New York
Had she not proudly held high her protest sign—punctuated with a profanity she could not recall ever using in sixty-eight years of life—I might not have noticed the small, quiet woman in the boisterous crowd.
Her voice was soft; her silver hair was tucked beneath the hood of a red parka worn against the cool drizzle of early spring; the top of her head barely reached my shoulders.
It was Saturday afternoon in midtown Manhattan. She fell into step beside me as we marched slowly down Fifth Avenue, amidst a throng of New Yorkers tens of thousands strong. She described herself as “just one little old lady” among five million women and men spanning all ages and races who marched that Saturday in towns and cities big and small throughout the country—all of us “happy warriors,” as she put it, in the first of two nationwide demonstrations in April against the specter of American fascism and its orange-faced Führer.
The day’s theme was “Hands Off!”—of all things the orange man would steal away from the better angels of American character.
She introduced herself, as people do at comradely events: “Frances,” she said. “Everybody calls me Fran. I’ll just leave at that.”
She asked, “And your name?”
“Thomas,” I said. “Tom.”
Fran explained her use of the crudely flexible word she’d appended in pink to her protest sign: “Tom, dear, it’s because I’m mad. I am quite aware it’s vulgar. But it’s one of the few words that that awful man in the White House comprehends, and I’d like him to know I’m mad. As mad as can be.”
A retired kindergarten teacher, Fran is equally disdainful of the awful man’s putrefied Republican Party. These days, the party founded by Abraham Lincoln and advanced by Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower has sunk low. It has abandoned historically conservative principle, trading this purpose for a dislike of immigrants and other persons of non-Aryan ethnicity; these days, the party is little more than a cult of obsequence to Dear Leader.
Likewise across the United States last month, two stars of the opposition Democratic Party paired up on a rousing coast-to-coast tour to warn us that organized money and corporate power threatens to eclipse political authority, thereby eroding individual freedom and dignity; how such an American oligarchy—of the morbidly wealthy, by the morbidly wealthy, and for the morbidly wealthy—is an existential threat to the world’s oldest continuous democracy.
The stars: Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders of Vermont, age 83, and 35-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, affectionately known as A.O.C. The name of their tour: “Fighting Oligarchy.” The orange face of existential threat: Donald John Trump.
Public reception has astonished Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Sanders, especially the welcome received at rallies in states won by Mr. Trump in last November’s presidential election. Twenty-thousand turned out for Bernie and A.O.C. in Utah, for instance. A capacity crowd of seventy-five hundred roared approval at the University of Montana’s Adams Center. More than twelve thousand people cheered the pair in the town of Nampa, Idaho. Fifteen thousand Arizonans packed an arena in Tempe…et cetera, et cetera.
Less pleasant reception has been expressed in furious post-midnight social media screeds from the White House—writings that Washington wags call Mr. Trump’s addled “toilet tweets.”
Speaking for dear Bernie as well, A.O.C. proclaimed, “We’ve got them scared.”
I could go on about the tour’s small town successes at inspiring the citizenry and rattling a tyrant and his lackeys. In the big places—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia—the Bernie-A.O.C. team has attracted voters by the scores of thousands. Nowhere in all this has anything untoward occurred, nowhere has anyone been arrested; everywhere, people learn they are not alone in their disgust for the criminal gang and clown show that is the government of Donald Trump.
The next nationwide mass demonstration is set for May Day. Here in New York this month, likely again somewhere along Fifth Avenue, I hope to catch sight of a certain little old lady.
Until then, be it noted that the Trump regime has reached its critical first hundred days and is now fully exposed for its least offensive quality—that being what the late great New York journalist Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017) would call a gang that can’t shoot straight.
Something is going right again in America, at last. Shoulder to shoulder, we are speaking up about unfairness, and speaking out against cruelty and incompetence. We are learning that courage is contagious.
•
Early in the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker took the rostrum beneath the Capitol dome in Washington. In accordance with Senate rules, he would stand throughout the speech he was about to deliver and would not avail himself of men’s room relief—under penalty of forfeiting the floor.
For several preceding days, he’d prepared for what he was about to say: Meals taken at smaller proportion than usual, leg muscles massaged, extra doses of vitamin pills, all liquids refused in the day-long run-up to the big event.
The event concluded at mid-evening on April 1, having consumed twenty-five hours and five minutes for Mr. Booker’s marathon speech. Thus, it became the longest filibuster in congressional history, breaking the previous record of twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes when the racist Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) ranted about the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Senator Booker, on the other hand, spoke calmly and elegantly of the noble purpose of getting into “good trouble, necessary trouble,” per the dictum of his hero—the late Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020), a civil rights icon nearly beaten to death in 1965 by Alabama police during the Selma-to-Montgomery march in protest of the state’s denial of voting access for African American citizens.
Together with fellow trouble-makers from back in another troubled day—the men and women, even the small quiet women of America—John Lewis was instrumental in achieving an important measure of racial justice.
Exhausted from his own achievement at righteously countering Strom Thurmond’s vile filibuster, Senator Booker’s voice was raspy as he looked straight into the television cameras recording his enlightened address. With reference to Donald Trump and his Republican Party cult, all seized by a contagion of cowardice, Mr. Booker offered a stern observation:
“We have reached a moral moment.”
And he reminded his colleagues in government, and political leadership of either persuasion, of a promise kept by protestors in the streets of America who refuse to cede democracy to oligarchy:
“The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”
•
The people in power, for the time being, are men of profound awfulness and a few women with silver crucifixes dangled between breast bone and décolletage who are sometimes even worse.
They are demonstrably incompetent, at best, answering blindly to their White House master: a multiply convicted felon, pathological liar, adjudicated fraudster and sexual predator who was twice impeached during his first term in office—for attempting a political extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then for inciting his loyal goons to launch an armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021, an attempted coup d’état resulting in five deaths, serious injury to more than a hundred police officers, and property damage of $2.7 billion (€2.38 billion).
