Category Archives: Political

Soul on ICE

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When I first heard of Renee Good’s death, I immediately thought of a conversation I’d had with my brother a couple of months ago. “Stay away from ICE,” he’d warned as we talked about Trump’s escalating war on immigrants. Not because my brother agreed with the crackdown, but because he feared for my safety.

I had been telling him about training as a volunteer legal observer to document ICE activity in my county. Good was also a volunteer legal observer, though she was living in what has become a war zone under siege by Trump’s private paramilitary force while I live in a quiet suburb just north of San Francisco that so far has seen almost no ICE activity.

I identified with Good in another way, too. When I saw the New York Times’s analysis of bystander video that captured the incident, my first thought was that aside from stopping sideways in the middle of the road, Good was carefully maneuvering her car exactly as I do in every busy parking lot I’ve ever been in—slowly inching out, letting people pass, trying hard not to hit anyone, exiting a tight spot as safely as possible.

So much for safety. Now a mother who had only recently dropped her six-year-old off at school, then stopped because her neighbors were in distress, is dead and being demonized by Trump and his enablers despite widespread evidence that Renee Good posed no threat to ICE agents.

My husband’s cousin in Minnesota’s Twin Cities has volunteered for years with refugee resettlement. He reports,

What’s happening here is unbelievable. This is like late 1930s Europe. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are afraid to leave their homes. Restaurants have closed temporarily to discourage ICE raids and to keep customers and employees safe. Some schools have closed temporarily to prevent confrontations with ICE as students are picked up at the end of the school day. People are organizing grocery shopping runs for immigrants who are “sheltering in place.”

The senseless killing of Renee Nicole Good has really solidified the resistance to ICE here. It is truly sad that every day about 60 to 80 people are hauled off to the Minneapolis airport and flown to out-of-state detention centers. My mission is to keep the immigrants who I know off of those planes . . . there is no end in sight to this madness. The number of ICE agents in Minnesota is increasing from 2000 to 3000 so I expect a lot more trouble. It’s like a war between the executive branch of the federal government and one resistant state in the middle of the country that refuses to be bullied.

Refusing to be bullied is the right thing to do, and the best way to put an end to terror. It is also easier said than done, particularly when the bully is not some middle-school kid but the head of a vast and deadly power apparatus with many willing enablers. The cruelty and the chilling effect are the point.

I feel the chill, too. In truth, even though I am not remotely close to any active danger or hotspots, I am scared, and also relieved that I’ve only gotten one text from the Rapid Response Network. I have to fight my impulse to retreat, and strive to channel the spirit of resistance that has only strengthened Minnesotans in the face of real danger. I hope that owning up to my fear and relief paradoxically keeps me in a state of courage, even weak courage.

And so I show up intermittently at local demonstrations, donate money to grassroots organizations, contact my representatives in Congress who already speak out and vote the way I want them to. Standing at intersections with clever signs in the brilliant Californian sunshine while passing motorists honk their approval (except for the woman who yelled “Go Home”) feels mostly like a feel-good exercise of little consequence. But it’s not nothing, and sometimes enlivens my too-numb soul.

The other day I found inspiration in an unlikely place: a letter to the editor of my local paper by a gentleman named Igor Sill. I’ve read a lot of pieces urging hope, persistence, and a Never Give Up bravado. Mostly they make me feel chastised and ashamed of my despair and wish to retreat. Mr. Sill’s letter struck me differently:

As a new year emerges, there is a natural pause — a moment to reflect on what has endured and to look forward with intention. It is a time to measure not only what was gained or lost, but how we carried ourselves through uncertainty. None of us is tasked with fixing the entire world. Our responsibility is more attainable: to mend the portion within our reach. Any small act that helps another — relieving suffering, restoring dignity, steadying fear — matters immediately. In a turbulent world, one of the most powerful choices available to us is to remain present, do the right thing and show our spirit.

This distinction matters as 2026 begins. Optimism is the belief that the future will be better.

Hope is harder: the belief that we have a role in making it so. Optimism waits. Hope acts.

