Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Looking back, we should have seen it coming in 2017 when Trump made his now infamous statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia featuring a torchlight march of Nazi sympathizers shouting “Jews will not replace us” that cost the life of a young woman among the counter protesters. It was the moment that the president of the United States put our nation on the wrong side of racism, and as it would develop, on the wrong side of practically everything else we thought this country stood for.
He was saying that it was time to acknowledge as legitimate the other side of a question that this country had struggled with since its founding. I remember thinking that we had won this battle and other battles—we had Brown vs Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, all manner of local ordinances and court decisions protecting racial minorities from discrimination, and we had the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement, and we had fought and won the right for gay people to serve openly in the military and to marry.
And yet here we are. You name the issue, and with Trump in the White House, this country is now on the wrong side of it, the war in Ukraine being only the latest example of the black hole Trump has led us into, headfirst and eyes open. Trump took his tiny, manicured hands and rubbed the magic lamp and the genie popped out. On that dark day in 2017 that Donald Trump loudly endorsed the politics of white supremacists and Nazis, Trump signed a hall pass for racists and misogynists and xenophobes and homophobes. It’s been eight long years, and they are still out there in the hallways, unencumbered by the old rules, loose and without restraint.
Right now, behind me across the room on the television, Donald Trump is giving what they tell us is his fifth State of the Union address. I watched a few minutes. It is as filled with lies and grievance as you would expect. He’s blaming everything but the last Ice Age on Joe Biden and the Democrats, who he points to in the House chamber like a prosecutor repeating the crimes of the accused before a jury.
His jury is out there all right. He knows how to push their buttons and the Republicans in the House chamber know how to applaud and cheer on cue. It’s not Trump’s speech I want to talk about tonight but his jury—not only his MAGA base but the broad swath of largely white Americans he has in his thrall. I spent some time this afternoon watching a clip from CNN that showed a visit by a reporter to a county in Georgia where 90 percent of voters went for Trump last year. Heather Digby Parton, who writes the excellent Hullabaloo blog, described those interviewed by CNN this way: “They’ll love him ‘till the day they die,” noting acidly, “which may be sooner than they expect.”
Yeah, I know, we’ve seen it all before—the reporter from the big city going out in the hinterlands to take the fire hot temperature of Trump’s base, trying to understand how they can support this man who lies to them as easily as he breathes. This time the reporter had Elon Musk to throw into the mix, which caused the only tiny blip of consternation they showed. One guy predictably walked out of the diner where she was interviewing a group of Trump supporters when the facts she cited in one of her questions got in the way of his prejudices.
The group of men in the diner were all in their 60s and 70s, but despite their ages, I came away with the distinct impression that I was looking at our future. Maybe not the men themselves, but their children and their children’s children. We had better get a handle on the idea that it isn’t Donald Trump we’re going to be at war with in the coming years and decades. It isn’t even that they are his people, that they believe as he does, because he doesn’t have beliefs. He has only hungers and needs.
They were there in that county in Georgia and across the country in their coveralls and cowboy hats and pin-striped suits and high heels and designer dresses carrying their grocery bags and expensive purses and briefcases and prejudices before Trump came along, and they’ll be there when he’s gone.
Trump is still droning on the television behind me. I stopped for a moment to listen just in time to hear him attack wokeness in the military and pledge that from now on everyone will be warriors, not woke, as if we didn’t have brave soldiers and airmen and seamen before Donald Trump came on the scene. He kept pointing at the Democratic side of the chamber as he spit out his performative curses, accusing them of being for renewable energy and helping people in need and all that stuff that’s so unnecessary now that Trump has brought his new golden age of prosperity and un-woke prejudice into being.
It’s probably the only accurate and useful thing Trump said all night, to draw such clear lines that delineate the battle ongoing and the battle we face in years to come. He is right. There are two Americas: his and ours. There is the America that will abandon an ally that is under attack by Russia, which the Republican Party used to call the evil empire. There is the America that accepts that there are fine people on both sides of a profound issue like racial justice and equality before the law. There is the America that thinks words like woke and diversity are curses to be flung at what Trump has called the enemy within. There is the America that is fine with allowing children to die from measles or even the flu so long as parents have the right to choose whether they are vaccinated against diseases that can be beaten with a simple injection.
That’s his America. Ours is what it’s always been—a place of openness and acceptance but where your rights end where our bodies begin; a place where one’s skin color is a source of pride, not hate; a place where air and land and water is respected, not exploited and dirtied; a place where wealth is made use of, not worshipped; a place where obligations and responsibilities are taken willingly and shared equally. Our America still believes that some things are non-negotiable, that freedom is not just a word for nothing left to lose, but something to cherish and hold on to even at the cost of your own life.
I don’t say that lightly, and I mean no disrespect to the great songwriter and soldier and American, Kris Kristofferson. But I do mean that we are in a struggle not just for the soul of this country, but for its existence as a place where we can still dream of a shared future.
I fear however that what we are looking at is a hundred year war between those who believe that there are fine people on both sides, and those who believe that one side is right and the other side is wrong, and the difference is worth fighting for. I think we can win elections, like the midterms next year and the presidency in 2028, and the war will still go on, because the other side doesn’t believe in America the way we do. They believe democracy is a zero-sum game, that every inch not taken is an inch lost, that winning is absolute and that losing is worse than death.
I have been around for more than three quarters of a century. I have seen us go from a country of Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen and John F Kennedy and Edward Brooke and Bob Dole and Barack Obama to a country of Donald Trump and JD Vance and Tommy Tuberville and Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk. Elections have been won and elections have been lost, but we have never deserted an ally in a time of war, when cities were still being bombed and rockets still flew and blood still flowed from bodies of our friends on the battlefield.
We are in a different time. We are dealing with another kind of fellow citizen. What it once meant to be an American has lost its meaning. We can save our country and save ourselves, but we’ll have to save people who are not like us in the process, and that will test our beliefs and our resolve as we have never been tested before. It may take us a hundred years, but we know that we and our children and our children’s children can do it, because Americans like us have done it before. There is another greatest generation out there waiting to be born. Our mission is to fight long enough and hard enough that it happens.
