The election of Donald Trump (the sequel)
Started: 2024-11-27 13:34:14
Submitted: 2024-12-08 17:34:54
Visibility: World-readable
Processing the results of the 2024 presidential election
Donald Trump has won the presidential election, again. This is not new news, by the time I'm posting it; but it took a couple of weeks for me to gather my thoughts and begin to process the news.
Were mistakes made? Sure. The last stimulus probably overheated the economy, providing too much money chasing after too few goods in an economy still stressed by the supply chain of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Federal Reserve was slow to act. The administration couldn't convince people of all the good they were doing. Biden's support of the genocidal campaign in Gaza was inexcusable. Harris couldn't figure out how to distinguish herself from an unpopular president. I would have preferred more vocal support of immigration — it's good, actually! And it's clearly racist to point at brown people as if being an economic migrant is somehow immoral when most white Americans' ancestors were themselves economic migrants. Biden was slow to drop out. Harris had to spend much of the truncated 2024 campaign backtracking on her progressive positions from the 2020 campaign. But in the end about 75 million Americans looked at the open racism and misogyny and transphobia of the campaign, and the self-generated chaos of the first administration, and said, "I want more of that."
I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
The week after the election I parked at San Bruno BART to fly out of SFO. San Bruno is the site of the Tanforan relocation center, where American citizens and legal immigrants of Japanese descent were imprisoned. The monument and displays at Tanforan hit differently now, after the election, when the president-elect has promised to deport 20 million Americans, and maybe end birthright citizenship while he's at it.
I guess we're still having the hand-wringing debates about whether we're supposed to take Trump literally or seriously. We have to take him seriously, because we saw what he did as president before, and he's been given blanket immunity by the Supreme Court to do whatever crimes and misdeads he wants to do in office. We also have to take him literally, because otherwise we let him off the hook to say whatever he wants, as if "it's just locker room talk" excuses talking about sexual assault.
The power went out the morning after the election, as I woke up to find out that the worst president of my lifetime had been elected to a second term. We recently replaced our aging gas stove with a fancy induction stove, but this means we can no longer cook when the power goes out. It was bright and sunny outside so we set the camp stove on the patio to heat water for coffee (for me) and hot chocolate (the rest of the family).
(California just banned single-use disposable propane containers, so we have to get the right hose to hook up a 5-pound tank, which I also need to figure out how to deal with. I recently heard that "California never had a thought it didn't want to codify," which was intended as a cutting put-down, but I think it's funny and and also uncannily accurate.)
(The other election-related slur I heard was "Skittle-haired they/them activists" which I thought was a hilarious way of describing people with brightly-colored hair who want to treat others with respect and dignity.)
I put up a Black Lives Matter flag on the little flagpole on my deck, after consulting with my spouse because she lives here too and (contrary to the example set by a certain Supreme Court justice) I believe my flag-related decisions will reflect on her as well.
At lunch I biked to my nearest beach, at the overlook on the bluff above the San Lorenzo River, looking across the river to Main Beach and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The river has transitioned from its summer lagoon status (where the river terminates in a sand bank at the end of the beach) to its winter river status, where the river actually flows all the way into Monterey Bay. It was bright and sunny, in contrast to the cloud that the election cast on the country. There were more birds on the beach than people, congregating in the shallow water at the end of the river.
It's going to be a long four years.
