We Were Right About Trump and It Doesn’t Feel Good

On January 20, 2017, I waited for a train to DC for the Women’s March. Gloves off on the cold platform, I was back and forth on Facebook messenger with an acquaintance mocking the protest: What are you all so afraid of? The list would be too long. I didn’t know where to begin. The train was coming.

In this second year of Donald Trump’s second term, those who feared the worst as he rose to power a decade ago are being proven right — and horrifically. And there is zero comfort or satisfaction in saying, “Told you so.”

For The New Republic, Toby Buckle looked at why Americans who recognized early the danger of Trump tended to be dismissed. Race and gender, of course, were big factors, especially in the response of those Buckle calls “anti-alarmists” — and who I call the pundudes. Yet more interesting is what he learned talking to dozens of “fascism’s Cassandras.” (Buckle notes Cassandra was right to warn the Trojans against accepting that nifty gift of a horse.) Most, he discovered, are not deep in liberal bubbles. The attuned — who included a lot of women — didn’t need to go to Ohio diners to see Trump’s appeal. They understood he would take us to dark places.

In “The Resistance Libs were Right,” Michelle Goldberg quotes male scholars who, in recent years, argued why and how Trump had not achieved fascism, intellectual exercises that seem of little value as he now furiously hits every mark of it: trampling on the law and human rights, consolidating power, violently repressing dissent, threatening wars to demonstrate might. Much resistance to the Resistance was plain mansplaining.

What are you all so afraid of?

It’s been easy for some pundudes to look in the oven through blurred glass, watch the meat cook, and proclaim, “It’s not ready yet!” — but not so easy for those who’ve ever been treated like meat, such as women and girls who’ve suffered from rank sexism and sexual exploitation. Vulnerable groups targeted for hate, vitriol, and repression by Trump and his MAGA enablers — immigrants, the disabled, the unhoused, LGBTQ+ Americans, people of color, Muslims and Jews among them — have keenly felt the rising heat. Yet some insisted that what we were experiencing wasn’t what it was.

During Trump’s first term, some survivors of domestic abuse, sexual assault and harassment, and child sex abuse shared on social media their emotions as a man multiply accused of “sexual misconduct” sat in the White House. We recognized in his words and actions the tactics of our own abusers. Justine Andronici wrote in the fall of 2019:

Those of us who work in the field of domestic violence, and those of us who have survived an abusive relationship…see the similarities between how Trump is treating the country and how abusers treat their victims.

Trump exhibits many if not all the personality traits of an abuser: significant misogyny, a profound sense of entitlement and superiority and, perhaps most notably for this circumstance, the strong belief that the rules simply do not apply to him…It is only the scope of his control, his platform and the potentially devastating scale of his influence that make him different.

It doesn’t feel good to have been right. As an abuse survivor, it is re-traumatizing to be ignored, to watch in fear as terrible, predictable events unfold and to feel powerless to stop them. As things get worse than my hypervigilance (that exhausting Spidey sense of the abused) could forecast, it feels abysmal.

What are you all so afraid of?

During this second Trump term, the federal government has become a predator.

Back in office, a civil jury having found him guilty of sexual assault, Trump has befriended others accused, charged, or convicted of sex crimes and given enormous power to Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Linda McMahon, and others accused of harassment, abuse, or their cover-up. He pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists, releasing convicts, many of whom have reoffended.

The Department of Justice is now devoted to attacking political opponents. The Department of Defense has become the Department of War, reflecting a wholly violent purpose. Likewise, military and paramilitary troops have been deployed to American cities not to defend and protect but to intimidate and control. The Department of Homeland Security runs a force that occupies rather than secures the homeland. ICE has become a secret police, creating hell on city streets, a collection of masked, unvetted mercenaries. The Supreme Court has sanctioned racial profiling and the administration tells them they can act with immunity. Residents and citizens are being snatched and sent to detention centers and concentration camps, where many have died. Peaceful protestors are being threatened and maimed. Shot in the chest and killed in front of a loved one.

No justice, no defense, no security.

What are you all so afraid of?

Who was right about Trump’s fascism a decade ago matters now because of the desperate need to listen to those who are right today. This includes Cornell’s Kate Manne, who writes about the broad-daylight slaying of Renee Good:

The case is yet another illustration of a point that is crucial to understand about the rise of fascism in this country: misogyny is not an incidental feature or an optional add-on or comorbidity. Misogyny is the beating heart of a fascism that violently safeguards and shores up white male authority—by punishing any social subordinate who questions the designated authority figures. Good was not only killed in a misogynistic spirit, as we knew already from the gendered slur that escaped her murderer’s lips at the crucial moment, like violent punctuation.

In light of this fascist motivation and moment, anti-alarmists and pundudes are still telling us to calm down, ladies. The oh-so-reasonable folks at Third Way warn that calls to eliminate a paramilitary created in the anti-Muslim hysteria after 9/11 could hurt the cause because it’s an “impulse” that is “emotional.” Because after all, fascists are best disarmed by measured talk tested in focus groups just as victims of abuse are comforted by their abuser being given a talking-to.

I have lived my adult life with my abuser never having been held to account. This is why the brave Epstein survivors speak to me so loudly. For decades, they were ignored by the authorities, allowing Epstein to elude accountability and to reoffend — a word way more mild than the dread survivors feel when they can’t protect others from their abusers. Epstein’s survivors are not done being ignored and abused; MAGA is using them as political props to go after political opponents while protecting Lord-knows-how-many conspirators and breaking the law to do so. The message: They don’t give a damn about crimes against women and children, against the vulnerable.

It’s the same message sent by the Republicans who approved Trump’s autocrat-friendly Supreme Court picks and who refused to impeach Trump and who kiss his ass and rubber-stamp his agenda today. It’s the same message sent by the Biden DOJ who refused to move fast enough to prosecute Trump for his crimes. It’s the same message sent by everyone who donated and voted to return him to office. It’s the same message sent by self-labelled moderates who insist Democrats should tiptoe around the deadliness of ICE. They don’t give a damn about crimes against the vulnerable — or a democracy, however flawed, that could help protect them.

Victims and survivors of misogynistic violence are frequently doubted, dismissed, and discredited by the men in power tasked with holding perpetrators accountable. Predators lie about and demonize their prey, intimidate and threaten them. When the government is the predator, the best hope of the people is to become survivors and survivors who get justice.

I can’t be free of fear of my abuser until he is dead, and even then, his unpunished crimes will leave a legacy of intergenerational trauma. Nevertheless, I can count myself a survivor because of the loving binds I’ve made with other courageous survivors. In the same way, we can look to the Trump-occupied cities and to Minnesota and follow the example of Americans taking risks on behalf of all of us. A good woman was slain in and for the act of trying to protect herself and her neighbors from abuse. Even now that she is gone, they abuse her. But by binding closer together to protect each other — and vowing to hold accountable those taking lives and our democracy, we can hope to survive American fascism.

What I’m afraid of now is how long that might take, especially if we don’t listen to the people who know what fascism is because they are already in its burning heat.