This post has been a long time coming. There is a certain level of stress that comes with writing something that is not related directly to pop culture. When writing about politics or the political climate, the anxiety inside me rises. When Donald J. Trump was elected (debatable) President of the United States of America, writing about him meant developing a thicker skin.
A week ago, Trump tweeted the following:
“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you”
—Donald J. Trump
The Forty-Fifth President of the United States is an idiot. An absolute dummy. A whole fool. There are a few more colorful words to describe him but those shall suffice. Every single day since Trump's election, minorities and the marginalized in this country have been clenched so tight. Well, those of us who didn’t put him in office, that is. Every single day, he uses Twitter to issue what he thinks are directives. Tweets are not policy, by the way. Aside from the pure homophobia and hatred in these tweets (which we will get to), the Pentagon had no idea this was going to happen. The military chiefs were taken completely off guard by the announcement. There were also reports that they were worried about what he was going to say because the delay between his first and second tweet were so long.
A study done in 2014 out of the Williams Institute estimates that there are about 15,500 active duty transgender members of the military. If you would like to read the study, you can click the hyperlink. The message by Trump and his administration is clear and significant. Trump and his merry band of bigots do not see trans people as human. The same way he refuses to realize that Muslim is not a race. The same way he refuses to realize he is President of the United States and not solely the president of the bigoted racist, xenophobic, homophobic, white people who put him in office. Before you begin typing fast, here is the now infamous graph of voters by race:
The President of the United States called trans people "a burden." Trump, a man who has never held a political position, called trans people a burden. Trump, a man who could not ascertain the significance of the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers if you held them in front of him, called trans people a burden. Trump, a man who dodged the draft, called trans people a burden. Let me repeat that. Trump, a man who is a draft dodger, called trans people a burden. Trump, who I am willing to bet money, could not name the various branches of the military, called trans people a burden. A burden. Women and men who put their lives on the line so that he can be free to spew his stupid are a burden to him. Transgender members of the military protect the American people every single day yet, the leader of their own country thinks they are a burden.
Members of the military do not give one iota about whether or not someone is trans when it comes down to business. When service members are in the field, their sexual identity is not a factor. When saving the lives of their fellow men and women, gender identity is not a factor. What matters, is that they all come home alive, that they leave no man or woman behind. You are painfully uneducated in what it takes to even serve in the military. They put their lives on the line for people they have never met, all for the protection and freedom of the American people. Trump calling trans people a burden, along with his administration saying LGBTQ people are not protected under civil rights acts, takes away from them the very freedom they fight for.
The Muslim ban, I believe, was the first ban that Trump worked to implement. Images of children in handcuffs, not because they were Muslim, but because of their names and that they were brown, were splattered all over the news. Attorneys were in airports drafting writs of habeas corpus while the world watched with bated breath. I cried at the image of the attorneys running down the steps of a court in New York when a judge ruled the ban unconstitutional. Contrary to the message by Trump and his administration, you cannot tell if a person is Muslim by looking at them. After the Muslim ban, it was only a matter of time before he came for the Hispanic and Latino community by demanding a wall be built around Mexico.
After his chants of “build that wall” and attempting to ban Muslims, it was only a matter of time before he set his sights on the LGBTQ community. And, quiet as it’s kept, he will come for black people soon enough. Hell, he already thinks Chicago and inner cities are the epicenter of black struggle. He also idolizes Andrew Jackson. A quick Google search can help with why that is an issue. There was a week, a month or so ago, where every evening at five o’clock, some insane thing regarding this administration happened. The country could literally set their clocks by it. This past week reminded me of that. There seems to be only one question that can be asked nowadays: What in the entire hell is going on?
This country will not be able to continue going on the way it has been. We are sitting on a powder keg. There was a time when Americans could wake up in the morning and not worry about the official POTUS Twitter account and the tweets it posted. There was a time when the news did not escalate the anxiety of a nation. There was a time when I could watch the news without groaning. That was before the United States of America elected The Mad King. The rhetoric spewed by Trump is dangerous, and the whole world is watching the results in real time. From the Trump Administration stating that federal civil rights laws don’t apply to the LGBTQ community, to attempting to remove health care from millions of people, the country is facing an unprecedented time.
The nation that was once looked at as an elite world power, has a petulant child at the helm. I understand that historically we have survived the worst as a nation. There is no comfort in that statement. That does not make sleeping at night any easier. Minorities and the marginalized catch hell and constantly pay for the sins of a nation. To quote William Shakespeare, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
