It was the last week of June, 2015, and I was en route to visit my son in New York City. The TVs in the Atlanta airport were still broadcasting details of the horrible event that occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, a few days earlier, when a racist teenager named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel AME Church with a Glock and murdered nine Black parishioners.
After a couple days in the city, Andrew and I decided to drive out to Montauk and get some sea air. On our first night there, we went to watch an indie film being screened in a local park. It was a warm evening and people were sitting on blankets and folding chairs in the dark, chatting, staring at their phones, waiting for the movie to begin.
I was scrolling idly, when a tweet with a video of President Obama caught my attention. It was the moment when the president broke into “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston. He began singing alone, then a few others joined, and then the sound swelled like a great wave, as everyone in the building lifted their voices as one. As I watched my little screen, I felt tears on my face. The president of the United States had somehow tapped into the unspeakable pain of that moment and transformed it into hope and love, into catharsis. I will never forget it.
Whenever I think about that night — and I still do — I’m struck anew by one of the great mysteries of my lifetime: How the American people could elect a leader with the spirit and decency of Barack Obama — a Black man, to boot — and just four short years later put a lying, self-absorbed, racist clown like Donald Trump into that same office.
It’s almost as though the American zeitgeist did a complete and inexplicable U-turn, and it happened in a heartbeat. Just 10 days before Obama led that congregation in song, the man who would become his successor rode an escalator to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his candidacy. Tellingly, his very first words were a lie: “Wow, wow,” he said. “That is some group of people. Thousands!”
There were approximately 200 people there, and campaign aides later revealed that many had been paid $50 each by a casting agency to show up and be enthusiastic. Trump went off on one of his now-familiar unscripted rambles, concluding by saying of Mexico: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. They’re not sending their best.”
Trump started his campaign with racist grievances and has been escalating them ever since. The fact that we now have masked ICE and Border Patrol agents seizing brown people off American streets without warrants is not an accident. It was the plan from Day One.
And now there’s so much more: We are flooded daily with new grievances, new grifts, new monuments to the president’s unquenchable ego: federal buildings, airports, a ballroom, a giant arch, a golden statue, bills, coins, passports — all festooned with the name and image of this vain, stupid man. The latest thievery? Almost $2 billion in “reparations” to be paid to the mob of violent, ignorant dupes who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, on orders from this president.
Under Trump’s impulsive “leadership,” we’ve started pointless wars, seized foreign leaders and removed them from office, murdered dozens of people in small boats in international waters without bothering to prove they are guilty of anything. We are a rogue nation, distrusted by our allies and mocked as fools by our competitors. We are led by a man in obvious mental decline, propped up by a cabinet of toadies, tycoons, and TV hosts.
I keep going back to that funeral in Charleston. Can you imagine this president offering heartfelt comfort to a congregation riddled by violence, or to the families of those who died, or to anyone in pain, for that matter? We don’t have to imagine it. Trump provides evidence every time he speaks to an audience that he is incapable of talking about anything but himself for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s beyond appalling. Our democracy is careening down a dead-end street and it’s long past time for another U-turn.