One of hope’s greatest adversaries is cynicism. Cynicism assumes bad faith and inevitable failure. It can feel sophisticated, even protective, but it quietly erodes engagement. A healthier posture is skepticism: the willingness to question without surrendering to despair. Skepticism keeps us alert; cynicism shuts us down.

We were reminded of that truth this past year through widely shared footage from Australia’s Bondi Beach, where a bystander ran toward danger during a violent attack rather than away from it. There was no plan and no guarantee of success — only courage that was improvised and deeply human.

Moments like this clarify something essential: hope does not originate in institutions alone. It emerges when individuals decide that disengagement is not an option their conscience will accept. Acts of unscripted courage are not anomalies. They echo an enduring truth: Meaning survives when people stay engaged. Hope does not deny hardship. It accepts it and insists that effort still matters.

Hope is not the belief that the future will be kinder; it is the decision to remain responsible for it, even when the outcome is uncertain. As a new year begins, that choice to stay engaged may be the most consequential one we make.

Less than three weeks ago, I said good riddance to 2025. The new year feels even worse. The brave people of Minnesota and Mr. Sill’s words help me resolve not to renounce my true feelings of fear, exhaustion, and despair, but to let them accompany me as I decide to remain responsible for the future, even when the outcome is uncertain. Effort still matters. Disengagement is not an option my conscience will accept.

Good Riddance

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Has it been only a year since the Times Square ball last dropped? It feels like a decade, one characterized more by wrecking balls both literal and figurative. To top off a hard year, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s 35-year-old daughter, succumbed to terminal cancer just yesterday, although not without leaving us the gift of her grace and her final essay.

But that heartbreak notwithstanding, at last it’s time to turn the page on 2025.

It’s been quite something perusing the commentary this year. Hope is necessary for carrying on, but it’s sometimes been hard to keep despair at bay. First came gentle encouragement to breathe, step back, take care of yourself, but not give up. Then, with apparently too many people following the first three but not the last pieces of advice, sterner exhortations about the treachery of disengagement emerged. Always, there was the cheer brought by brave resisters, small victories, federal judges not part of the US Supreme Court majority, and the good feelings of solidarity that came with the massive No Kings protests throughout the year. Many times, I found solace in schadenfreude, such as the end of the Trump/Musk bromance and MAGA infighting at this year’s Turning Point conference.

Then, after one too many tacky gilt pieces were affixed to the Oval Office and Trump and his enablers did everything in their power not only to strip healthcare but also food from millions of Americans, solid evidence emerged that the tide was turning. Following a promising string of special-election overperformance, in November, we saw stunning widespread electoral victories for Democrats (apparently still hated, but preferred). Finally, Trump’s “plummeting” poll numbers, which declined in infinitesimally tiny increments for months, fell below 40%. I find it alarming that anyone supports this regime, but still, I’ll take it. Just as I’ll take having complicated instead of merely contemptuous feelings toward Marjorie Taylor Green.

It’s been a hard year to sum up, to assess the damage while still finding reasons for optimism. Mainstream commentators are valiantly trying. Just last week in the New York Times, I read back-to-back opinion pieces. One, by UC Professor David G. Victor, began, “On its face, 2025 looks like a year of relentless backsliding in the fight against climate change.” You don’t say. Through some unconvincing jujitsu, Victor attempts to make a case for optimism. Commenters raked him over the coals, which are at least easier to come by with Trump’s avowed resurrection of the deservedly dying industry.

Nicholas Kristof was more honest in proving that he understood his year-end assignment of offering hope without delusion. In Which I Valiantly Try to Cheer You Up took the long view, acknowledging the massive damage wrought by the first year of Trump 2.0 but urging perspective that in the arc of human history, things aren’t so bad and will likely get better.

All in all, it seems everyone is ready to bid adieu to 2025. Although personally I experienced many joys this year—a new granddaughter, loving and happily married children, several nice trips, and the good fortune not to be in the direct line of fire for any of the atrocities befalling our country, I can’t wait to turn the page. Usually, I like to let the good feelings of the holidays linger after January 1, but this year we hurried to dismantle Christmas.

