WE NOW KNOW.
The Donald J. Trump era has been a super stressful time for many Americans…. but we choose to look at it this way: Donald Trump and his ride or die militia have done this country a favor. Love them or hate them, they have exposed every single weakness within our government and brought to the surface the deep fault lines that have threatened to destabilize this nation for decades.
But make no mistake, how we respond to the weaknesses and fault lines they uncovered is 100% up to us – YOU and each of US. It’s like if we walked on the beach after a big storm and discovered tons of trash had washed up onto the sand. The storm itself is not our fault of course, but what happens next absolutely is. We can either clean the trash off the beach OR we can just leave it there to wash back into the ocean – where, multiplying under the cover of darkness, it accumulates and grows and becomes an even bigger mess.
Pre-Donald, it was like this slow drip, drip, drip. We could feel in our bones that things were off but had a hard time identifying exactly what those things were. Most of us assumed a day of reckoning was coming eventually, and it most certainly was. The Donald Trump spectacle – which is both a symptom and a consequence of our severely broken politics – just accelerated the process.
Before, so many potential policy outcomes were purely theoretical. Across America, we settled in at dinner tables with our families or sat across from co-workers at lunch and argued (with little evidence other than our, obviously brilliant, gut feelings) about the size our federal government should be and the role it should play, or if trade wars really do pay off, or if 37 trillion dollars in federal debt was really that big of a deal, or if significant tax cuts for rich people and Wall Street really do, in fact, ignite the entire economy.
We debated the condition of our checks and balances and whether Congress had allowed the executive branch to gain too much power. We discussed what would happen if we failed to see the warning signs of an international pandemic and, if a pandemic did indeed reach our shores, the role basic science should play… and for that matter, the role science should play in every aspect of our lives.
We innocently asked ourselves – in the naïve manner of people who are certain something like this could never happen to them – what it must be like to live in a country where the president called the press “the enemy of the people;” democratically-held elections “rigged;” American cities “blood-soaked” “cesspools of blood;” and the nation’s capital a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” Or what it must be like to live in a country where the vice president said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize having careers instead of having children; called female opponents “a bunch of childless cat ladies;” or falsely claimed that Haitian migrants were eating household pets.
… or if the president illegally took boxes and boxes of highly classified documents and put them in his bathroom after he was voted out of office… or blatantly sold out our intelligence agencies in front of the entire world by siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, then shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador right in the middle of the Oval Office… or likened the U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany while, ironically, actual Nazi wannabes stormed the national Capitol.
We probably would have asked ourselves, if we could have even imagined it, what would happen if our president, vice president, and members of the Cabinet trampled all over the First Amendment, doing everything under the sun to silence their political rivals, quash dissent, and punish those they perceived to have slighted them in any way, or if the president called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
… or if our commander-in-chief dispatched U.S. military troops to patrol American streets as if we were a police state; attacked Gold Star families and called our faithful military generals “dopes and babies,” “suckers,” and “losers.” Or if he visited, alongside Retired Marine General John Kelly, the grave of 1st Lt. Robert Kelly – General Kelly’s son who was killed in Afghanistan – and said to the eternally grieving father, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
We waxed poetic about America’s role in the world. What, for example, would happen if the president and the vice president of the United States suddenly seemed to love everything authoritarian, heaping praise on autocrats from Egypt, the Philippines, Turkey and Kazakhstan – and if the president had full-on bromances with Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Kim Jong-un (and even Vladimir Putin before their painful breakup!).
We questioned – but only hypothetically because we thought it too unthinkable to even contemplate – what would happen if we suddenly abandoned the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), our loyal allies who served beside us in our fight against the Islamic State, or if we blatantly reneged on our promise to protect the incredibly brave men and women who risked their lives to serve alongside us in Afghanistan, essentially signing many of their death certificates.
Or what it would be like if the United States told members of NATO off right to their faces, or if we withdrew from major global agreements, or if we abruptly retreated from the entire world and started treating our most trusted allies like they were enemies, insulting them, bullying them, and threatening them – in their own countries and even in the Oval Office.
Before, we viewed topics like these as theoretical because, for the most part, we had never witnessed their real-life implications. But now, we have first-hand knowledge of the value and/or consequences of these scenarios because we have actually lived – and are once again living – through them. And we have the battle scars to prove it.
We now know.
Meanwhile, the COVID pandemic also exposed things. I mean, like huge, major things. The entire episode can be summed up in the warning Buffett gave us years ago (Warren, not Jimmy): “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
We discovered that our Strategic National Stockpile – our national repository of things like antibiotics, vaccines, and other critical medical supplies – had been neglected for years. We learned that our economy was not nearly as fortified as we would like to believe and that our federal government was tragically unprepared for a global crisis. We had front row seats, yet again, to the uninspired, mind-blowingly expensive “solutions” of the U.S. Congress, and were also cruelly reminded of the massive health, economic and educational disparities that exist in many minority communities.
Some of the things mentioned above are subjective and, therefore, leave room for opinion. Things, for example, like the size our federal government should be and the role it should play, or whether we should or shouldn’t withdraw from the entire world. However, many of the things mentioned are objective. Meaning, we have the data necessary to accurately assess things like tax cuts and trade wars. We have provable outcomes and can clearly track the relationship between cause and effect. After all, numbers don’t lie.
We now know.