Happiness Is a Warm Gun

On the inevitability of Donald Trump, part two

(NASA/Emma Howells)

[Part I: The Dirty Old Man – 00:00-00:43]

The last time I found myself in this city during election season was 2016. I was 13, old enough to cackle at all the Republican primary debates, click away at the 270toWin interactive map in study hall, and be some nondescript flavor of communist (“have you read the Wikipedia page for Rojava?”). I made the most of being the product of divorce, living my weekends in the center of the known universe. I gawked at demonstrators, even visited Trump Tower once. “Dad, that’s where he says they make the best taco bowls. That’s the escalator. Isn’t it nuts?”

It all got a bit realer when his face was projected on the side of the Empire State Building in the early morning of November 9th. When I went back to Trump Tower the weekend after, it was a remarkably different sight. The NYPD was setting up concrete barriers and a security checkpoint on 5th Avenue of all places. There was a constant crowd of protestors, chanting. There was a feeling of horror but also a willingness to fight. That will to fight would burn bright for the next four years, until he not only lost, but proved to the whole country with his actions afterwards that he was unfit to even gaze over the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Eight years later, the sights have been far less dramatic. I was at a bar in Astoria with some old and new friends, once Fairfax County dropped not wanting to be the harbinger of bad news I quietly focused my attention on looking at local races here in New York City, swings towards Trump that were hardly any more comforting. It’s all something of a blur, but I distinctly remember a Latino man who I saw earlier in the night wearing a Trump hat coming back in with a different Trump hat and someone I know drunkenly trying to remove a wheatpasted Trump bumper sticker from some scaffolding. At 2 am, I took the N train to Lex and for whatever reason insisted on walking 35 blocks back home.

In observing the people I passed in the coming days, you’d not have known Donald Trump had just been re-elected. And why would you? The backlash in 2016 had an underlying tone of injustice. This was a man who 54% of voters did not choose, who was the most unpopular nominee in modern history, who was a lame duck before he even took the oath of office. He was a backlash to something other, something distant, the hatred and bigotry of under 78,000 mouthbreathers in three Midwestern states, empowered by a fluke of the undemocratic Electoral College and vague murmurs of FBI malpractice and Russian meddling. He had gotten a mere 18.1% of the vote in his home city, less than McCain, both Bushes, every Republican nominee since the party was founded but for Romney thanks to Hurricane Sandy goodwill. Last month, Manhattan learned that America is actually not better than this, and the theory of far off, angry white men has been blown to smithereens.

Trump got 30.0% of the vote in the city this time around. While narrower than it looked on election night, he is the first Republican nominee to win the popular vote since 2004, an election characterized by a lust for vengeance and sangre por sangre that makes even this moment look relatively docile by comparison. He won all 7 swing states, including Arizona, where my recently transplanted father who voted for Clinton in Manhattan and ridiculed Trump as much as I had found it in him to pull the lever for The Donald this time. I myself got into the voting booth intending to vote the Working Families line, but balked and ended up scribbling in a write-in (Cornel West, a man who should not be president, but is better than Stein and De la Cruz). I could tell you why I did that, but you’ve had a month of other talking heads telling you (and plenty of my own warnings), so I won’t insult your reading comprehension. If you’re here, you’re a well-read, politically engaged person. You have a college degree, maybe more than one, listen to podcasts, trust the science, wear subtle clothes that fit just right, and can discern in an instant between the very, very obvious path to national salvation and all this Tinseltown nonsense. I started this article the night after, but didn’t have much new to say. But I can look back with clearer eyes.

[Part II: The Junkie – 00:43-01:35]

I graduated from the same Mid-Hudson high school as my mom, Arlington High. It’s a large, sprawling complex centrally located in the hamlet of Freedom Plains, permanent population 438 but growing to about 5,000 people during the day between the thousands of students and hundreds of staff, my graduating class 732 kids before dropouts and arriving in no less than 55 school buses. Those buses come from a 15 by 15 mile area I have always considered a fairly representative sample of the United States, from the gritty Section 8 housing by the City of Poughkeepsie to the trailer parks of Pleasant Valley and the suspiciously cheaper than over the school district line McMansions of Red Oaks Mill. They pass crammed apartment blocks, and they pass front yards filled with rusted-out cars, where land is more plentiful than money and each when times are tough is a several hundred dollar bond ready to be cashed with a call to a scrapper or auto part store. 56% White, 25% Hispanic, 12% Black, 40% receive welfare. Hallways flood when it rains. All students must wear lanyards with photo ID. Ex-NYPD “school security monitors” in crimson windbreakers patrol the halls. Over 60,000 have attended. There are no notable alumni on Wikipedia.

My alma mater is sometimes in the news for not the best reasons, but violence is rarely completely random. So long as one kept to themselves, minded their own business, generally they were fine. If guidance deemed them worthy of our school within a school, the socially insulated handful of AP classes, they may not even have the indignity of interacting with the philistines. Even up there, we had our own Manhattan. A younger, prouder me who wasn’t deemed “that kind of kid” by the oracles was not very good at abiding by these guidelines. But for a frail, bony girl who looked halfway dead randomly slapping me in a hallway sophomore year, all other instances happened because of my failure to heed the principle of talk shit, get hit. One occurred around the 2020 election. I should note upfront, I am now on good terms with the others involved.

