America’s Future Depends on Booting the World’s Most Careless President
By: Rachael Hope
Tags: Social Justice, Politics, Donald Trump, Human Rights, Election 2020

America’s Future Depends on Booting the World’s Most Careless President

If you only need one reason to vote him out, consider this: Donald Trump doesn’t care about you or this country.

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

This year is my 6th time voting for the President of the United States. In the past, it’s always been something I believed in doing, and something I watched closely. But this year is different. I have never felt that so much was at stake. Beyond policy, this time feels like one candidate will improve things, and one will mean the end of the country I live in as I know it.

I’m not super excited about either candidate, if I’m being honest. I don’t love Joe Biden, and he wouldn’t have been my pick for the nomination. It’s hard to be very into another old white guy president. But I don’t have to marry him. He’s a means to an end, and the ONLY choice that will lead to things getting at all better.

I am happy that he chose a woman of color as his running mate. I am looking forward to seeing what she does. There it is, that hope. That assumption. Because I can say as much as I want that I’m not letting myself hope, but is it preventable? How can I not hope for a win when the alternative is so dire?

There are no good outcomes.

I posted this status on Facebook at the end of September, when Donald Trump decided to make a statement about what would happen if he lost the election.

Never in my life have I actually wondered if I should have guns in my house. Until now.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m vehemently anti-gun. We don’t have guns in our house. I have held a handgun exactly one time in my life, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. It was not loaded and I held it for about 10 seconds before handing it back to its owner.

I am in support of gun control, and believe America has a pretty big gun problem. But never have I been more afraid of what those guns might be used for. With 40 days to go before the election, I my stress was ramping up about what would happen on November 3 and 4. Proud Boys roam the streets of my mid-sized city, and on weekends parades of unnecessarily large trucks with unnecessarily large Trump flags drive the streets.

Trump reminds me of a toddler who doesn’t want to leave the park throwing himself down in the playground gravel, arms and legs akimbo.

Now that there is less than a week before the election, my stress has ramped up to sometimes unbearable levels. I’ve read a little bit about the physical effects that prolonged stress can have on the body, and I feel like we’re all going to come out of 2020 with bodies that are less healthy than they were when we started. At the beginning of 2020 I was the healthiest I’d been in years, but now I feel like everything is uncomfortable all the time. I have stress stomachaches and mask-and-stress induced breakouts. I feel like a teenager again, or at least the skin on my face does.

The idea that Trump would refuse to leave is ridiculous to me, baffling and scary at the same time. It reminds me of a toddler who doesn’t want to leave the park throwing himself down in the playground gravel, arms and legs akimbo. In The Atlantic, Barton Gellman wrote:

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged. Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

2020 seems to be the year of handling things we’ve never experienced before. Joe Biden is projected to win, but so was Hillary. My stress partly stems from this not-knowing, but partly stems from the fact that there are no good outcomes, at least in the short run. Even if Biden wins, I am worried about what damage Trump supporters might do, and what damage Trump himself might cause in the time between election day and January 21.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about you.

The fact that I’ve never even considered this kind of worry shows how different this election is from ones past. Never in my lifetime has any president shown with so much clarity that he does not care about his constituents or his citizens.

Throughout the course of a raging pandemic, he has continued to insist that things are pretty much fine.

But there is no visible sign of concern from the White House about this potential pivot point on which thousands of lives may depend. That may be because it coincides with the moment of highest tension in a presidential race in which the President is trying to convince voters that the worst of the emergency has passed. “I think we’ve done an amazing job … in my opinion we’re rounding the turn,” the President said in an interview with a local Fox station in Detroit in which he continued to minimize the danger. On Monday, he had claimed the virus “affects virtually nobody” while doubling down on previous claims that young people are “virtually immune” — a staggering comment on the eve of such a tragic milestone. Asked about the 200,000 deaths as he headed out to another campaign event Tuesday in Pittsburgh, with a non-socially distanced crowd, the President said “it’s a shame” but claimed he had nevertheless saved millions of lives. CNN

I’ve been lucky that I haven’t lost any friends or family members to this illness. Yet. We went through a scare with my Mom, but it turned out she had pneumonia, and I’ve never been so excited about pneumonia in my life. When I imagine what it must feel like to those who have empty chairs at their tables when Trump acts like their pain and grief doesn’t exit, I am incensed.

To him, the vast majority of Americans are just that: nobody.

It’s absolutely heartless, and it breaks my heart. Every time someone says it’s not serious, refuses to wear a mask, acts like it’s political and going to magically end next Tuesday, I am heartbroken by the heartlessness it demonstrates. In my article, Tragedy, Empathy, and the Weight of Grief, I wrote:

Through it all I watch the judgment and lack of compassion pile on, and I know I need to look away but it infuriates me. It’s so heartless. And that’s what gets to me the most. I have watched so many people turn against the people I love, using politics as an excuse to trample over other people. And at the top of the pile, we have a President who has turned against his people and somehow still tricked so many into believing he cares.

Make no mistake, whether you support Trump or not, he does not care about you or your well being. The person who is supposed to lead by example talks about grabbing women by their genitals, mocks differently abled people, prods a father about his dead son, and discounts the lives of the people he’s supposed to care most about. So, here we are. More than 234,000 Americans are dead. That’s one in every 1,400(ish).

Yet President Donald Trump says Covid affects virtually nobody. Rather than publicly mourning, Trump was arguing this week that Covid affects “elderly people with heart problems” and very few other people. “It affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing,” he said in Ohio. CNN

Do you know why he said this? Because, to him, the vast majority of Americans are just that: nobody. When the White House issues a news release touting Ending the Covid-19 Pandemic as an achievement of this president as thousands of people are dying and hospitals under his watch are full? They are just showing us that our lives don’t matter.

It’s time to wake up, America.

Not only has it become increasingly, glaringly obvious that we’re dealing with the world’s most careless president, it’s pretty clear that he’s also the most outwardly condescending. When Trump and his administration say that they’ve solved an ongoing global pandemic, the only assumption they can be making is that we are all stupid.

It is stupid to see 88,000 new cases of an illness in one day and at the same time accept that that illness has been solved. It is stupid to believe a reality TV star and his cronies over scientists with scientific knowledge and doctors with decades of education and experience.

If you need to be a single-issue voter, why not make humanity your issue? We have one candidate who has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, directly, through his actions. And we have someone else. He doesn’t have to be your favorite. You don’t have to marry him or even commit to him for more than four years. You don’t even have to like him. You just have to recognize that if nothing else, at least he cares about other human beings more than 0%.

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