The Trump moments that defined us
Here are the scars left by the worst president in history. Some are smaller than others but they all run deep.
The evening after a mob of Trump supporters raided the Capitol—actions that were encouraged by the president and several members of Congress in an attempt to decertify Joe Biden’s presidential win—South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham stood in front of his colleagues and declared Biden “the legitimate President to the United States.”
This marked a change from weeks leading up to the attempted coup, when Graham stood by Trump and propagated false claims that the election was stolen. It’s hardly noteworthy that Graham— the living embodiment of a cheap condom— touts a big game but shrivels under any heat, but he did refer to Trump as a “consequential” president, and I can’t argue that point.
In fact, Trump has caused so much damage over the past four years that I can’t imagine there ever being a more consequential president. When I saw images of the Capitol engulfed in tear gas, it felt like a smash cut used in a horribly bleak, post-apocalyptic comedy where someone from 2016 asks “How bad can it really get?”
For the past four years, we’ve endured enough catastrophic moments as a direct result of Trump’s callous ineptitude to warrant some sort of mass PTSD compensation (Just off the top of my head: Capitol coup, Heather Heyer’s death, Puerto Rico, pardoning of war criminal Eddie Gallagher, the unnecessarily high COVID death count). However, I’ll wager that it won’t be those big moments that people remember from this administration, but the small ways in which Trump’s reign has personally affected them.
I have two defining Trump moments.
In January 2018, I was in Hawaii for a wedding. I had been asked to write a speech for the occasion, so my nerves were on edge. The morning before the ceremony, I went snorkeling with a few friends in an effort to try and calm down.
I looked back toward the shore and noticed a person in our party frantically waving at me to come back in. My mind immediately went: shark. But when I scurried onto the sand, I realized the reality was much worse.
An emergency alert had been sent to everybody’s phones, and this warning did not fuck around:
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER.”
I wrote about this for CityBeat after it happened (“Baby’s First Nuclear Scare,” originally published January 29, 2018. Hit me up if you want to read it), and here’s what I said back then:
It’s a strange feeling to face potential sudden and violent death. It feels too far-fetched to be real, and yet this is the world that we’re all living in—a world where a madman plays nuclear chicken with another maniac via the comfort of a Twitter account. (PS: Fuck you, Trump. Fuck you, Kim Jong-un. And fuck you, @jack, for enabling all this). My thoughts ping-pong between this can’t be real and this is absolutely real, and underneath the mental deliberations, the confusion becomes fear.
No, not just fear, but seeds of hysteria. Do I call my family and tell them I love them, or is that too dramatic? Have I lived a good enough life? Have I done everything that I wanted to do? Will people miss me after I become particles? Will my death be eulogized by an idiot who uses my death to justify going to war with North Korea?
Now we know that the alert was caused by some combination of computer human error (whoopsy daisy). There was no nuclear war, but the fact that Trump had been taunting Kim Jong-un—even comparing nuclear buttons to dick size—made the whole thing seem totally plausible.
My second Trump moment came later that year when I went to my grandpa’s funeral in Manti, Utah. My grandpa was a lifelong conservative, so his support of Trump wasn’t very surprising, but when we went to his house after the viewing, I learned that he had spent the end of his life increasingly subscribing to QAnon conspiracy theories, and hoarding food/supplies for the end of the world (turns out that Manti is is kind of a haven for end-times preppers).
This was the first time I’d heard of anyone taking QAnon seriously, and it made me so sad to imagine my grandpa’s mind warped by the preferred cult of Trumpers. Of course, I was sad when he passed, but part of me is thankful that he left this mortal coil before QAnon could really get its savage hooks in.
I asked a few influential San Diegans what their defining Trump moments were, and here’s what they said:
Adriana Heldiz - Multimedia producer, Voice of San Diego
In late 2018, my coworker Maya Srikrishnan and I spent a lot of time in Tijuana covering the influx of Central American migrants who were arriving at the border in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States. At this point, President Trump's rhetoric and immigration policies regarding asylum seekers and the migrant caravans was adding fuel to tensions that had already been building up locally.
