P.S. Words Fail Me

Just before the 75^th anniversary of D-Day in June 2019, I posted an idiosyncratic childhood memory of that event along with a horrified denunciation of the ignorance and stupidity of Trump 1.0, its State Department, and the Department spokesperson, Heather Nauert. In what seemed at the time like an inconceivably idiotic remark, Nauert had cited D-Day as an example of the long friendship of Germany and the United States. It seemed appalling, just a few years ago, that a such a person spoke for the United States.

Well. Now who speaks for the United States? On February 28, 2025 – another day that will live in infamy – our president and vice president staged a vile ambush of the leader of a besieged nation. Shouting a stream of lies at their guest, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump and Vance spewed Russian propaganda. They confirmed, in case anyone had missed the point, that the United States is now allied with the dictatorships against the democracies. The Grand Alliances of D-Day and of NATO, which kept the peace in Europe for nearly eight decades, has been smashed. Trump, with his customary vulgarity, says the European Union “was born to screw us.”

Trump and his flunkies – including sycophantic Secretary of State Marco Rubio and drunken ex-Fox-anchor Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth – are lining us up with the autocracies against our ancient allies. They’re selling out Ukraine, and they publicized the sale in an Oval Office photo-op with a White House press corps that does not challenge lies. This dreadful realignment, this inexplicable surrender to the murderous dictator Putin, makes Nauert’s idiocy look like nothing much – although stupidity and ignorance did, I suppose, help to prepare the ground for much worse. But Nauert’s nonsense, like many of the targets of my posts during Trump 1.0, fades into insignificance during Trump 2.0.

About ten years ago my elder daughter talked me into blogging, and for the first couple of years, it was fun. I commented on the world as it was in the 1950s when I was young, as opposed to the way things are in the 21^st century. I reminisced about working in Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 campaign, about my several post-college jobs in publishing, and about the food we ate in the fifties and the food we eat now. I compared the way my grandchildren travel with the way young people once traveled – without credit cards or social media or phoning home – and rejoiced that some things have improved for women and girls, at least in basketball.

The blog offered a welcome opportunity to complain about the difficulties I encountered as a graduate student working on the once-despised, now iconic Margery Kempe. Even better: it became an outlet for masses of unpublished research and reflection on the heroic Claudia Jones. In the very different worlds of Margery Kempe and Claudia Jones I learned a lot and made some new and valued friends.

But then came 2016.

In posts early that year I was still ruminating about such matters as the technical difficulties encountered by people who grew up with rotary phones and a curious family inheritance involving fracking in Colorado. But after Trump was elected in November I began to swat at one horror after another, and the posts acquired a darker tone. Eight years later the horrors are no longer threats – they’re here. During this terrible fall and winter, stupidity and ignorance have made way for terror and treason. Last October, the morning news brought hints of nuclear war from Vladimir Putin, at that time the shadow manager of Trump’s campaign and now his outright puppet-master. Putin’s hints reminded me of what I wrote two years ago, on the 60^th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, recalling the sudden panic of that bright blue October day in 1962 when I realized my babies were in the target zone. Now everyone’s babies are in that zone.

Speaking of fear, as our poultry and dairy farms are being overwhelmed by avian flu, is anyone not terrified of the next pandemic? During the deathly mismanagement of Covid during Trump 1.0, I remembered earlier public health emergencies and reflected on the behavior of a very different president. Thoughts of FDR, and of the polio epidemics of my childhood, are now accompanied by unbearable – and unnecessary! – images of children again crippled and dying under a dismantled health department in the hands of an anti-vaxxer with a worm in his brain.

Back at the beginning of Trump 1.0, the callous indifference of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, displayed at her confirmation hearing when she insisted that educational policy be left to the states, sent me back to the 1950s, to Brown v Board of Education and some of its consequences. A longer look at DeVos’s ideology introduced me to Dominionism, one contemporary version of Christian Nationalism. If it was hateful to think of that worldview guiding our schools, it is more frightening to see its symbols on the office of Mike Johnson, the present Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. And our new Secretary of Education, Linda MacMahon, has an even bigger job than her predecessor, DeVos – to dismantle the department, along with the protections it provides for students. Perhaps public education will disappear entirely: nothing seems impossible now. 

Again and again, those who seemed in 2016 to be the worst possible choices for a president’s cabinet now seem actually preferable to the new parade of crooks and incompetents. As Trump’s appointments rolled out this winter, it was like watching some kind of dystopian game show – “Quick! Name the worst possible person for a job!” Matt Gaetz! Gone, we’d like to think, at least for now, but Matt Gaetz? I first encountered that cruel clown as a Florida congressman who cared nothing for the birds and beaches of his home state. When I examined his disreputable career I was disgusted, but not really surprised, that he was Trump’s first choice for Attorney General. Trump likes to surround himself with other sexual predators. Back in 2018 his choice of Brett Kavanaugh for SCOTUS and the disgraceful confirmation hearing process that followed, including the harassment of his accuser, brought to my medieval mind Joan of Arc, of all people (the accuser, not the “Justice,” obviously). If it was bad in 2018 it’s worse now. Pete Hegseth! whose own mother recognized him as a pig, at least until (like Joan of Arc) she was forced to recant. 

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, even those who disagreed with some of its decisions believed the Supreme Court to be above political pressure. Until it became Trump’s Court, it was our most widely respected institution. When the “Justices” dismantled Roe vs. Wade last year it became obvious that all of our hard-won achievements in reproductive privacy and choice were under threat. When I wrote about Griswold and its influence not only on Roe but on Casey and Obergefell, I recalled 1965 and our cheerful confidence that progress toward freedom and common sense would continue. Are we really heading all the way back toward a ban on contraceptive materials and information and education? “We won’t go back,” we shouted – but now it’s Trump 2.0, and we very well might. “Justice” Alito has already spoken of the Comstock Act, product of the insane Anthony, as a live option for our future.

Within hours of taking an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, Donald Trump attempted to undo the 14^th Amendment. Last year I wrote about a “family lawyer” — my great-grandfather, J. Hubley Ashton, who made the case for birthright citizenship to SCOTUS in 1898. He argued on behalf of Wong Kim Ark that the racist Chinese Exclusion Acts were unconstitutional – that his client, born in California, was an American citizen. The opposing counsel – the Solicitor General of the United States (an ex-Confederate officer) – responded by attacking not only the 14^th Amendment, but any and all attempts to provide equality of opportunity for the formerly enslaved. Jim Crow and the Klan were flourishing in the 1890s, and the robber barons of Big Oil and Big Steel were despoiling our natural resources. Birthright citizenship was saved at that moment, but is threatened again by contemporary versions of racist and anti-immigrant fervor. And the oligarchs – billionaires, now – without the restraints of an earlier time and with the colossal armament of Big Tech, have not only the ear of the president but their hands on the national checkbook.

I could go on and on, of course; we all could. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these attacks on democracy and decency is that more than 77 million of us voted for them. What we feared in 2016 was certain in 2024, and yet many of us voted for it, and others allowed the horror to proceed by not voting or voting 3^rd party. And it continues: when Trump addressed Congress on March 4^th, Republican senators and representatives stood and cheered his every lying word.

Call your representatives; join your local Indivisible group; demonstrate in the streets; do whatever you can to fight back. Ignorance and indifference have given way to treason, and here we are. Words fail me.