Thank you, Donald Trump
THANK YOU TWITTER #THANKYOUTWITTER
Congratulations, Donald Trump. Even before the depravities Wednesday when a Trump mob stormed the Capitol, you galvanized me into political activism.
The last time I got involved with a presidential campaign was in 1972. As I recall, it wasn’t my enthusiasm for George McGovern, but my affection for an attractive college classmate, that lured me onto the streets of Bridgeport, Conn., handing out flyers for the South Dakota senator’s doomed candidacy.
I spent 46 years not donating, not volunteering, not doing anything, for any woman or man involved in politics. Not even for friends who ran for city council. That was partly because I am lazy and cheap, and partly because I honored the oft-mocked notion that if you are going to write about politics you should do so with “clean hands,” as the lawyers say.
Journalists loved to make fun of former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., who didn’t even vote, so as not to compromise himself vis-a-vis the characters his newspaper wrote about. I admired him.
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For me, Trump radically altered the political terms of trade. Starting in 2018, I asked myself, suppose my grandchildren inquire: Did you support this President Trump? He seems like an extraordinarily, um, off-putting person. Didn’t he incite a riot against Congress? Surely you resisted him in some way . . . right, Grandpa?
Two quick points: First, my politics are center-right-anarcho-syndicalist, meaning all over the map, trending conservative. I vote for people like Charlie Baker and Mitt Romney. Before the events of this week, I probably approved of more Donald Trump policies than Stacey Abrams policies.
But Trump’s personal cruelty to other human beings, which became manifest within moments of his declaring his candidacy in 2015, overwhelmed me. If you purport to distinguish right from wrong, or presume to teach your children how to behave, Trump’s behavior — well, it’s all been said. Richard Nixon looks like Pericles by comparison.
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Secondly, inveighing against Trump in the newspaper isn’t really “working against Trump.” This is Plato’s cave, and these opinions are shadows of reality. Political work is touching people, literally or figuratively, and asking them to do what you believe is the right thing.
In 2018, I spent a few days campaigning for Jared Golden in Maine’s Second District, because that was the closest, potentially flippable, district to my house. A writer named Jeffrey Lewis (read his “Berlin Cantata”; you won’t regret it) and I bombed around the Ellsworth area in his Prius and spent a fair amount of time debating whether the legendary Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander Sandy Koufax had retired to East Holden or Ellsworth. Maybe we turned a few households Golden’s way. Who knows? The district did flip. In this case, the journey was its own reward.
This fall, I wanted to canvass in Ohio or perhaps Michigan, but an organizer told me that the Democrats weren’t going door-to-door during the presidential election because of the coronavirus. I couldn’t have canvassed anyway, because my hip went south. (Thanks for asking, as they say in Brookline. I’ll be fine.) A couple of months ago, a friend remarked over an outdoors dinner that she was “sending postcards to Georgia to relieve her anxiety.”
My thought balloon: I’ll do that.
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And I did, on a spectacularly modest scale. And so did my wife, and other friends texted into swing states, phone-banked, etc., etc. I assume that this process replicated itself a minimum of one hundred thousand times.
So thank you, Donald Trump. I owe you a huge debt. Because of you, I will be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and say, “A lot of people got involved, and it made a difference.” I’m proud to have been one of them. Now, vamoose.