating assignments. Kudos to Chris and Kaitlan for staying put.

Imagine the insecurity that would impel a president to blame and punish reporters for his own murderous ignorance. When members of the press corps refuse to be bullied or set against one another, they uphold their crucial role enshrined by our Founders in the First Amendment.

Trump’s lies, threats, and wishful thinking, his responsibility dodging and refusal to respect expertise, have already killed more Americans than the 58,220 who died in Vietnam. The question is whether that and the tanked economy will cost him reelection, and there the news is encouraging. Polls show he is in trouble, and his desperate flailing shows that he knows it. Republicans are afraid that his disastrous handling of the public health crisis will cost them the Senate as well as the White House.

Still, the election is six months away, and Trump’s mischief proceeds apace. A few examples:

The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division at the Department of Health and Human Services (which sounds like something George Orwell thought up to entertain himself during the Blitz) is going to let doctors refuse to treat LGBTQ patients for religious reasons. Never mind that there are far more biblical injunctions against everything Trump does than against queers.

Trump issued an executive order last week temporarily suspending the issuance of new green cards, though it carved out exceptions such as for essential workers—including, presumably, resort staff and Slovenian models. His invocation of health and jobs as justification is a thin veil for the racism that he and advisor Stephen Miller have fomented all along.

Trump’s decision to speak at West Point, prompted by Mike Pence’s Air Force Academy appearance, will require 1,000 graduating cadets to return to the military academy from the homes to which they scattered because of the pandemic. They will be tested for the virus, given masks, monitored, and segregated in the mess hall—all to serve as props for one insatiable ego.

We respond to a challenging time in various ways. Businesses adapt, fresh connections are improvised, new charities spring up. A few blocks from me, Metropolitan AME Church, like many other houses of worship, has gone enthusiastically virtual with a range of programs.

As for that confrontation in the briefing room, it is notable that the president’s aide backed down. Secret Service agents are not a dictator’s thugs, as he may discover if he refuses to leave the White House on January 20. For now, he will resort to any destructive act and tell any lie in his growing fury, while the reporters he slanders and abuses labor on. Let them be our inspiration.

Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at [email protected].

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Rising to Our Moment Against Trump’s Madness

When most of us launch into a new morning it is nothing like storming Normandy Beach on D-Day.

Most of us are not being shot, deported, jailed, evicted, or starved. Whatever brutal measures Trump and his minions have in mind, most of our freedoms have not yet been blotted out by a fascist state. We still have our voices and our power to act. It is for us to use them.

Some say we’re letting Trump distract us from the harm he’s doing. Really? We can’t multitask? What is he up to that we’re missing? Lining his pockets? Packing the courts? Rolling back environmental protections? Gutting USDA? Raiding FEMA funds to cage more migrant children? Promising pardons to staff who follow his unlawful orders? Attacking immigrants and people of color at every turn? Deporting students and sick children? Mocking journalists and scientists who don’t echo his desires? Letting Wayne LaPierre lead him around on a leash? Jerking off on the drapes? What?

If we are so unserious that we cannot keep track of this demagogue’s despoilments, we are done. I do not believe it. We will not all sleep through the next fourteen months. I may not be Edward R. Murrow reporting from a London rooftop during the Blitz, and you may not be Julia Child spying in Sri Lanka, but we can rise to our moment.

We bring different gifts, but we all have a part in the election. Each of us can contribute: register voters, reach out to neighbors and family, have the difficult discussions, challenge our representatives, give our time and money to candidates, run for an office ourselves.

One of the best things we can do is simply not surrender to the erosion of standards. We don’t have to accept diminished expectations because of Trump’s unrelenting trash talk and provocations. We can stand our ground. We can defend things we care about regardless of what the man-child and his rabble say.

Reality provides a backstop. Gay and trans people do not disappear because some wish to erase us. Women, people of color, immigrants, and religious minorities do not become devils or infestations or denizens of The Handmaid’s Tale because of a sociopath’s rants. Sea levels do not stop rising nor storms growing more extreme by ignoring (or nuking) them. Mass shootings are not stopped by thoughts and prayers. Crumbling infrastructure is not rebuilt by neglect. Pesticides don’t stop killing bees because of Monsanto’s denials. Sooner or later, the truth bites us in the ass. Trump’s alternate facts (that is, lies) do not become true by repetition.

45’s incompetence causes harm that mean tweets do not mitigate. He weakens our standing in the world with his obliviousness to soft power.

We, in the meantime, continue in our diversity to create, innovate, inspire, and enlighten. We do not require permission to step up and assert ourselves. We build and rebuild alliances and go where others haven’t because, as Murrow said in confronting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, we are not descended from fearful people.

The campaign ahead will be long and nasty. When you feel overloaded, you may have wandered into Trump’s funhouse. “Aha!” his trolls love to cry, as if Putin’s useful idiot is above reproach and every journalist who issues a correction (as honest people do) should be dragged off in chains. Break out. Look around you to clear your head and reorient yourself toward the reality-based community.

The idea of America, if it lives at all, lives in us. That is our wellspring. All of us are its guardians. Federal employees in particular, including DOJ attorneys and Secret Service agents, take oaths to defend the Constitution. The great majority take their oaths seriously, as I did during my own federal career. Pledges of service do not morph into plunder because a toddler scribbles over them.

Don’t give Trump’s band of saboteurs rent-free space in your head. We might win, we might not. We don’t know. Cable news is full of experts who were wrong about the last presidential election. Much is at stake. There is no point in hand-wringing or giving up without a fight. We can do this. Let’s go.

Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist. He can be reached at [email protected].