Arlington has courtyards, something I am sure the architect was very proud of, but were soon permanently locked when administrators realized they had accidentally created an area where we could smoke without setting off fire alarms. In the hastily planned COVID re-entry of September and October 2020, it was decided these doors would remain permanently open to provide ventilation. Soon after, I saw an odd photo of some young men holding a Trump flag in one of them between classes.

It was mostly as I expected, the camo cap-clad sons of Pleasant Valley and Beekman, but also a few Poughkeepsie kids I did not expect to be in such a photo, including a Black guy who sat at my lunch table. I gave him some shit about it, he reacted strongly, and as these adolescent benders go deescalation was not on any of our minds, other people were pulled in on the basis of vague honor, and things quickly got physical and out of hand. That’s how I ended up being escorted around by our friends, the school security monitors for a few days.

At the time, I figured it was some odd fluke of the environment, a school where at least the lower class of all creeds was fairly integrated. Few I knew back there were interested in politics, and fewer still were public about their allegiances. But we had some— Trump flags on the camo capper’s lifted pickup trucks, devoutly Catholic girls who spoke on abortion as murder in American Government class in as clear terms as “water is wet,” I even was friends with a girl up until she skipped class to attend January 6th. And then you had the intelligentsia, the children of transplant artists, work from homers, Vassar professors, the city plastic surgeon, IBM employees, the kids who had read the studies and come to the rational conclusion of the flavor of the month in the massive Democratic primary field, homogeneously liberal in a school district that voted for Trump all three times. In the months leading up to this election, most of the support for Trump I’ve seen on my Instagram feed has been nonwhite young men from urban Poughkeepsie.

The Democratic Party in the Trump years has made a play for moderate, affluent suburbanites at the conscious cost of working class voters, as I’ve written about before in Carhartt Politics. The hemmoraging of the working class in this election is obvious, but if you want to see the flip side, I point you to red Bucks and Nassau Counties, the spitting image of suburban shelteredness in Pennsylvania and New York respectively, both voting Republican for the first time since 1988.

[Part III: The Gunman – 01:35-02:45]

On December 4th, a man was shot and killed in Manhattan. No one knew it in the hours immediately following, but what would follow was a sensational news story about two previously unknown men with more staying power in the headlines than almost any other. You can look at the comment section on every outlet from the Times to the Post, the near universal public response has not necessarily been cheering on the killing of the insurance executive itself (my friends at the Center for Strategic Politics have shown that doesn’t poll well at all), but can certainly be characterized as carrying an underlying tone of “…well, I get where he was coming from.”

The alleged shooter is hardly an everyman. Steeped in far more wealth than his target, he went to the right schools— Gilman Country Day in Baltimore, Penn for undergrad and grad school— it’s a background that lends itself to a full-page high school yearbook profile, a firm place in the highest strata of American society, and I suspect one hell of a legal defense. In a time where people of backgrounds like that sitting in campaign offices, think tanks, and Zoom calls are taking stabs at the dark in hopes of capturing something that shifts the national conversation, one of their own has no doubt done it.

It is worth note that what is effectively the murder of some guy is at best met with a shrug in the public consciousness. Brian Thompson was not a public figure in any meaningful way, his Wikipedia page was created mere hours after he died. He was one of innumerable nameless people playing in the orchestra of our broken healthcare system, knowing that were they not, someone else would be in their place. Particularly in the wake of the first presidential election in decades that has lacked an aspirational case for dramatic changes to how healthcare works in this country, the collective anger suddenly channeled through an act of violence suggests a complete dereliction of potent opportunity by the Democratic Party. The first concrete policy lead on Harris’ website was making permanent an $800 tax credit for private insurance premiums. Even Donald Trump, whatever else always aware of the direction the wind blows, has kept conspicuously silent on what at surface appears a slam dunk occurence to condemn radicalism and appeal to law and order. Trump is a master at constructing effigies, channeling anxiety at societal ill against institutions, groups, individuals. He can recognize a good one.

While there is media reporting on his health issues, it is difficult to imagine someone of such privilege having their life destroyed by claim denials. That said, his GoodReads account and the etchings on the bullet casings show he’s quite well-read on this subject. There is nothing unique about the insulated class coming to bold, evidence-based conclusions about what must be said or done from their extensive research, though his pitch to the proles is a bit different than the mantra “democracy is on the ballot.”

Donald Trump went to the American public and told them something was deeply wrong. He identified those responsible, the nation’s enemies within, and pledged through gritted teeth to uproot them entirely. We look poised to enact state violence against millions of people and effectively ban my healthcare as a consequence. At least that’s a campaign pledge that isn’t mere nibbling at the edges!

When I was back at Arlington, I put hundreds of hours into the only Democratic presidential campaign that seemed comfortable speaking in an frightfully uncouth manner about the state of things. The greatest lie told since has been that its failure was a plea for normalcy. There remains an intense, raging energy for dramatic change in our society. One party has reaped greatly from this unilateral disarmament. Why is the Democratic Party so afraid to tap into it?