Into the recycling bin of history you go, 2025. Good riddance.

Onward to 2026!

The Cruelty is the Point

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“The problem,” said my friend, “is that Republicans are willing to let people die, and Democrats are not.”

You might think we had this conversation just a few days ago, after a group of eight Senate moderates brokered a deal with their Republican counterparts to end the government shutdown.

But my friend and I actually discussed this a good fifteen years ago, during another chapter in the long saga of asymmetrical political battle between Democrats, who believe that the purpose of government is to improve people’s lives, versus Republicans, who want to shrink government down small enough so it can be drowned in the bathtub, as anti-tax Republican Grover Norquist famously put it.

Here we are again. This time, starving government isn’t enough. Trump and his GOP enablers have literally been starving people, depriving 42 million of SNAP benefits. Trump wasted no time in exploiting the shutdown to further the rampage he’s enthusiastically executed from the jump of his second term, vowing to use it to “get rid of a lot of the things we didn’t want,” targeting, of course, “Democrat things.”

Apparently, one of those Democrat things is food.

Turns out, plenty of non-Democrats also need food. Who knew?

Unmoved by this reality, Trump refused to utilize an emergency fund expressly meant to feed people during crises, defied federal courts ordering him to do so, appealed their attempts to make him comply with the law not once but twice to the Supreme Court, and threatened to punish states who had made alternative arrangements to keep their residents from going hungry. As a New York Times reader commented, “The past few weeks have been eye-opening. I have never seen anyone work so hard to deny food to those who need help getting it. That will not be forgotten.”

The cruelty is the point. Whatever your feelings about how a few Democrats helped end the shutdown with a whimper instead of a bang, this essential truth remains.  Trump, showman that he is, has merely escalated a long-standing GOP tendency to hurt vulnerable people with his brazen relish for causing harm.

Before Trump was even re-elected, Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect whom Trump pretended not to know, said about federal workers, “We want to put them in trauma.” Right after the election, Trump rewarded Vought with the powerful directorship of the Office of Management and Budget. Many consider Vought, along with fellow-sadist Stephen Miller, to actually be calling the shots in Washington.

In February, DOGE head Elon Musk wielded a chainsaw signaling the destruction in store for federal workers soon after bragging about “feeding USAID through the woodchipper.” A recent New Yorker article cites a respected estimate that 600,000 people—two-thirds of them children—have already died since the demise of USAID.

For months, Trump and his cronies have been firing federal workers, terrorizing immigrant communities, slashing funding for programs that help ordinary people so billionaires can have bigger tax cuts, and blowing people to bits in international waters, apparently just to get their manly rocks off. But these guys aren’t just dicking around. They’re gleefully taking a wrecking ball to the economy, the rule of law, and, in the metaphor of the century, the East Wing of the White House:

Busy destroying things, blaming others, filing appeals, increasing and decreasing tariffs on a whim, and feasting on the empty praise of world leaders, Trump naturally couldn’t be expected to sit down with congressional leaders to address problems behind the shutdown, like hunger and skyrocketing healthcare costs. He did, however, find the time to brag about his new marble bathroom and 90,000 square-foot gilded ballroom, and to host a Great-Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago:

The grotesque optics only magnify the callous cruelty. Melania’s jacket from Trump 1.0 (at the top of this post) says it all: They really don’t care who gets hurt.

That’s the very problem my friend pointed out so long ago. Ezra Klein, commenting on what led Democrats to end the shutdown, said the same thing, but more nicely:

Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing . . . More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt.

Democrats did not succeed in getting Republicans to extend healthcare premium subsidies as a condition for ending the shutdown (if they had, as Ezra Klein and others have pointed out, they would have saved Republicans from themselves and taken Democrats’ best electoral issue off the table for the mid-terms). But they did succeed in elevating to prolonged national attention the fact that Republicans could care less about the well-being of ordinary Americans and are responsible for skyrocketing healthcare premiums. There’s a whole lot more that can and should be hung around Republicans’ necks, but this was the ticket, and it worked surprisingly well and quite probably for as long as it could. Republicans were never going to capitulate, and had the shutdown and the increasing suffering it caused continued, public opinion on who’s to blame would have switched on a dime from Republicans to Democrats. As it stands, Republicans own the shutdown, the escalating cost of living, the chaos, greed, and indifference to suffering. They own the cruelty.

