Home of the free, or the GOP?
It's Memorial Day in America- what will YOU do?
As I walked up Broadway in SoHo on Saturday, a flotilla of Trump voters highjacked the street. To taunt and torture the humanly decent among us. Tourists gawked. New Yorkers seethed.
To my readers in London, Paris, and other civilized city settings, my apologies for inflicting on you the evil that lives here. The video below is a visual to which Americans have become tragically accustomed, since Trump’s election in November 2016.
Photo credit: This video was taken by moi. This past Saturday afternoon in SoHo, on Broadway at Prince Street.
In this clip, the trucks are blaring “Thank God we’re saying bye to Joe,” likely a reference to President Biden’s recent tragic health announcement.
And after I recorded it, the Trumper trucks began blasting Bing Crosby’s “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas”. My guess is that this references Congress’ passage this week of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Which, if now also passed in the U.S. Senate, will among other things, end $700 million in Medicaid and remove $280 billion from the food stamps program.
Much like Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (which is not an actual department of the government), this bill will slash and burn longstanding infrastructure- allegedly in an effort to fix the national debt deficits. It will cut healthcare and remove support for those in poverty, and will not encourage wealth growth for everyday people in our country. This bill will instead add an estimated $3.3 trillion to the U.S. federal deficits, over the next ten years.
And it will instead, by design, redistribute money from the poor to the rich.
For the Republican voters who voted for this regime in November 2024, the cruelty has always been the point. It is the feeling, the strategy, that lives in their heads and “hearts”. Also important to remember is that most GOP voters are not driving Trump trucks through SoHo on a Saturday.
Instead many live among us, and work in lucrative fields. They are very “successful”; money in the bank, personal property owned (often multiple). Their families already have everything. Yet they dig in on their support of this Republican regime, since they imagine for themselves a brand new tax break. For which they will apparently do anything.
So today, on Memorial Day, let’s take a long hard look around at the Republicans in our own backyard, who- eyes wide open- voted for this. Voted for all of this. And call them what they are: instruments of human indecency. Traitors to our country. Destroyers of our democracy.
To quote
in his piece Donald Trump is an Insult to Those Who Died Serving This Nation:Picture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met. Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire; shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor; jumping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of explosions, crouched in the blazing sun within the crosshairs of a sniper perched 500 meters away; withering away from malnutrition in anonymity and solitude…
Now imagine telling those brave servicemen and women just before they gave their very lives for this nation, that it would one day be placed in the hands of a treasonous felon with abject disregard for the laws of this land; a man lacking a single noble impulse or patriotic thought…
Imagine breaking the news to those beautiful souls facing certain death, that five or twenty or sixty years later, America would be helmed by a billionaire insurrectionist who would ridicule their bravery; make a mockery of their sacrifice; and place those who followed them in harm’s way, by allowing a disgraced TV personality to oversee them…
We have failed our veterans by squandering their service and wasting their sacrifice.
Donald Trump’s traitorous presidency, his undeserved occupation of the Oval Office, and his very repugnant presence in the highest seat of power in America are all a massive middle finger to those we honor on Memorial Day who died so that we could endure.
And whether on Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day or Independence Day, or any day we wake up with such a small, cowardly, petty disgrace of a man leading this nation, we should be livid at the insult he is to those who truly loved and love America, we should grieve our part in the mockery that is being made of their sacrifice, and we should openly and loudly stand in opposition to him as a way of properly honoring them.
On this day of national recognition, let’s honor the courage of those who came before us- by prevailing against the evil forces that now operate existentially against us.
They do not sit on foreign shores. Instead they conquer us daily- on our own soil.
The greatest threat we now face lives right here. We can see it, in them, and all around us.