Burn Notice

By Sue Bergeron

February 13: On the eve of the second impeachment decision of the worst president ever to occupy the Oval Office (I can’t even believe I’m saying “second” next to impeachment here) I thought I’d share a few thoughts. Recently, certain things have been taking up space rent-free in my weary head. Now that Joe has won the election I see his agenda unfolding in a smooth and methodical way I could never have imagined, considering all the sand the Trump administration threw into the gears during the transition. I often revisit my early days inside the Biden campaign. 

As the election approached I suffered from terrible anxiety. I feared that if the Teflon Don pulled off what I feared was coming---what actually did just happen---he would be successful in becoming our country’s first dictator. His MAGA army would succeed in starting a Second Civil War and attain the resultant secession they were itching for. Fortunately, the insurrection at our citadel of freedom was thwarted and the government was not successfully overthrown. 

One guy in particular, a Trump supporter in his 80’s who lives in a tiny suburban bungalow, still haunts me. Readers may remember him from a March “Report from Rhode Island” I submitted. I was then running for Delegate from RI for Joe Biden, just before the pandemic exploded on the East Coast. Still canvassing door to door, in the bitter winds of late winter, I had the misfortune to knock on this devil’s door. Bedecked in full Biden gear, as I came up his walkway he swung open his front door and let loose with a barrage of vitriol that nearly sent me flying backwards. “What’s this all about!?” He bellowed at me, appalled at my Biden gear. He was listed as an Independent. I barely got a word out before he nearly hit me with the storm door, glowered at me and yelled in my face. “I’ve been a lifelong Democrat until what you people did down there in Washington last year! It’s a disgrace! I swear I’ll never vote Democrat ever again!” A hard man, he started on a rant about the immorality of impeaching Donald Trump and the corrupt and unfair treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh. Then he unloaded on Joe Biden, calling him a corrupt politician, a thief and a liar. That’s when I lost it. I’d recently been reading Joe’s memoir “Promise Me, Dad”. The indignity of this guy repeating the Trump-Fox-MAGA conspiracy loop about Biden, a man who has spent almost fifty years serving this country so honorably, was just too much for me to take. I began to cry, and through the tears I was astonished to see a little white haired lady in a wheelchair, swaddled in a blanket, wheeling herself out from behind this maniac. She reached her hand out to me from behind him and said, “I’ll sign your papers.” But he pushed her back and shouted “No! Get back.” I quickly fled, in fear for the woman.

I often think back on that horrible incident with the man who mistreated his wife and me so badly, because he, like so many millions of others have been hypnotized by Trump and his propaganda machine. I wonder, now that Joe has been elected, if he can see that Biden is not a corrupt politician and that the Trump Channel is just an arm of the biggest liar of all time. The pandemic was just beginning when we had our encounter. Since then almost 500,000 people have died. We also learned since then about the phone conversation that took place between Bob Woodward and Trump, wherein the former president admitted he was downplaying how serious the pandemic really was after telling the American people it was a hoax. We thought that was The Big Lie. Has that effected this man’s thinking

When Trump wouldn’t concede the election I thought about the man again. Has he finally given up on Trump yet? I mused about what it must be like at his dinner table. He, sitting there, angrily shoveling in his Hungry Man TV dinner in front of Lou Dobbs screaming about the “Chinese Virus” every night, and she, the poor abused wife bent over her Cup O’ Soup, silently enduring it. Or had the woman been able to turn her hard man around? ---gently pointing out how he’d been mistaken about Joe? How did she end up in that wheelchair, anyway? Maybe the man had been a good person in another time, devoted to a disabled woman all her life, back when he was a Democrat with ethics and morals. I know it’s not wise to judge. I considered going back there. Sometimes I pondered the idea of stuffing a copy of “Promise Me, Dad” in their mailbox. But who would I address it to? ---the man or the woman? He might just throw it in the trash. I really did want to talk to him again, but at the end of the day I figured he was the type to call the police on me. After all, with Trump’s guys it’s all about LAW & ORDER, right

Now I see there is no redemption for the hardcore Trump Cultist. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think back to the early days when I joined Indivisible and attended community organizing workshops in an effort to learn how to begin the long hard job of ousting Trump (immediately after his election). Packed in an overheated high school classroom full of angry protesters against Trump (mostly Sanders people) we were brainstorming for ideas how to win back the Dems and “Obama-Trump” voters in the next election. There was a lot of hostility toward the Trump voters. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t be nice to them!” one woman yelled out angrily. The crowd cheered, clapped, heads nodded, the old wooden desks rumbled on the floorboards. I raised my hand and stood up. “Now wait a minute, wait a minute. Think about this: We can’t just disenfranchise all those Trump voters. Many didn’t realize who he was. They must surely feel some buyer’s remorse by now. Or they soon will. We can’t attack his voters. We must instead concentrate on attacking Trump and his policies. His voters will gradually come to see through his lies and come back to us. It serves no purpose to spread this kind of hate.” Well, that went over like a turd in a swimming pool at a backyard party. The room went quiet with sour faces all around. Then there was grumbling. As I attempted to network after the meeting, attendees brushed past me as if I were wearing a radioactive biohazard suit instead of the Indivisible jacket I proudly wore that day

Those people could see something evil and rooted deeply into our body politic that I was just too much of a cock-eyed optimist to be able to see four years ago. It makes me so very sad. Watching the “Fight Club Documentary” the Trump defense team presented during Friday’s impeachment trial---actually had the opposite effect on me of what they were aiming for. I probably had seen most of the truncated clips they spliced together in their entirety when they originally aired and I remembered the full context of most of them. It just angered me that Van DerVeen would attempt to conflate what Trump was doing with what any of those people were saying. It started reminding me of my early Trump protest days and got me thinking about why I protested him in the first place. I remember this: It was always peaceful; even rallies with thousands of protesters stayed peaceful. Seeing how difficult it has been to convince the very people who were targeted by the mob Trump sent, to protect our nation from further harm, I now see that I really have been naïve. They will never bend. They will never return.

I had thought of sending the little old lady in the wheel chair a letter and asking if she was OK. I might ask what she thought about Joe getting elected. And then I’d caution her to burn the letter in their wood stove before her Hungry Man could find it. For both of our sake’s.