Eight (years) is Enough
Eight (years) is Enough
Published on Election Day 2024. Written over eight years.
Last night, the night before Election Day 2024, I skimmed the many notes and scribblings I've jotted down throughout America's Trump era. I've only shared a small percentage of these bleatings with anyone.
That small percentage has probably been more than enough for my poor friends and readers. Imagine being my wife or children! Did you know my family developed a code phrase that they say if I am getting a little too worked up about Trump and MAGA?
The phrase is “Jason (or Dad), that's enough out of you.” I think the comedian firstborn daughter came up with it. We all find this hilarious.
I was quite happy (still am, generally) during those years of my life from 1970 to 2015 when Donald Trump never crossed my mind. I just never thought about him. I am from Minnesota, where no Trump skyscraper or Trump golf course exists. I never once watched his TV show, The Apprentice—not a single minute of a single episode. Why would I? I never read the kind of magazines he appeared in. I'm not a big tabloid guy. I don't watch beauty pageants. I don't frequent casinos. I’ve never been to Atlantic City, New Jersey.
So why would I have ever thought about Donald Trump before June of 2015? He was meaningless to me. He was just a half-famous guy whose orange face occasionally showed up on the pulpy magazines that cluttered the grocery store checkout line. From what I could gather from those cover photos and schlocky headlines, he had a weird haircut and was an awful husband and hey, let’s throw in a Slim Jim and some honey-roasted peanuts. That was the extent of my awareness of Donald Trump.
Then in 2015 and 2016 he descended an escalator and ascended to the Republican party nomination. In so doing he staked out new and meaningful space in national and global affairs and in the lives of all Americans, even those lives where he’d never stepped foot, like mine.
As he ascended and expanded, I brushed up on him. I dug up old profiles, found video interviews, read excerpts of biographies, learned about his family and his history, and started following him on Twitter. Doing all this seemed like a requirement for being an engaged American citizen. In that self-taught crash course in Trump that I undertook leading up to the 2016 primaries and election, I never learned a single thing about him that I liked.
His campaign of bigotry and authoritarianism and ego, built on a lifetime of the same, activated something in me that I did not enjoy, even while I found it necessary. I guess that’s what they mean by righteous indignation. I did not want our mighty, fragile country to be led by such a person. Discovering that others admired him, found him to be a winner and a leader and just what the nation needs, made me bitter and cynical about people and places that I’ve always deeply loved. I used to find the little café in a lakeside town in my home state charming; now I notice the people in MAGA gear in the corner booth and I shudder. I always admired the industrious bait, firewood, and pickles shop along a road near my family’s cabin; now I see the Trump flag waving outside its door and I leave in a hurry.
To this day, I struggle to understand how certain friends and acquaintances whom I genuinely like and admire could ever support such a man.
I would like to resolve these conflicts, but I don’t know how to.
How I plan to get through what America’s about to go through
I am writing this early in the morning on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Today is election day. The coming days and weeks might be difficult.
Note: Of course, they also might not be. If Harris wins decisively, as I think she might, perhaps there’s merely a MAGA whimper. Perhaps any Trump-inspired attempts at disenfranchising voters or intimidating the will of the people might be met with the kind of patriotic decisiveness that the Philadelphia District Attorney displayed when he challenged would-be election meddlers and intimidators to “F— around and find out.”
I expect there to be misinformation in the air and on the intertubes that will be overwhelming and contradictory. I encourage my family and friends and readers to develop an information plan: who will you listen to? Where will your facts come from? What will you understand to be true?
Here’s what I remind myself:
Some minor hiccups will happen: a printer running out of ink; a mail truck carrying ballots getting into a fender-bender; an abnormally late count from some precinct. This does not mean hanky-panky has occurred.
The red mirage is real, just as it was in 2022 or 2020. I think most Americans understand this phenomenon by now, but here’s a refresher: in some states, ballots cast by mail or submitted early are actually tallied after the day-of ballots. Those late-counted alternative ballots will likely favor Harris. Also, smaller precincts—which usually favor Trump—tend to complete their counting more quickly, due to volume. So it can appear as if the Republican candidate is “winning” early in the reporting, while the Democratic candidate “catches up” later. This is a red mirage that election-night-watchers should understand.
About that: watch out for the touchscreen wizards like Steve “Khaki” Kornacki and John “In America, we don’t have a” King talking about the counting as if it is the contest. Even if they use the language of an unfolding sporting event, remember there are no “comebacks” once the votes have all been cast. I wrote an essay about this in the lead-up to the last election (why do I have to keep repeating myself!). We are just tallying up what has already occurred. It is supposed to be boring.
Trump may claim victory prematurely, without much evidence. I keep reminding myself, and my family, to not listen to what Trump himself says. I think he holds the distinction of uttering more documented lies than any person in human history. In 2020, a day or two after the election, he was told by his advisers that he had lost; he simply decided he had not. Which is to say: he claimed things like “massive voter fraud” without having any good evidence thereof, and while having plenty of good evidence thereofnot. Which is also to say: he is dumb, and, worse, he thinks you are dumb.
If you are a Twitter user (oh, how I miss golden age of Twitter), I’ll remind you that since the last election, the very richest man in the entire world, Elon Musk, went and bought himself a weapons-grade propaganda machine, Twitter. He rebranded it as X and he’s vowed to use that machine and his own vast wealth to promote Donald Trump’s fortunes. Musk has apparently been promised a job in the Trump administration where he will decide how to manage the US government budget. By the way, that’s a job for which being the richest man in the world seems entirely disqualifying. And that’s only the second most disqualifying fact about Musk’s candidacy for that job. The most disqualifying fact about Musk’s candidacy for that job is that Elon Musk currently owns businesses with many billions of dollars in government contracts, and he would of course like those contracts to remain and to grow. That’s who Trump wants to decide how America spends its budget.
Use Twitter carefully, if at all.
So. MAGA has Elon Musk, with his belly peeking out from his t-shirt. (I’ve been there, Elon.) MAGA has ugly hats. MAGA has a lot of tech-finance bros. MAGA has Nick Bosa. MAGA has punishment and retribution. MAGA has sneering comedians who think race jokes are the epitome of cleverness and wit. And MAGA has Putin and Orban and Xi, just waiting for Trump and Vance and Musk and that whole crowd to sacrifice American freedom to enable their vast appetites for wealth and power.
But that squad doesn’t scare me. I’ll take the roster with international alliances (we see you, NATO!); a broad coalition of decent leaders of every ideology and background (LeBron James sets a screen for Dick Cheney who hits AOC on a backdoor cut!); the US Constitution; the history of expanding rights that has defined America’s promise; a vast, powerful army of pissed-off women (thank you, vast, powerful army of pissed-off women!); a football coach and social studies teacher from my own backyard; and a cool, experienced, smart, empathetic leader who doesn’t brook poppycock, who battled authoritarians and predators for a living, who has an absolutely excellent and genuine laugh that I would be happy to hear more, and who is leading the charge against this foe.
I have predicted a Harris win (and yes, originally a Biden win) and a Trump loss, perhaps decisively, throughout this cycle, even when the polling was bleak. This was never just wishful thinking. You can read my reasoning in an essay I wrote just the other day. (“Jeez, Jase, there are a lot of words in this one.” -my wife Margie.) Read it, and share it, and think about it.
As for me, I’m excited to return to not thinking about him. That’s enough out of you, Trump. That’s enough out of you, MAGA. That’s enough.
