My grandma used to say, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them -- the first time."
It's good advice, and when I haven't heeded it, I've almost always lived to regret it. It's not that I think people can't change; it's just that most of them don't.
In the particular case I'm thinking of, though, it's not the first time, nor the tenth, nor (probably) the thousandth time that we've been shown precisely who someone is. And it will come as no shock to most of you that I, once again, am talking about Donald Trump.
What brought me back to this distasteful topic is the ongoing nonsense about migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's pets. There has been, says both Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance, a "flood" of over twenty thousand Haitian immigrants into Springfield, overcrowding schools, triggering a crime wave, and overwhelming both police and the prior (read "white") residents.
There is not a shred of truth to any of this. The most recent data shows that there are about 5,200 people from Haiti in all of Ohio. There is no credible evidence whatsoever that anyone's pets have been killed. There's no crime wave, no swarm of refugees into schools, no... anything.
But confronted by these facts, both Trump and Vance simply doubled down on the rhetoric, as they always do. Interviewed on CNN, Vance told Dana Bash that he knew it wasn't true, but that he was allowed "to create stories so that the… media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."
Funny how when I was little, that was called "lying" and was frowned upon. When I was a few years older, I found out that's what "bearing false witness against thy neighbor" meant.
You know, that thing in the Ten Commandments? The same Ten Commandments these people want plastered on every public school classroom wall?
Or does that commandment not apply if thy neighbor has dark skin?
But because anything that comes out of Dear Leader's mouth (or his cronies' mouths) is automatically considered true by his followers, the result has been the college in Springfield holding virtual classes because of malicious and threatening calls, public schools (including an elementary school) on lockdown, and the mayor getting death threats because he had the temerity to state publicly that Trump and Vance had lied.
It doesn't end there. The second abortive assassination attempt on Trump led both Vance and Donald Trump Jr. to blame "radical leftists" (despite the fact that neither of the would-be assassins were leftists by any stretch, much less radical ones). Elon Musk, who just will not keep his fucking mouth shut, commented that it was funny how no one had attempted to assassinate Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, then Vance followed it up with saying that it was the Democrats who need to tone down their rhetoric.
It's right from Joseph Goebbels's playbook; accuse your opponents of what you're doing yourself.
At this point, if you still support Trump, you own all of this. Every last scrap of it. You know who he is, and chances are you've known for a long while. And if -- every god ever worshiped forbid -- he wins reelection in November, you will own every last thing he does. Because he's told us, you know? He's told us over and over and over again. Here are a few of the things he's said himself -- i.e., this is not me speculating. This is right from his own mouth.
- There'll be the largest deportation of immigrants (legal and illegal) in American history.
- There'll be sky-high tariffs on imported goods, especially anything from China. (He seems not to understand that tariffs are not paid by the country the import came from, but by the consumer in the recipient country.)
- He will withdraw all U. S. support for Ukraine.
- He plans to get rid of U. S. military leaders who are "woke" -- defined, of course, however he wants to.
- He will cut funding for any schools that have support systems in place for LGBTQ+ students, and those that have vaccine or mask mandates. That, too, is "woke."
- He will jail his critics in the press -- and even went so far as to say he'd find a way to silence ordinary citizens who oppose him.
If I wake up on the morning of November 6 and find that Trump has won, you -- his supporters -- will bear the blame for every last horror he perpetrates, everyone whose voice is silenced, every legal asylum seeker who is sent back to face imprisonment, injury, or death. You will be responsible for every freedom lost to Americans because Donald Trump's fragile ego can't handle being contradicted. You will be responsible for every queer child who is denied help and who ends up committing suicide. (And don't @ me about how "this never happens." The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ teens is four times the average for straight teens. And I was -- twice -- very nearly one of those queer teens who succeeded.)
If he's reelected, you will swallow the responsibility for all of that, swallow it down to the last vile-tasting drop.
It all boils down to what Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago -- a quote I had on my own classroom wall: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
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