Donald Trump's America

Evening Dispatch

Photo credit: Samuel Corum [Anadolu Agency; Getty Images]

Seven years ago today, the torch-carrying white supremacists marched through Charlottesville shouting, “Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us,” over and over again.

Two days later, Donald Trump said the following in response to a reporter’s question, “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. . . . You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down to them a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

First of all, if you are protesting the fact that a city wants to change the name of a park from Robert E. Lee Park to something else, you are a terrible person. Either that or you are so ignorant of your country's history that you need to go back to school or at the very least pay attention to who it is you're listening to, who you’re choosing to align yourselves with. Robert E. Lee was, until recently, the greatest traitor to the United States. The only positive thing you could say about him is that he attacked us from the outside, unlike people like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, who continue to try to take us down from within.

Robert E. Lee was directly and indirectly responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths. The fact that he and Jefferson Davies, president of the Confederacy, weren’t hanged for treason is mind boggling. They fought a war against our country in order to ensure that rich white men would continue to have the right to own other human beings—to enslave them, to torture them, to rape them, to murder them—and suffered the most minimal of consequences.

“Jews will not replace us,” the white men screamed. What kind of broken, vile human being walks around in public and says those things? What kind of person believes it? It's a devastating commentary on how far we still have to go and it confirms the reality with which we still live that, in many ways, the South won the Civil War. People like Donald Trump want it to stay that way.

Democracy is on the line in this election but I keep hearing that that doesn’t resonate with a lot of people. Donald Trump is a fascist, but people don’t see the threat he poses. Instead, we need to mock him. I’ve been saying that for years—the best way to take him down, this man who thrives on, (and wouldn’t survive without) the adulation and subjugation of others, is to mock him relentlessly. Because he is a joke. But it’s not enough.

Thanks to his being empowered by a broken Republican Party, Donald is also extremely dangerous. I'm sorry if the threat of America's sliding into fascism isn't compelling enough for some people, but it’s a point that needs to be made—over and over and over again.

Maybe the problem is that so many things Donald says are offensive and un-American; so many of his actions and personal qualities render him unfit. So, let’s focus on one reason not to vote for him: At the Charlottesville rally, a man drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors injuring 35 people and killing Heather Heyer. She was 32 years old. Donald Trump aligns himself with the white supremacists who rallied that day in support of Robert E. Lee; he aligns himself with the kind of men who stormed our Capitol; he aligns himself with the kind of men who believe in the Lost Cause and the Great Replacement theory. He aligns himself with the kind of man who murdered Heather Heyer. That should be enough.