That’s a message we can and should take all the way to the mid-terms. It’s time for Democrats to step away from the circular firing squad and get to work. We have lots more elections to win.

Signs of Solidarity

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There are so many horrors perpetrated by the Trump Administration, it can be difficult to choose which to focus on. Right now the hair-on-fire moment is Trump’s and his minions’ weaponization of government against everyone they dislike, including rich and powerful people like Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey. This is indeed an alarming escalation.

But the assault on the most vulnerable people also continues; the reign of terror visited upon immigrants may have dropped from the headlines, but not from reality. We’ve witnessed masked agents abducting brown people off the streets and sending them to foreign gulags, gardeners who have lived here for over 20 years chased down, citizens and legal residents detained, American-born children terrified they’ll come home to vanished parents after a day at school. The Guardian reports that immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in ICE detention. So much for prioritizing deporting “the worst of the worst.”

That’s why I’ve joined Signs of Solidarity (SoS), a campaign devised by Indivisible to help immigrants feel safe and welcome in our communities, to educate workers and their employers about their rights, and most importantly to communicate that we see and condemn what’s going on. As an SoS volunteer, I’ve been going around to local businesses offering free, public-facing signs in support of immigrants as well as signs designating a private space that ICE and other immigration enforcement can’t legally enter without a signed judicial warrant:

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Even when someone doesn’t want a sign because of a blanket policy against posting anything in their windows, they almost always appreciate the cause. One restaurant manager in a shopping center that doesn’t allow posting proudly put up a big flyer by the front door anyway. His neighbor, born in America but raised in Iran until the war there caused his parents to send him back to the US alone at the age of 14, was nervous about crossing his landlord, but prominently displayed a flyer on the inside counter. Customers standing in line while the cashier explained to me that she’d need to run it by the owners called out, “Thank you so much for what you’re doing.” One customer coming in for her treatment at a high-end beauty salon asked for signs to post in her own business a few towns over. A pizzeria owner, taping a sign to her window, handed me her staple gun saying, “Here, you’ll need this to make sure your other sign is secure on the outside bulletin board.”

I should say that my small town has not been a hotbed of immigration enforcement. I live in an affluent, mostly white community in one of the deepest blue counties in the country. Signs proclaiming “No Human is Illegal” bloom in people’s yards. The warm reception I’ve encountered is hardly surprising here. Possibly it would be different in a more conservative part of the country, particularly if business owners feared antagonizing a broader swath of their customer base than is likely here. There’s a natural tendency to not want to stick your neck out in dangerous times.

But if I, a mild-mannered, 70-year-old white citizen not the least bit in the direct line of fire when it comes to the more sadistic oppressions of the current administration, is unwilling to do something simple to stand up to the abuses of power all around us, then what hope do we have? We’ve seen how corporate leaders, media, universities, and law firms who capitulate to Trump only embolden him further.

I’ve been heartened by the conversations I’ve had, cheered by the growing number of signs popping up in windows downtown.

They help people feel less alone, less hopeless. They give people courage. The more we stand in solidarity, the sooner we can bring this nightmare to an end.

Fight Fire with Fire

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Full disclosure: I’m the type of person who would bring an NPR bookbag to a gunfight. Actually, I wouldn’t knowingly go anywhere featuring guns, so most likely I’d just stay home and read a book.

But suppose somebody burst into my house, threatening everything and everyone I hold dear, while I sat reading? I’d fight back however I could. An attack on my house calls for self-defense.

That’s what’s happening now with a literal attack on the House of Representatives. Republicans know that they are likely to lose control of the US House in the 2026 midterms. That’s why Donald Trump and his enablers, in an unprecedented power grab, have redrawn Congressional district maps in Texas to try to snatch five more House seats from Democrats in the 2026 mid-terms.

