For a man so inept he bankrupted casinos in Atlantic City, it turns out Donald Trump is an adept gambler. In my Oct. 29 column, I framed the election by writing: “The Trump campaign is premised on a risky bet. It is a wager that Americans are secretly as vicious, vulgar and vile as Trump himself.”
Sadly, the joker hit the jackpot and now America’s future looks as bleak as three lemons on a slot machine in the now imploded Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. If you want a sneak preview of what’s to come for our country, enjoy the demolition of Trump Plaza in 2014.
It’s taken more than a week to write this piece. I had the words — but my hands refused to type them. I’m only human and I needed some time to mourn the probable death of my country. We know what’s coming and there are few guardrails, and even fewer Republicans, with the character to stop Trump’s worst impulses.
Republicans now control the presidency, the House, the Senate and the hijacked Supreme Court that has given Trump criminal immunity. Really, all that stands in the way of autocracy are GOP Senators, thus I strongly suggest you renew your passport.
As our nation falls into the abyss, at least we can be comforted while Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) expresses her deep “concern” before voting to lop off another piece of America. Perhaps, she will dry her crocodile tears with remnants of our shredded Constitution.
On Election Day, I predicted Kamala Harris would win. I did so not due to overconfidence. I simply refused to believe a majority of voters were nihilistic enough to choose the most odious man in America to lead us, particularly amid credible warnings of impending fascism and religious fanaticism.
Tragically, a stew of misinformed and malevolent voters failed their country, and I suspect they will live to regret the worst mistake of their lives. They will wistfully look back and realize how good they had it, before they handed over the White House keys to a mentally unstable madman with wicked intentions.
The Parade of Regret’s first grand marshals are pro-Palestinian voters who thought they’d be cute and punish Harris by voting for Trump, threatening to do so, or choosing a useless third-party candidate as a protest vote.
They helped elect Trump who rewarded their loyalty by nominating former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be Israel’s Ambassador. I hope they enjoy Huckabee’s views:
"There is no such thing as the West Bank — it's Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as settlements — they're communities, they're neighborhoods, they're cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
In his slick bait-and-switch campaign, Trump cynically deployed his Lebanese son in law, Massad Boulos, to coax gullible Arabs in Michigan into voting for the former President.
Layla Elabed, a founder of the pro-Palestinian group Uncommitted, initially refused to endorse Harris, and only did so weeks before the election. Now she and her movement are left to pick up the shattered pieces, which includes legitimate concern Trump will encourage Israel to annex Gaza and the West Bank.
“Trump’s team lied to a community in anger and despair?” she asked ironically. “Isn’t that his whole thing?”
Rattled by the situation, Abbas Alaweih, another "Uncommitted" leader, appeared on CNN and pathetically begged President Biden to save Palestinians from the nightmare that surely awaits them. Maybe Abbas should have thought about that before smearing Biden and Harris with “Genocide Joe” chants at campaign events?
Folks like Abbas demanded the river and the sea, and their hubris likely got Palestinians a craggily patch of desert on a reservation, while Jared Kushner builds gaudy hotels on Gaza’s lovely waterfront.
Arabs suckered by Trump are surely the first in a long line of constituencies to get screwed, as if they were Trump contractors. I’m sure Latinos who voted for Trump will get a rude awakening when they are repeatedly pulled over in traffic by police officers asking to see their papers. If they are accidentally placed in a miserable camp by Stephen Miller and deported, don’t come crying to me.
Same goes for struggling families who voted for Trump and soon may realize they are on the hook for up to $4,000 a year to pay for Trump’s tariffs. It’s not like top economists didn’t try to warn them. As far as I’m concerned, they can get third jobs to make ends meet and pawn their wedding rings to survive. Perhaps, that might persuade them to next time be good citizens and stay informed before casting a vote for fascism.
The most delicious reckoning will surely be the downfall of Elon Musk. He fancies himself a genius yet isn’t smart enough to realize there is no room for two suns in Trump’s paranoid universe. He will be fortunate if he leaves Trump’s orbit without being deported for his one-time “illegal alien” immigration status, as well as having his assets seized by the federal government. No doubt Attorney General Matt Gaetz won’t have any trouble “trumping” up a charge, when instructed to do so.
Authoritarian leaders like to consolidate power by showing their subjects that they are strong and stand alone on a pedestal. There would be no more effective way of sending that chilling message to the American people than kneecapping Musk in broad daylight.
America now anxiously waits for the installment of sundry hacks and quacks into cabinet positions. The picks have been so stunningly awful, that I praised the selection of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. The bar is so low that I now cheer for repellent sycophants who are at least somewhat sane.
