I’ve mostly refrained from political posts this season. It isn’t because I don’t care—I do, very much—but mostly because it seems like this time around, everybody has already made up their mind. The trenches have been dug. The positions have been established. Everybody knows who Donald Trump is at this point. And while the election may be decided by those mysterious “independent voters” (a baffling group of people, in this day and age. If you can’t make up your mind between Trump and Kamala Harris, do you have trouble buying bread at the grocery store? Do you wait at stop lights, trying to decide whether to go straight, or turn?), it sure feels like there’s the red side, and there’s the blue side, and everybody has made up their mind. And legitimately—I have friends on both sides. I have a lot of friends, all over the country and all over the world. They live in cities and rural areas, they are white, black, Latino, Asian, they are rednecks and LGBQT. They are young and they are old. I have a lot of friends, and I try to understand their viewpoints, even if I sometimes completely disagree with them.
I was quite vocal about my dislike of Donald Trump and everything that he stands for in the previous two presidential elections. It boggles my mind that we’re here, once again, with Trump as the candidate for the Republican Party. But here we are. For the last nine years, I’ve had people complain: “Keep your opinions to yourself”; “I like your music, but hate your politics”; “Go live somewhere else if you don’t like America” (the last one always cracks me up, as my Dickerson family tree has been here since the 1650s—I’m not going anywhere). I’ve heard it all. And this time around, I haven’t said as much, not because I was censoring my viewpoint or because I feared retribution, but simply because, as I mentioned, everybody has pretty much made up their mind at this point. It seemed pointless, like sticking your finger in an electric fan blade, over and over again, somehow expecting a different result each time.
What I want to talk about, the day before the 2024 presidential election, is how much Donald Trump has broken my heart about the once–United States of America, and how he has destroyed my faith in so many of the Americans that I once admired and believed in. I truly believe that the worst thing about Trump is what he has brought out in people I loved.
If you know me, you know that I was born and raised in two great places, Missouri and Virginia. All of my family came from Virginia, and my folks moved to Missouri for college and careers. I was brought up going to Baptist Church, I was in the Boy Scouts, I worked menial jobs around farmers and punk rockers and stoners and rednecks. I played in bands with old blues guys, country pickers, heavy metal types, and tried to forge my own way forward. I had a great childhood around people I greatly admired. I should mention here that my parents were Democrats through and through. Even as they watched most all of the other Southerners abandon the Democratic Party because of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” my folks continued to support Democrats and never wavered in their core beliefs. And that is what breaks my heart about Trump—watching all these other people in my life change all their core beliefs to follow this man.
You may call it TDS; I call it a finely tuned bullshit detector. But the very first time I heard Trump speak as a presidential candidate, I watched for about a minute then said to myself: “That guy’s a con man. He’s a liar, and he’s a fraud. He is completely, 100 percent full of shit.” I stand by my internal bullshit detector. I believe I am accurate in my defenestration of Donald J. Trump. What truly blew me away, however, was Trump’s ability to hoodwink, to con, to P.T. Barnum half of the country. I do believe that Trump has an unexplainable and undeniable Ingredient X, a show-business ability to convince people to follow him and believe everything he says, in a Doctor Doolittle fashion. I can’t explain it, and I don’t think anyone can. I think Trump’s ability to capture the news cycle is unmatched, a fact that both parties were unprepared to deal with when he first ran in the 2016 election.
But as Trump took over the airwaves and blustered and lied and eventually won the presidency in 2016, I watched so many of my fellow Americans change with him, fundamentally, wholly and completely. And that’s the part that has just about broken me. I mean, we’ve had con men before. This country always tolerates them for a while, then chews them up and spits them out. But Trump? He seems to have a lock on at least a third of the country, controlling people’s minds and making them change who they were, or who they thought they were.
I made a list of many things about Trump that have forever changed the Republican Party and what it used to stand for. I was never a Republican, but at one time it really seemed like the people running our country were at least all adults in the room, whether they were Republican or Democrat. But Trump has changed the Republican Party to fit his own vile, demented, childish, and uneducated worldview.
My original list of things that Trump destroyed in the Republican Party’s core beliefs included many subjects. I started writing it and I realized it could grow into a two-hundred-page list. The one thing that I decided I had to write about, because—it cannot be denied—is US national security. The one thing I can never forgive the current Republican Party for is giving Trump a pass on espionage and treason, and making our country—and our American soldiers—less safe. There are a million reasons to not vote for Trump, but of all the things that could impact our daily way of life, this is the most urgent (and what’s really wild is I don’t think it will matter much in the polls).
When I was growing up, Americans viewed national security as a huge concern. Coming out of the ashes of World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reagan and his Republican cronies—and nearly all of the country with them, I should add—lived in fear of the Russians, of nuclear war, of annihilation and destruction at the hands of our enemies. The defense budget exploded to become the largest part of the national budget. The men and women fighting in our armed forces were elevated as heroes and saviors of our American Way of Life. Anybody who dared to help or assist our enemies was deemed a traitor, and we put them in prison. Sometimes we even executed them. Through Reagan and Bush and George W. Bush and even through the Obama years, Republicans never wavered in these national security beliefs. Then came Donald Trump.
