Dumbfounded No More

I have been dumbfounded since Trump’s re-election.  (Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “lacking the power of human speech”)  For an erstwhile writer, this is profoundly dismaying.  But I have literally been unable to conjure any words or images that could grasp and express how I experience this unprecedented calamity that has befallen us all.  And with each additional stupefying blow to all that we hold holy, my incapacity to speak about how I feel only deepened.

Until yesterday.  I finally came upon a metaphor that, for me, is a nearly perfect image of our predicament: we are all now living with an abusive husband.

And like many who are battered by an out-of-control, domineering husband, we don’t have anywhere else to live.  And so we are captive to violent outbursts of his smashing the furniture, attacking our physical wellbeing, snatching all the money, emotionally humiliating us, making insanely irrational decisions, demolishing our family harmony, alienating neighbors, bullying those weaker, savaging perceived slights, and creating deep fear that our future holds nothing but more of the same fearful abuse.  A sick monster rules the house, full of rage and revenge, devoid of any scintilla of ethics or decency.   

Now that I know who Donald Trump is to me and to you, I will waste few words on describing or lamenting his psychopathic qualities and his despicable decisions as he goes about demolishing the most precious underpinning of our society, hour after hour.  Far wiser minds than  mine have been doing that definitively for many months during my own dumbfounded silence.

My attention now turns to how we collectively blunt the worst effects of his dry-drunk rampage.  And how we put in place bulwarks that might begin to restore whatever exceptionalism America has claimed, deserved, and demonstrated for several centuries now.

Prioritizing our effort is critical.  As just noted, it is a complete waste of time and effort to lambaste Trump for who he is and what he does and doesn’t do.  He was trained from childhood to be a sick and brilliant practitioner of self-aggrandizement.  Any inborn impulses of conscience and morals were cynically erased from him as a youngster by his racist slumlord of a father, and he has become successfully power-mad in pursuing nothing but his own gratification ever since.  Nothing—nothing—will ever change that.  

I would even dare to say he is no longer responsible for his hopelessly despicable lack of character; he is simply what you get if your father smothers in the cradle whatever gene for human decency you were born with.  He cannot possibly ever resurrect it within himself.

No, our contempt and most ferocious resistance must be reserved for those other elected officials who, in full adulthood, freely are choosing to smother their own personal consciences and morals.  I am talking about the Republican members of Congress who cluster discreetly in the cloakroom, aghast at him, to shake their heads in disbelief and mutter their disgust for Trump’s outrageous decisions. They abhor his usurping their powers granted by the Constitution, his choices of insanely incompetent Cabinet officers, his decisions to wreak havoc on the world economy, and whatever else he does hour by hour to destroy their stature and threaten their re-election. 

Yes, they marvel every day at how awful he is…and then slip back out on the floor of the House and the Senate to find their seat, slide low to duck behind their desk, and raise a quivering hand in favor of whatever Trump is demanding them to choke down next. Mature adults, pathetically trashing both their personal integrity and the sacred trust invested in them by their constituents.  

Donald Trump told the world what he would be doing.  It’s all spelled out in the 996 pages of “2025”.  But these Republicans in Congress never told voters that they would be so cowardly as to let Trump and a bunch of cronies run roughshod over them and you and me.  Heck, they even took an oath—remember when an oath meant something?—to uphold the Constitution that they now reprehensively ignore at Trump’s insistence, in fear that honoring their oath will cost them their job. 

Well, their jobs are toast no matter what, if we get it right.  I see three places to focus our attention, effort, and money in the days ahead:

1.         Mounting a relentless public /media campaign to call out the cowardly co-conspiracy of cooperation with Trump by the Republicans in Congress, between now and the midterm elections.  I don’t want them to stand up to Trump at this point; let them remain feckless.  As their constituents come fully to comprehend their inexcusable failure to truly represent them by quaking in their boots at Trump’s threats to primary them, they will be “flipped” out of their seats in 2026.  Those Republicans will come—too late—to realize that they should have feared the voters more than Trump, as they watch their Democrat replacements reassert Congressional powers in support of America’s Constitution and against further Trumpian outrages. 

2.        Sending all the money we can possibly afford, and then some, to the front-line forces like ACLU and The Brennan Center and others who are representing us and Trump’s targets of revenge and the Constitution in courtrooms all across the country.  They are working skillfully to overturn Trump’s most egregiously power-mad decisions and actions, and without them out there for us, we are truly lost.

3.        Turning out to participate in Town Meetings wherever and whenever they are happening. These gatherings matter not because the numbers of attendees will mean anything to Trump, but because they generate mutually-reinforcing energy among us as we jointly resist the coup, lest we become divided and conquered. They matter because they will lead, district by district and state by state, to the downfall of the individual quisling Republican members of Congress whose specific complicity will be spelled out and publicized at each and every such gathering.   

I know there are so many more things that we might be doing, but I am very persuaded that it would be folly to spread ourselves too thin. If none of these three appeal to you, please do find something else--but not more than just a couple of points of intervention to lean into. If we react to everything and try to do everything, the endless tsunami of outrages that Trump drowns us in day by day will continue to mystify us, stymie us, even (dare I say) dumbfound us.

I sincerely thank those of you who have contacted me over the past few months and asked why I’ve not been writing much.  Some were concerned for my health, or wondered if I had retired from writing.  Nope.  Now you know why.  Just plain dumbfounded.  But now you also know you’ve stirred me out of my stupor, and for that I’m profoundly grateful.  We’ve never lived a moment in our lives when being fully engaged with healing the affairs of humankind is more critical.