Journal of the plague years

      Four years ago, when Donald Trump was elected, I felt compelled to start chronicling his daily assaults on public integrity, civil rights and the Rule of Law on Facebook.  When I launched the stand alone blog a few months later, I chose the title,“Journal of the Plague Years.” The name was a nod to Daniel Defoe, of “Robinson Crusoe” fame, who chronicled what it was like to live in London during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1665 in his historical novel of the same name.

At the time, I quipped that Trump’s presidency would be like the plague in Defoe’s novel, a brutal disease that sweeps through society,causing rampant suffering and destruction, but for a short time. As one of the 94% of Black women who voted for Hillary Clinton, I had no doubt that Trump would unleash a plague of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia and anti-semitism on this country. I anticipated that his crude prejudices would embolden violent white supremacists and allow casual racists to the police the mere presence of people of color in “white spaces”, from public parks to a Yale common room. Under Trump, hate crimes have reached an 16 year high, (Source: “Hate Crime Violence Hate-Crime Violence Hits 16 Year High, F.B.I. Report Says,” by Adeel Hassan, The New York Times, 11/12/19). Tell me that isn’t a plague.

       There has been a scourge of corruption and malevolence, from Trump and his family of grifters, to every member of his cabinet. From Tom Price who tried to dismantle Obamacare from inside the Department of Health and Human Services to Scott Pruitt, who used his perch atop the EPA to gut regulations to ensure clean air and water, to, most tragically, William Barr, who “corrupt[ed] the Justice Department in the service of a tyrant,” every member of his administration seeks to sabotage the mission of the agencies they lead.

     We have lived through an infestation of sadism into our public policy, snatching immigrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, in violation of international law, (Source:  “UN rights chief ‘appalled’ by US border detention conditions, says holding migrant children may violate international law,” UN News, 7/8/19).  We have a Supreme Court that enthusiastically embraces capital punishment, whether it causes death by gruesome and barbaric means or whether it results in the murder of an innocent man in Alabama.

      Every effort to hold him accountable failed.  From the Mueller investigation to the impeachment hearings and “trial,” Trump stonewalled and Congressional Republicans enabled him to continue his disastrous misrule, regardless of the damage inflicted on the country.

      As these plagues swept the nation, many remained unbothered.  Some reasoned that as long as he appointed judges whose hostility to equal rights let them keep their unearned spot at the top of the pyramid, Trump was alright with them.  Still others shrugged off the persecution of people of color, LGBTQ folks, Jewish or Muslim Americans as collateral damage that didn’t matter as long as their 401k balance kept rising.

    Now, though, in the midst of a global pandemic, Trump’s cruelty and incompetence could cost those same heedless people their lives.

The mistake they made was thinking that Trump’s chaos could be confined to “those people.” Blinded by fealty to their own irrational hatred (or their bank balance), they failed to see how we are all connected. We canaries in the coal mine tried to warn them. Now they’re trapped down here with us.

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