But where is the evidence–not the belief, but the evidence–that anyone on the white, political right who has agreed to the contract is now being excluded from participating in it? Getting in a huff about Starbucks holiday decor doesn’t count.
Such was the magic number Trump hoped to shake out of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, on January 2, 2021, during a now infamous, hour-long plus phone call. Although the conversation wandered very far and very, very wide, the President always came back to either that particular, peculiar figure or one quite like it.
Our blip of a moment in history may instead be more frequently recalled for a worldwide pandemic, for the resulting number of dead, for the speed in which a vaccine was developed, and as a perfect, pithy example of the ever resurgent power of propaganda.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
At the height of his authority, in addition to presiding over county jails and the official deputies of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Joe commands 36 different all-volunteer posse groups.
Telling without telling, the cashout stays in the just beyond, in the future conditional. We never find out exactly what Lady Gaga did. That’s okay, actually. It’s better that way, even.
To wrestle with this, and as a nation wrestle we must, an unfamiliar, yet not unknown, American wilderness awaits our brave journey, where our national ambivalence remains unsettled and volatile. It is difficult to imagine a reckoning in this American landscape, so scarred by division, fundamental difference, and worldview.
Come the day after, little of what exhausted and demoralized you has changed. Trump is going, going, we think, gone: but with 71 million, almost half of the country’s votes stuffed in his pockets. The racism, nativism, misogyny, and the authoritarian style he represented live on. These folks probably don’t even need to go underground.
“Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper.” James Baldwin
Thanks to the horrific associations they conjure, any floodlit, outdoor, nighttime political rally can bring on a reflexive chill. To frighten? And by frightening, impress? Was that the message behind Amy Coney Barrett’s nighttime gathering of Republican conspirators in a strange, after hours Supreme Court swearing in ceremony? Why the inverse mimicry of an earlier, afternoon super spreader event?