One Sunday, Maya and I decided to go to Tijuana to cover a peaceful march in support of the migrants. That march quickly turned out to be the day hundreds of migrants ran towards the San Ysidro Port of Entry that prompted officials to temporarily shut down the border. I vividly remember standing with Maya on top of the bridge that went over the Tijuana River watching the chaos play out. While I was capturing video of migrants being violently pushed by federal officers, I remember trying to mentally prepare myself for the worst.
"This is all because of Trump," I thought to myself. "I might see someone die today because of him and his words."
Butch Hussein Rosser - Music journalist, Treble, San Diego Mixtape Society
I saw him come down the escalator and thought to myself, "Can't wait until Hillary beats him by a couple million."
For far too many ignorami, it seemed a joke or a publicity stunt, but after Please Clap! gave his brother the presidency, I suddenly became interested in politics in a way I hadn't been before. My parents always voted—and always voted blue—but it wasn't until that happened that I became interested in following along on a daily basis. (Did I pick the best century to suddenly devote free time to American politics and history, or the worst one?)
And here's the thing: I was right.
But it didn't matter, because this is America, and the Manchurian Cantaloupe is white, straight and allegedly rich.
Thanks to the Electoral College, the spray-tanned American id ran wild for four years and all it cost us was a republic.
The day white people get their house in order will be February 30th.
Wendy Wheatcroft - Teacher, activist, Moms Demand Action
It is incredibly difficult to choose a defining Trump moment for me.
On Election Day 2016, I had worn my white blazer adorned with Hillary buttons to go vote in my neighborhood with my children. I had tears in my eyes imagining the history that would come that night. Afterwards, I came home and frosted cupcakes with the Hillary campaign logo on them. I hung campaign signs, a US flag, and a rainbow Pride flag in my living room and had a few friends over.
But early in the evening, my five-year-old-daughter broke her ankle on our trampoline. And things went downhill from there.
As I watched the returns come in, I had a growing sense of doom. My friends slowly left as the mood rapidly changed from bad to worse. I took off my white blazer and threw it on the floor. I ripped the flags and campaign signs off the walls and sobbed as my British husband looked on in disbelief. We had just gone through Brexit too! We belonged to no place. I cried all night and didn’t sleep, but got up the next morning ready to fight for our children, who deserve better than this.
I have not stopped fighting for four fucking years. Even before Trump’s election, I had spent time deep undercover on social media in far-right groups and I knew what they were capable of, but I've since become a leader in gun violence prevention, holding the line against gun extremists who have been plotting our demise long before Trump came along. They have made threats to my home and family. They have stalked and harassed me on social media, and even shared pictures of my kids on Breitbart. I have locked myself in a cage at the Federal Courthouse to protest children being locked in cages at the border. I have raised money and supplies for countless causes helping our migrant, unsheltered, and refugee populations. I ran for office—something I never planned to do before Trump—to make positive change in my community.
When the pandemic hit, I began teaching my children in my garage and have sewn thousands of masks for people across many states, hospitals, and—most meaningful to me—the Navajo Nation. I have stood alongside Black Lives Matter with our BIPOC neighbors to rail against racist policies and systems that must be reformed. Even my kids have planned BLM protests in solidarity. To me, these past four years will be my Trump moments, because everything I have lived and breathed, I have had to do because of him and his horrific policies. It has been my awakening.
Ismahan Abdullahi - Executive Director of San Diego’s MAS PACE (Muslim American Society Public Affairs Community Engagement)
It was Friday, the 27th of January 2017. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States a couple of days earlier. I was at work when I found out that he signed an executive order that banned Muslims from entering the United States. There was much confusion, fear, uncertainty that surrounded this moment, and the entire presidency of Trump. Communities already at the margins endured so much in these past four years. However, that Friday when the executive order for the first iteration of the Muslim Ban was signed, I specifically remember the frustration our communities felt, the fear of a Muslim registry given the Islamophobic rhetoric Trump spewed during his campaign and the hundreds of calls I received from community members who were uncertain what this new ban meant for them and their loved ones. I reached out to Muslim-serving organizations and organized a community townhall that was attended by over 300 community members and allies. This was a start to 4 years of organizing, advocating and pushing back against Trump's harmful policies.