I watched my jaw hit the floor as Trump openly courted Russia for illegal assistance in defeating Hillary Clinton. Didn’t matter to Trump supporters. When both the House and Senate bipartisan committees found that Russia had actively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump supporters didn’t care. When Trump invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak into the Oval Office shortly after taking office in 2017, this meeting wasn’t reported in the United States, but photos came out in the Russian press that Trump had invited these men, from an enemy nation, into the Oval Office. Later it was revealed that Trump shared classified intelligence with the Russians about a planned Islamic State operation. When this came out in the press, Trump supporters didn’t care.
During Trump’s presidency and in the years following, a shocking number of confirmed stories came out about Trump personally committing acts that would land ordinary citizens in prison for years, or executed for treason. Trump met with Putin numerous times and asked the translators for their notes, which Trump then either chewed up and ate or tore into small pieces and threw in the toilet. Trump called the leader of Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelensky) and told him that in order to receive US monetary aid, Zelensky would have to provide him “dirt” on his political opponent, Joe Biden (Trump was impeached over this egregious and illegal act, but the Republican Senate refused to convict him). Trump shared top-secret information with guests at Mar-A-Lago (a place that had been infiltrated by Russian spies). Trump took top-secret, classified documents with him after he left office and (this is the crime) refused to give them back. Possession of just one sheet from any of these top-secret documents would land a soldier or average citizen in prison for years, but Trump was allowed to slow-walk the prosecution, appoint the judge who would oversee his own case, and claim it was mere “lawfare” by his political opponents that he was charged with espionage. (I’m literally cutting out about a hundred other treasonous things that Trump did, because this piece is already getting LONG….)
Reagan and his national security government officials would be rolling over in their graves. The founding fathers of the United States would have executed Trump before sunrise on January 7, 2020. Trump has endangered US soldiers, US citizens, and endangered delicately negotiated foreign policy that has kept the United States out of nuclear war for decades. Any other citizen who did what Trump did would be immediately jailed. Any Democrat who did these things would be immediately executed. And yet, for the supporters of Donald Trump, it’s all okay. It’s just fine with them. He can do whatever he wants.
The Republicans of the old days fought for…nothing. Their most essential beliefs of national security—tossed into the trash. The entire Republican Party gave up their most core beliefs, given to one man with an extremely dodgy relationship with our adversaries. Watching elderly Trump supporters wear shirts that say “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” literally blew my mind. I was never a Reagan Republican, but watching these people literally give up their most core beliefs about national security has broken me, because national security matters to me to—as an American. What the hell happened to these people? Donald J. Trump is what happened to these people.
And here we are, on the eve before another national election with Donald Trump as the candidate for the Republican Party. It doesn’t matter to his most ardent supporters that he’s been charged with 34 felonies, is awaiting trial for dozens more (including espionage charges), and is awaiting sentencing for prison time should he lose the election (I believe, as many do, that the only reason Trump is running for president again is to pardon himself of his many crimes). It doesn’t matter to his supporters that he has used incredibly ugly and hateful and sexist language to describe his opponent, Kamala Harris. It doesn’t matter to his supporters that he has proposed some of the dumbest, unscientific, ill-advised plans for his next term in office. They’re all in. They have chosen the cult of Trump over their country.
The whole thing has just about broken me. I’m not really sure what happened to the America I knew, or the good, decent Republicans I used to know. Perhaps it’s always been like this, and Trump has just drawn these attitudes out into the open.
Tomorrow we’ll find out if America still wants adults at the table making intelligent decisions based on experience, science, and a progressive look into the future. Or perhaps America wants a former game show host, six-time-bankrupt “businessman,” and aggressively uncurious 78-year old man who wears bronzer makeup, puts lifts in his shoes, slurs his words, talks about a professional golfer’s penis size, pretends to jerk off a microphone, and airs personal grievances in an echo chamber filled with people who think just like him. The fact that it’s such a close race boggles my mind. Trump is no more qualified to lead a country than he is to sit in a corner of the food court at the mall, yelling crazy Fox News stories to any poor soul within earshot. He’s the literal representation of everyone’s “crazy uncle.” It hurts my heart that America has fallen this far. Donald Trump, showbiz grifter, loudmouth conman, bullshitter extraordinaire, shouldn’t even be considered for any position in government, much less the president of the entire country. Tomorrow, America will decide its future, and the repercussions of what happens tomorrow will decide the rest of our lives.
For my Republican friends, I’ve heard all your excuses. I’ve heard all your justifications. I’ve heard you parrot stories you heard on Fox News that make you think you’re right. I’ve heard all your “whataboutisms.” I still love and treasure a lot of you, bless your hearts, but your vision of what America should be is not the same as mine. I think we’re better than Donald Trump. I voted for Kamala Harris. I voted for a better vision of the future for this great country, not some bleak vision of America’s past. I urge all of my friends to exercise your right to vote. Tonight, I am “nauseatingly optimistic” that Kamala Harris will be the next president. But everybody has to get out there tomorrow and vote.
Tomorrow, we will have a better idea about the fate of the nation. For me, personally, I’d like to think about healing this broken heart of mine. I’d like to still believe in the greatness of what this country can be. And Donald Trump isn’t it.