NOTE: Several hundred goons convicted post-insurrection on a variety of charges were eventually pardoned by Donald Trump in January at the outset of his second term.
Today’s goons in service to Donald J. Trump, whose most ardent admirers seriously believe the initial “J” is for Jesus, swan about the streets of America in armored vehicles supplied by the federal Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency, known by the chilling acronym ICE.
On the basis of tattoos, choice of baseball caps, and dubious tips from sketchy informers, the frequently masked goons confront suspected terrorists, slap them in handcuffs and manacles, and board them on planes often bound for a notorious torture facility from which few will ever leave—the Centro de Confinameiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, located in a remote region of El Salvador.
In Mr. Trump’s gaudily gilded Oval Office, meanwhile, what seems to matter in rounding up the usual suspects are these factors: Spanish surname, though Arabic will do nicely; brown skin; a situation whereby the ensnared “suspect” is sufficiently desperate for a snide remark from the president and good laughs all ‘round a roomful of sycophants.
Indeed, it is that cruel at the Trump White House.
Among many, one case in point: the matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old construction worker in the state of Maryland who has lived in the U.S.—legally—for half his life.
Mr. Abrego Garcia and his wife, an American citizen with a Spanish surname (horrors!), were raising three children with disabilities before he was abducted by ICE goons as he sat in a car in the parking lot of a construction supply outlet, tending to a young son with autism.
Upon hearing the news, Donald Trump complained that media accounts portrayed the abductee as “such a perfect angel.”
The Trump administration was soon forced into a rare admission: Due to a “clerical error,” Mr. Abrego Garcia was improperly detained, but nevertheless somehow subject to immediate deportation. His arrest was based on a single allegation from a local police officer that he held membership in the obscure Barrio-18 gang of western New York state, a rival to the widely-known terrorist MS-13 gang.
—The detainee, who has never lived in nor visited New York and who has no criminal record, denies the allegation. The accusing officer failed to back up his allegation with anything approaching verifiable fact.
While bound in chains and awaiting take-off to CECOT from the tarmac of a military air base in Maryland, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer managed to present papers to a federal court in Maryland that documented his official resident status as a peaceable man gainfully employed.
Donald Trump, of course, objected to such a nicety and insisted that the man in chains be whisked away forthwith to the country of his birth—El Salvador as it happens, specifically to disappearance in the notorious black hole of CECOT. His fair-complexioned attorney general, Pam Bondi—she of golden hair and a fetchingly positioned crucifix—declared that Kilmar Abrego Garcia “is not coming back to our country.”
The federal court thought otherwise, and ordered that Mr. Abrego Garcia be taken off the plane and released. Fat chance of that. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a self-described dictator whom Mr. Trump is paying millions to house the disappeared, responded to the court’s urgent directive, by saying, “Oppsie, too late.” The plane was in the air.
In short order, the Abrego Garcia matter was brought before the United States Supreme Court, where its nine justices ruled unanimously that Mr. Trump must “facilitate” his release from CECOT. Fat chance of that.
Mr. Trump did not facilitate. And how was the Supreme Court to enforce its order? After all, the court has no army, no police, nor even a goon squad.
Wrangling and intransigence ensued, for which Trump lawyers are handsomely compensated.
During the lawyerly parlor games leading to and following the Supreme Court order, federal appeals court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III was shocked—shocked—by the arrogance, ignorance, and inhumanity of Donald Trump. A fellow Republican, Judge Wilkinson was appointed to the bench some three decades ago by Ronald Reagan, whose presidency marked a beginning to the end of simple decency in the one-time party of Abe Lincoln.
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our connotational order,” Judge Wilkinson wrote. “This should be shocking, not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
He added, “If today the [White House] claims to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the [White House] will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?…The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present.”
As if in response to Judge Wilkinson’s fears, Donald Trump said he is pondering the possibility of abducting “home-grown” offenders, read citizens he dislikes, and disappearing them.
•
And this is the present day state of affairs in the world’s oldest continuing democracy: “Kafka mixed with Bozo the clown,” as the Rhodes scholar-cum-television journalist Rachel Maddow defines the zeitgeist.
It is likely that Donald Trump et alia bank on public amnesia over the sins and crimes they have committed, or plan to commit. This has been their modus operandi for some time, and it’s been successful to date in keeping this president of ours on our own side of prison bars.
Mr. Trump is a stupid man, though a cunning creature who groks the darkest corners of humanity—our capacity to ignore things that are not convenient, our taste for Kafkaesque cruelty.
The British television writer Dennis Potter (1935-1994) was best at illustrating such darkness in “The Singing Detective,” his masterpiece, in which he gives the lead character an insightful line of dialogue:
“I’ve not seriously doubted…that any lie will receive almost instant corroboration, and almost instant collaboration, if the maintenance of it results in the public enjoyment of someone else’s pain, someone else’s humiliation.”
•
I met someone else at the “Hands Off!” demonstration in early April. His name is Dave, just Dave. He and I talked of the next demonstration, scheduled for April 19, and how it would light a way out from darkness at this moral moment…
…By remembrance of our roots as a powerful people with the courage to cast off oppression by people in power, namely our British colonizers.
April 19, as it happened, was the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Paul Revere’s legendary midnight horseback ride from the Boston harbor westward through the countryside to warn the people of Massachusetts of a fast-approaching sneak attack from the sea by the British army, bent on annihilating those who dared get into good trouble, necessary trouble.
Dave took a long look at thousands of New Yorkers streaming out of Bryant Park toward Fifth Avenue with protest signs to display in the mighty march downtown.
“Look at this crowd,” said Dave. “We still got it.”