Bella Ross - Journalist, web producer, inewsource
On Jan. 22, 2017, one day after attending the Women’s March and two days after Trump’s inauguration, I posted on Facebook. To be clear, this is something I never do. Having joined the platform in middle school, the seemingly endless archive of embarrassing pictures and “Like my status for a tbh” posts was enough to keep me away for good. Once the 2016 election came around, I perceived the site as a full-blown warzone.
I was confused when I returned from the Women’s March to find family members of mine (many of them women) criticizing the display on Facebook. I’m usually not one to entertain the political disagreements between myself and my Arizona-based family members, but this was one of the first times it became clear to me that we were existing in different worlds—almost like parallel universes. We loved each other, but we could not understand one another.
My Facebook post, a plea to find common ground, was ignored by my conservative relatives. I knew one post was unlikely to change their minds, but the situation forced me to come to terms with just how deep our country’s divisions run. Unfortunately, after four years of Trump, my relatives’ online dialogue continues to prove we are farther from understanding each other than ever.
Justin Pearson - Musician (The Locust, Retox) and founder of Three One G Records
Normally when you think of a light turning on, it’s similar to a meme where one might have a bright idea. I think there’s a flipside to that, which is when you enter a dark room that is filthy and has been since it was systematically built. You flip on the light and see all the roaches running for cover. It seems that the last administration turned those lights on for us to see the white nationalist garbage that is America today.
We can say that people are more polarized now than ever, but I think the administration removed the hoods. We can now see who is part of the Klan and the racist ideologies that this country was built on.
Perhaps they started to feel empowered in some ways due to the constant rhetoric being spewed on Fox and Friends, but they also clearly felt fear and acted on that. We can pinpoint all the aspects of negligence from the administration—as well as the strategic placement of people to retain power and grow wealth for a capitalist system—but there was a lesson taught to oppressed people, which was to hate downwards. This is a massive subject to try to address, and polarization is a real drag until it forces you to take a hard look at the world we live in.
For me, there wasn’t one or two or three moments that stuck out, it was hundreds of fucked up things that just piled up to a large mound of shit.
THE WEEKLY GOODS
Listen to this
Brian Strauss contains multitudes. The San Diego expat singer/songwriter’s Of Ennui is one of my favorite San Diego bands from the last five years, and I highly recommend it for fans of intensely beautiful music in the vein of Sparta or Hum. Last year, Strauss released an equally excellent acoustic album under the name Mr. Foxx (which Julia Dixon Evans reviewed for this newsletter). Now, Strauss is back to making heavy music with his new doom drone project, Gaunt Emperor. The five tracks that make up his debut, Femur, is a sonic journey, to say the least, and perhaps a little inaccessible if you’re not already a fan of bands like SUNN O))). But like that band, Strauss proves that heavy doesn’t have to be aggressive or abrasive—that it can, in fact, be soothing and beautiful. Pre-order Femur on Gaunt Emperor’s Bandcamp.
Read this
Last week, all the insurrectionists were throwing out the word “Orwellian” to describe their social media bans, and it quickly became clear that they had never read a George Orwell book. But guess who has... this guy [points to self]. And to prove it, here’s an in-class essay on 1984 that I recently found in a box of old stuff. I wrote this when I was Freshman in high school, and it’s solid B work. According to the teacher’s comments (Hi, Mrs. Carlquist!) I was supposed to talk about foreshadowing, and not just give a sensationalistic summary of the book. I think my favorite line in this is: “Winston hooks up with Julia.” Anyway, I got better at English. And if you haven’t read the book, there are spoilers in this essay.
Got a tip or wanna say hi? Email me at ryancraigbradford@gmail.com, or follow me on Twitter @theryanbradford. And if you like what you’ve just read, please hit that little heart icon at the end of the post.
Julia Dixon Evans edited this post. Thanks, Julia. Go follow her on Twitter.