Trump Has Won Me Over

OK, I did not watch his acceptance speech. I just couldn’t. But I did just watch the 60 Minutes interview from tonight. I don’t know. I’m kind of charmed. He’s kind of won me over.

OK yeah, now that I have your attention…

Are you FUCKING kidding me? I am actually so alarmed by the CBS interview and the way that Leslie Stahl is normalizing him as a legitimate politician/president-elect/person. But after I watched this I could actually imagine many Americans saying and feeling this way. And that is terrifying to me.

Besides the fact that Trump ran his entire campaign on fear mongering, othering, violence, and hate — he is a KNOWN liar and a known racist, not to mention a total hothead who has shown little knowledge of and perhaps even blatant disregard for how our government actually works. Remember how he wanted (still wants, presumably) to bring back the death penalty for 5 Black kids wrongly accused of RAPE. Um, we don’t execute people for rape in this country. And he was still arguing this after these young men spent 14 years in prison (FOURTEEN YEARS) and were exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from someone whose DNA was found in the victim’s body.

And this is the man we’re going to allow to appoint justices of the Supreme Court? He’s already done a bang up job with his “alt-right,” white nationalist cabinet pick so far! He will no doubt choose an extreme conservative for the Supreme Court even though allegedly most Americans are not themselves extreme conservatives.

Trump is delusional and a pathological liar. I’m appalled that we are here right now and that our “liberal” politicians are also treating Trump like he’s for real and telling us it’s time to make nice. They, like much of the press, are gaslighting us! And it’s not ok. An article on CNN earlier tonight claimed that Trump made a “powerful appeal” to the nation when he looked into the camera during the 60 Minutes interview and told his supporters to stop the violence against minorities. Really? Was that a powerful appeal? Too little too late as far as I’m concerned. And also, I question his sincerity. I have good reason to.

When Stahl first asks him if he has heard about his supporters chanting “white power,” and doing violence to minorities he hesitates to admit he has. Then he says he’s heard a little bit about it. He says the media is over blowing it. He says that these haters would be there causing violence even if he had never run for president. He may be right about that last part. But you know what? They wouldn’t be holding “Trump for President” signs as they did it. And though this type of violence from Trump supporters has been going on the entire campaign, it is clear to me (and not just from the media) but from reports I have had from at least 5 people I know personally who have either seen for themselves or had their own friends experience these things THIS WEEK. Three of the events I’m talking about happened here in NYC, I heard second hand accounts — not third hand, not a friend of a friend of a friend of someone who knew someone, NOT the media. These stories are real. The violence and the hatred is real and many of Trump’s supporters have been emboldened by his presidency.

I know many people — including some of my own FB friends — had other reasons to vote for him. I truly believe that although those people were not motivated by racism, it still stands that they were at the very least willing to ignore the reality of what this candidate has represented since day one. Since before day 1. He is not a good guy. We witnessed it time and again throughout the campaign. And many Americans and the electoral college have chosen to look the other way. As even a conservative blogger, Sean Patrick Hughes points out, the people who voted for Trump were so desperate for “change” in our government that they had a “willingness to ignore personal decency and fair treatment towards people who are different in service to that change.” This is not OK and it never will be. The press and the establishment politicians need to stop telling us that it is. Trump may have won fair and square according to our absurd electoral college rules, but that does not make it OK that he did. Think about what he represents.

You should watch the interview. To me it feels like crazy making (Trump is gaslighting us too, but he has been all along). See how he backtracks on a bunch of stuff he promised during the campaign, including the fact that he’s going to appoint a special prosecutor send Hillary to jail… Apparently she and Bill both called him to congratulate him as did both Both George Bushes. Can someone please fact check this? I seem to remember him also making claims that the NFL called him a while ago.

And who knows? Maybe the Clintons and the Bushes did call to congratulate him. And if they did, shame on them. Apparently now he thinks “crooked” Hillary is a good person. What? I guess he was just trying to malign her in order to get your vote. OK maybe that’s politics, but it’s also a form of lying. Or at best disingenuous politicking. But it sure worked, didn’t it?

Also listen to what he says in the interview about not touching gay marriage. He says he won’t (Good. Let’s hope he’s not lying about that now. But you know what? It is built into the RNC platform plain and simple) because, he says, that the deal is sealed. Gay marriage is already written into the constitution.

Abortion rights? Not so much. Roe V. Wade, he says, will definitely be appealed. What’s the difference? This is a genuine question. Why is one written into the constitution and the other up for grabs. What am I missing?

In the last debate when he was asked about “Obamacare”? His answer? “Gone! It’s gone. It’s horrible. All of it.” Listen to how he answers Stahl tonight. Again, of course I hope he’s NOT planning on taking away all of the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with absolutely nothing. What a disaster that would be. But really? Listen to what he had to say about it tonight. Quite different.

I thought his answers on Muslims, immigration, and the wall were all still completely unacceptable tonight and once again still employing the kind of fear mongering rhetoric that he has all along. Only this time, he was very calm. Leslie Stahl even thought so. In an interview she gave afterwards, she says she saw a different and softer, more subdued and “sober” side of Trump this evening. But she has zero interest, it seems, in trying to think critically about how that presentation of himself functions at this point in the game or about what it all means.

But to return to my original point — if you watch the CBS video and you ignore all that I point out here — all that many many smart, concerned citizens, journalists, activists and yes even some politicians have been pointing out for the past year or more, you may come away from watching that interview thinking, “he’s not so bad. He seems like a rational, reasonable, nice guy. A family man, even.” But you will be dead wrong.

The brilliant writer, Teju Cole, does a much more eloquent job than I can here of asking us to reject this normalization process. He writes, “Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else.” I’m not entirely comfortable with the word evil. I might replace it here with “oppression” or “racism” or “homophobia” or “misogyny” or any other number of nouns we’ve seen Trump and many of his conservative fellows endorse and perpetuate during this election cycle.

But I take Cole’s point. We should all be wary of politicians and media who ask us to turn around now and “unite,” “come together,” or “put our differences aside and get along.” I dread facing my students tomorrow for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they are generally kind, peace-seeking kids who want to believe that the world is a good place. I’m anticipating many of them are feeling cheered and at least a little bit encouraged by both Obama’s and Hillary’s responses conceding the win to Trump and encouraging us all to come together to support him as our president.

But I am not cheered or encouraged. And right now I’m wrestling with how exactly I should go about talking with my students about this.

There’s a quote circulating on social media lately, attributed to Son of Baldwin: “We can disagree, and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” These are the limits of our bipartisanship.

We should all be wary of anyone — friends, lovers, teachers, parents, university administrators, and especially, I think, journalists, who discourage us from calling out oppression for what it is and who insist on normalizing violent and dehumanizing ideologies. Tonight’s 60 Minutes interview was not the first time it’s happened throughout the election (think Jimmy Fallon’s interview with Trump in September) and it won’t be the last. As too many of us know it happens all the time.

But I refuse to play that game. I won’t go into my classroom tomorrow and try to normalize Trump and all that he stands for. I can’t look my students in the eyes — every single one of them in my first class tomorrow, Black, brown, Muslim, immigrants, queer or some combination of all of the above — I can’t look at their faces and tell them it’s time to unite. Somehow, I’ve got to find a way to tell them that now more than ever we must be critical thinkers, we must be willing and able to analyze and see through the rhetoric that normalizes what we know in our guts is anything but normal. I have to find a way to tell them that it’s OK to be angry. That anger, as the warrior-poet/ scholar/activist Audre Lorde told us so many years ago, “is loaded with information and energy.” That anger can be useful. That we need to use our anger now, productively, in order to fight like hell.