Oh hey, it's the 100,000th take.
“I’m going to go for a walk and meditate,” I texted my friends last night.” An “LOL” was not necessary to telegraph sarcasm.
Yes obviously I’m doom-scrolling like everyone. Everyone has a take. Here’s mine.
During Trump’s term, I had a breaking news writing gig. I’d signed up for a shift election day thinking, “It’ll be easy, I’ll write some crap like ‘historic blah blah blah’ and clock out.” Well that’s how I find myself in a diner on a dreary, rainy day in New York writing about Trump’s 2016 victory.
Anyway, the job involved watching cable all day to capture breaking news with which to feed the site’s #resistance readership. It was Hell. At some point I begged my boss to at least let me stick to CNN instead of Fox or MSNBC. Imagine begging someone to let you watch CNN eight hours a day?
“What do you think it’s doing to our brains that we watch cable news all day like everyone’s crazy old racist uncle?” I asked a coworker. “Dear god I don’t want to know,” he said.
Every day was the end of the world. Every liberal commentator and pundit and op-ed writer and analyst and Bush era ghoul re-habed with the help of Nicole Wallace’s chirpy smirk on MSNBC declared the end of the world. Unprecedented!
Every fucking day. I’d go on long runs during my breaks to offset the constant, nonstop panic ginned up by cable and the mainstream news in general. It lived in my body; the world’s dorkiest PTSD. The point is, the catastrophes predicted 100 times a day really didn’t happen or impact most people. So why would, this time around, the 1,000,0000000th op-ed about “the end of Democracy” make a difference? I really beseech the media to avoid this now. It’s not about normalizing him. It’s that crying wolf over everything—liberals actually managed to be mad at him about commuting the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson—ends up being counterproductive.
Focus on the real victims—and not just to score points. They are asylum seekers and immigrants.
I interviewed the late, great, Barbara Ehrenreich about Trump during that time. She was hilarious and delightfully ornery. “So what do we do?” I earnestly asked. “Why the hell are you asking me?”she retorted in a tone often used by my mother. “That’s your job to figure it out, leave me alone, I’m old.” She made a point that I kind of intuitively also sussed out when all of my very privileged friends were frightfully whispering about how we were all in mortal danger of fascism at a bar in Manhattan.
It’s immigrants and asylum seekers who face unprecedented, grave danger. Sure, throw on your Handmaid’s Tale costume, who am I to judge, but that dye is cast: those fuckers on the Supreme Court will be alive for 100 more years. What else is Trump going to do to rich white liberal women? (that poor rural women mostly bear the fallout of the reversal of Roe v. Wade also partly falls on establishment liberal institutions: tying abortion access to viability was a failing tactic, when viability was clearly going to increase with scientific advances).
He’s not going to fucking round up journalists, as my friends worried at the time, and as Jim Acosta exploited, later, to great career advantage, pretending Trump was sending the Gestapo after him.
We need to focus attention not to hysterically opposing every crazy lurch Trump takes, but focus on the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers.
I just published a story for the Appeal for Stephen Miller’s plan for immigrants. Here’s an excerpt, you can read the story here.
Carlos met his wife in a dance club in California in the mid-2000s. (The Appeal is withholding Carlos’s surname to protect him from retaliation.) She walked in with a friend. He noticed her and thought she was beautiful. He approached her. They danced and made their best attempt at conversation. “I spoke minimal English, and her Spanish was as good as my English,” he told The Appeal. They were in their mid-20s and didn’t intend anything serious: they lived in different cities, and his situation was precarious. He’d escaped the gangs of El Salvador and was living, undocumented, with his sisters.
“I grew up in an area of El Salvador where the gangs were in full control… I had several friends that either had to join to avoid getting killed or got killed,” he says. “I decided I had to leave to escape the violence.”
“My dream was to come to the U.S. and build a life, I wasn’t sure what that looks like, but I envisioned it being violence-free, full of opportunities and happiness.”
The couple’s casual relationship soon turned serious. “We talked every day, and we fell in love, and we moved in together only six months later.” They would go on to have a boy and get married in a ceremony on the beach. A few years later, a daughter followed.
Over the years, they tensely watched the political permutations of US immigration policy. During the Trump era, they were terrified, tracking every move of the administration and hoping that the sanctuary city in which they lived would protect them. The ended up fine: they continued to live, work, and raise their kids. They gained more hope when President Joe Biden won. Biden floated a parole option for undocumented people married to U.S. citizens. They were elated, but a Texas court blocked the measure. “The program is perfect for us … I would not have to leave the country.”
Now, they are terrified of another Trump term. “He is talking about mass deportations and just plain racist, horrible plans,” Carlos says. “I worry about my kids and the fact that he has so many supporters. That worries me more because he woke up the worst in people.”
Donald Trump, is indeed, outdoing himself in smearing immigrants this election cycle. His campaign has pushed lies about immigration and crime, including slanderous claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. At the Republican National Convention in July, thousands of party activists held signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” as Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” In October, he told a crowd, “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”
Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda is nothing new. During his 2016 campaign, he railed against “immigrant rapists” and boasted he’d build a wall to keep them out. He promised to ban immigration from Muslim-majority countries and enact a “zero-tolerance” policy of mass detention for people caught entering the country without papers. As president, however, his attempts to fulfill these promises faltered. Immigrant advocates won court orders blocking policies like the Muslim ban and family separation, and they convinced hundreds of states, cities, and counties to become so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” stymying Trump’s efforts to include state and local law enforcement in his deportation efforts.
If Trump wins a second term, however, advocates for immigrants face a much more daunting task. Not only has Trump pledged to resurrect policies like the Muslim ban and the border wall, but his calls for mass deportations go far beyond anything he attempted during his first term. The tools advocates used to resist Trump eight years ago may also be far less effective. Scores of Trump-appointed judges have made the federal courts much more hostile towards immigrant rights. Anti-immigrant think tanks have crafted policies designed to punish state and local authorities who resist deportation efforts. States like Florida and Texas have begun to deputize police and sheriffs to enforce federal immigration laws. In short, the threat to immigrants under a second Trump administration promises to be more extreme and harder to stop.
“What scares me about another Trump term on immigration?” Cornell Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr tells the Appeal. “Everything.”
“We saw how much Trump hurt immigrants in his first administration: the Muslim travel ban, family separations, increased delays in processing routine cases. He will hurt immigrants even more if he’s reelected, with devastating impacts on the U.S. economy, workers, and families.”