To counter Texas, California is fighting fire with fire with the Election Rigging Response Act, aka Proposition 50, a thoughtful counter to the Republicans’ bad-faith maneuvers. It asks voters to allow temporarily replacing maps approved by the independent Citizens Redistricting Commission with new maps favoring Democrats, reverting back to CRC-drawn maps following the 2030 census. Additionally, the temporary maps would only take effect if and only if a Republican-led state redraws their maps first.

That’s the trigger Texas just pulled, with other red states soon to follow.

So it’s time to put down that NPR bookbag and fight back by voting for and spreading the word about Proposition 50, on the ballot in California’s special election on November 4. It’s the best way to stop the steal of the US House in the 2026 midterms.

Yet there’s well-funded opposition to Proposition 50: Before the ink was even dry on the state legislature’s approval for placing it on the ballot, I received three glossy mailers warning against it as a dire threat to democracy. Opponents misleadingly gave the impression that the widely respected League of Women Voters opposes this bill by quoting the League’s California President out of context. Her remarks against mid-cycle redistricting and for independent commissions were made in response to Texas’s plans to redraw their maps. In fact, California’s LVW has forcefully repudiated the unauthorized misuse of their President’s words, and has made clear that they are not taking a position on Proposition 50 in keeping with their non-partisan stance.

Californians are rightly proud of their independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (whose maps will be temporarily replaced if Proposition 50 passes). It pains many of us that the scorched-earth fanaticism and/or cowardice of today’s Republican Party has led to this point. Yet here we are.

In discussing this with friends, most see a “Yes” vote as a no-brainer. But not all (I know a lot of people with NPR bookbags). I’ve heard worries about hypocrisy, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and other slippery-slope concerns. Some are mad at Democrats for not doing enough to fight Trump, and now appear equally mad that the party of extremely limited power is exercising one of the few options of power they actually possess. One friend is mulling over the choice between “pragmatism vs. principle,” and is leaning toward principle. I understand all of these impulses.

But there is nothing principled about letting the unpopular, destructive, and often lawless policies of the current administration continue when we have the power to thwart it. We did not ask for this fight, but since it’s been foisted upon us, we have two choices: Do nothing and let Republicans continue their assault on America, or stand up and fight.

Vote YES on Proposition 50 in the special election on November 4.

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Make sure you are registered to vote (and tell your friends and family, too)!

Want to volunteer to help pass Proposition 50?

–Bay Area Coalition is my home base, and we’ve been movers and shakers in key elections nationwide for many years

–Stop Election Rigging

-Most importantly, talk up the importance of voting in this and other elections among your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and everybody you can think of.

Mayday, May Day

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What we’re experiencing under Trump 2.0 certainly qualifies for the universally recognized signal for distress. The first day of May is also International Worker’s Day, so what better time for a robust rally? My husband Jonathan and I happen to be retired, so we took our non-working selves up California’s North Coast for a few days of R&R, where we were lucky enough to join the tiny town of Fort Bragg’s May Day protest. My unofficial count was that well over 200 people lined Main Street, with almost all passing cars honking in loud support. Not bad for a population of 6,919, especially when you consider that the economically decimated white working class town is ripe for MAGA’s siren call.

Luckily, I had packed my portable sign, which matches my mood most days:

Several people nodded approvingly. One man told me The Scream was being used in protests all over the world. A woman remarked, “I finally understand what that painting means.” The meaning of the May Day protests–several hundred thousand participants in over 1,000 American cities and towns, large and small–is clear: People are fed up with Trump and his GOP enablers’ War on America, and the discontent is growing.

This sign was my favorite:

Happy to oblige!

National Park Love

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On this day in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, making Yellowstone the nation’s first national park. Recently my husband and I visited the far younger and less visited Big Bend National Park, in Texas, so I thought I’d give a shout-out to our national parks at a time when they and so much else are being assaulted instead of protected. Call it a trip report with politics (you know I can’t help myself).