Sadly, we can no longer take decency, patriotism or sanity for granted in this incoming monstrosity of an administration. Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a bizarre vaccine skeptic, who had his cerebral cortex mauled by a brain worm, to lead Health and Human Services. If you forgot Trump caused 40% more COVID deaths than necessary in 2020, wait until Kennedy brings back measles, smallpox and polio.
Who knew Americans were so nostalgic for the triumphant return of the iron lung?
We can’t touch upon every appalling cabinet pick, for that would be like swatting flies in a manure field. However, some are so atrociously problematic their nomination must be addressed.
Secretary of Defense nominee, Pete Hegseth, is a fanatical Christian culture warrior and Fox News host who was the subject of a 2017 sexual assault probe. He has long been associated with the “TheoBros,” a group of Christian Reconstructionists who advocate for the imposition of biblical law in American governance, according to an investigation by Mother Jones. Reconstructionists often support stoning LGBTQ people to death.
In 2022, he co-authored “Battle for the American Mind,” a book that rails against “left-wing” education and advocates for parents to take up arms against progressive thought in schools. He has also publicly praised and supported Doug Wilson, the leading figure of the Reconstructionist movement, whose views include the belief that women should not have the right to vote and that religious minorities, including Muslims, should be assimilated or marginalized.
Hegseth’s alarming tattoo choices include symbols connected to the Christian Crusades and the phrase “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”). His ink raises red flags as these symbols, historically linked to religious violence, are part of a larger narrative embraced by the TheoBros that glorifies the violent imposition of religious ideals.
Seriously, is this really the dude we want in charge of nuclear submarines and F-35s?
Former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) was picked to be Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence (DNI) and will be tasked with overseeing 18 spy agencies. She’s long been considered a Russian stooge, and I personally consider her a dire national security threat. Trump might as well have placed Vladimir Putin himself at the helm of our security services. If America was any more fucked, we’d have to change our name to Ukraine.
Then there is former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who Trump picked to be America’s top cop at the Department of Justice. He was under investigation for child sex trafficking. The House of Representatives was supposed to release an ethics investigation of Gaetz this week. Unfortunately, the report was buried at the behest of Republican Speaker Mike Jones (R-LA), aka “America’s Fakest Christian.” As a writer whose name I can’t recall remarked online, “When Q-Anon said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice, this isn’t what we thought they meant.”
I’d like to take a moment to thank Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They were put in a difficult situation and performed remarkably well. We owe them our thanks and gratitude.
Unfortunately, Biden did not resign soon enough and the ticket was saddled by his paltry 40% approval rating. The Democratic ticket also couldn’t overcome the albatross of only 28% of voters saying the country was headed in the right direction.
We must also acknowledge that social issues played a role in Harris’ defeat. The GOP spent at least $215 million on network TV ads cruelly attacking transgender people. The ads revived five-year-old remarks of Harris expressing support for tax-funded sex change surgeries for prison inmates. The tagline: “Harris is for They/Them and Trump is for Us.”
The nation’s largest LGBTQ organizations had Biden’s entire term to educate Americans on transgender issues, knowing they would be used as a sledgehammer in 2024. Their top executives make between a half million and one million dollars per year, allegedly for their indispensable skillset.
Instead of earning their money, they let conservatives seize the initiative and dominate the discussion. They dropped a controversial issue in Harris’ lap a few months before Election Day and seemingly did a bare minimum to help her defuse the issue.
If this was a sports team that failed on such a spectacular scale, the coach would surely be canned. Likewise, heads should roll at some of our largest LGBTQ organizations, and they should be replaced by leaders who have the public relations savvy to educate the American people and win this fight. To keep the same people in place, who will surely double down on their ineffective arguments and failed rhetoric, is a recipe for future defeat.
Finally, the corruption of social media sites is a key reason we lost the election. In the same way conservatives outflanked the left on talk radio, leading to House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994, right wing trolls now dominate the Internet. Conservative messages are reaching hundreds of millions of people, while liberal messages are regularly shadow banned by leading social media companies.
We can come up with the most brilliant messages, but if no one hears them, how can we win national elections? That’s one reason I quit the right-wing cesspool known as Twitter this week, and like more than one million Americans, I dumped Twitter, now X, and switched to Blue Sky. Please consider following me, when you have a moment. Until liberal billionaires create alternative sites to replace Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, we will be at a decisive disadvantage in the messaging war.
I’d like to say this is a time for healing, but we all know that’s not true. The wounds will only deepen as the country we love rapidly falls into an abyss. It is up to us to fight to save what can be salvageable and rebuild from the rubble of an America that is almost certain to ignominiously crash to earth like Trump Plaza.
Wayne Besen is the executive director of Delray Beach-based LGBTQ nonprofit organization Truth Wins Out. He is the former spokesperson of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization.