Why Texas, you may ask? Quite simply, we wanted a winter hiking destination, and more northerly and high-elevation parks are under snow. The other place we considered was in and around the northeast part of Los Angeles, where our daughter lives, but it’s just as well we chose Big Bend, given that a lot of the trails we wanted to explore are now charred ruins (our daughter is fine).

Speaking of charred ruins, there is a lot of post-apocalyptic terrain to traverse in order to get to Big Bend National Park. We’re (somewhat ambivalent) fans of the streaming series Landman, which mostly takes place in Midland, where we flew into to start the four-hour drive to Big Bend.

The Midland of Landman seemed like one of the least appealing places on the planet, but it turns out the show features the golden-tinged, Vaseline-on-the-camera-lens gauzy version. IRL, we drove through miles and miles of flat, drought-scorched desert littered with metal warehouses, rusty machinery, and trash. The giraffe-like bobbing oil derricks added a touch of mechanized whimsy to the hellscape. At least there was no traffic. And the Border Patrol officers at a checkpoint an hour and a half north of the border were very polite.

Big Bend, thankfully, was prettier. At least we hoped it was, since it was well past dark when we checked into the Chisos Mountain Lodge, the only place in the park to stay that isn’t a campground (it’s about to close for a 2-year renovation). Luckily, it’s in the heart of the most beautiful part of the park–the photo above was taken from the parking lot, and most of the trails we hiked started from the lodge.

Two weeks before we got to Big Bend, there was a cold snap, with temperatures as low as 15 degrees. During our time, the highs were mostly in the mid-80s, and in the high 90s in the river and desert portions of the park. Luckily, we’re early risers who hit the trails by 7:30 every day, allowing us to sit on the lodge’s shady patio and read in the afternoons. The patio and the visitor center were the only places with wi-fi, and there was zero cell coverage, so our news intake was blessedly limited.

We loved the Lost Mine Trail so much that we did it twice:

There we met Tom, a lovely volunteer ranger who hails from Vermont and waxed enthusiastically about everything Big Bend: the geology, the birds, the tight-knit group of rangers and volunteers who spend a lot of time carrying extra water on the trails for unprepared tourists. I wonder how Tom and his merry band are faring now that the Trump/Musk wrecking ball has hit the national parks with frozen funds and massive layoffs. Maybe the birds will still be fine, even though this roadrunner was on the soon-to-be-demolished patio, mostly admiring his reflection in the glass.

But we were there in the relatively innocent days of unfit cabinet nominees being rubberstamped by spineless Republicans; the annihilation of USAID was just over the horizon, and sparse wi-fi preserved our sanity. So let us resume our carefree, if hot, hiking of the Pinnacles, South Rim, and Laguna Meadows trails:

If you’re noticing a lot of brown leaves, that’s because there’s been a two-year drought in southwest Texas. Another ranger told us that nature could withstand another year without permanent major damage. It remains to be seen how much more damage we can sustain.

Sparse water meant the Rio Grande wasn’t all that grand, but nonetheless, Santa Elena Canyon was one of our favorite places, a narrow chasm with Mexico on one side, the US on the other, and a slim ribbon of water running down the middle, the clarity and stillness of the river creating the cliffs’ mirrored doubles. Our two countries, so close and yet so far, seemingly one and the same place and people. If only. I thought of the beautiful book by Francisco Cantu, The River Becomes a Line: Dispatches from the Border.

We did not go to the Rio Grande Village, a legal point of entry where people wade across the river between Mexico and the US. A ranger advised us to get there by 7:30 am, since it would be 97 degrees there. She also recounted her trek on a completely exposed trail through prickly pear cactus on a mission to rescue tourists suffering from heatstroke, and how she hadn’t wanted to go back since. Not having packed our passports anyway, we took her advice, and stayed in the mountains. We wonder if this nice ranger still has her job. Or maybe she, Tom, and the rest of them are part of the Deep State?

There was one more trail to do from the Lodge, and aside from the fact that the Window Trail descends, forcing you to ascend when the cool of the morning is past, it’s a beauty, especially with a scramble up to the top of the Oak Springs Trail:

It was a short jaunt from our room to the Window Viewpoint, a lovely sunset ritual:

And my favorite view of all, flying home to the bejeweled Bay Area on the approach to SFO. Home, sweet, home!

Happy Belated Groundhog Day: Horror Replaces Rom-Com

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Groundhog

Note: I was on vacation on the real Groundhog Day, but worked diligently before leaving to write and schedule my annual GHD post. Alas, it never appeared, apparently falling victim to the Trump-Musk DOGE infiltration of WordPress, intent on eliminating all criticisms of the new regime and mistaking non-white-male images as DEI subversion. Now I am back, and, like my fellow Democrats, stand ready to fight back as I shake off my “Why bother?” torpor. So here you go, in case you’d like to turn back the clock and relive the last 3+ weeks.

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Like a lot of my favorite things–sleeping well, democracy, following politics–Groundhog Day has been turned on its head.

True, there’s still a resemblance to the 1993 film, in which Bill Murray hits the alarm each morning only to find he is trapped in the same day. I feel trapped, too.

Only my day begins with hair-on-fire head exploding as the radio blares the latest atrocities of Trump 2.0. Unlike Bill Murray, whose do-overs present an opportunity for tiny adjustments that make things better, Trump’s do-over is an opportunity for vengeance and making everything worse. Guided by his less lazy and smarter Project 2025 Overlords, he’s doing a bang-up job. At least I feel pretty banged up, and except for being female and from a Blue state, I’m not even a target! The dreary, gentle tedium depicted in the film has been supplanted by a fast-track descent into ever more horrifying levels of hell.

So if I were a groundhog these days, I’d be tempted to go back in my tunnel and never come out. At least not until the mid-terms.

But then I realize it’s Bite or Flight.

I’m rooting for Bite.

Caste

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The ambiguity of whether or not the Equal Rights Amendment has actually been ratified perfectly captures the status of women in today’s America. On the one hand, women have made huge strides in the last few decades. On the other hand, the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobb’s decision overturning Roe v Wade effectively relegated women to second-class citizens by stripping away their bodily autonomy. Oh, and did I mention that Kamala Harris lost the election to a man whose campaign Tim Walz characterized as the “He-Man Women-Haters Club?”

The recent news about the ERA brought me back not just to the election, but to this summer, when I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents right after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate. Caste refers to artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect and shapes the infrastructure of our divisions and ranking. It encompasses sex as well as race.

As Democrats hotly debated whether or not Biden should step aside, and who should replace him, I listened to the section toward the end of the book in which Wilkerson predicts to a friend well before the 2016 presidential nominations were sewn up that Donald Trump will beat Hillary Clinton. She was sure that the conscious and unconscious pull of caste would be just too powerful to overcome.

Listening, I thought to myself, “There’s no way Kamala Harris will be elected President.” 

I had thought the same thing about Barack Obama in 2008. Talking myself through my fears took some doing. Eventually I came to realize that not voting for Obama because I believed America wouldn’t elect a Black man meant I was participating in the very racism that stood in his—and our country’s—way. 

Obama won. He even won twice, making what could have been a fluke seem more solid, hopeful. Obama’s victories added to the rare examples Wilkerson cites when people stand strong against the headwinds of caste. Arguably, though, the rise of Trump as his immediate successor demonstrates the powerful backlash against daring to defy caste’s strictures.

This time around, eight years later, there was a lot of talk about how many Americans feared that the country was not yet ready to elect a Black woman (often from Black women themselves, who carry first-hand knowledge in their bones). There was just as much talk urging people to work hard to elect Harris rather than succumbing to and thereby entrenching the iron rule of caste.

And so we did—millions of us, with wild joy and enthusiasm. It wasn’t enough.

Although I believe Kamala Harris lost primarily because people were upset about the cost of living, that does not negate the existence of racism and sexism. I never shook my fear that Isabel Wilkerson was right. As a Black woman, Kamala Harris faced a deep and double reservoir of bias, conscious and unconscious.

Trump’s constant degradation of women and non-Whites certainly granted a permission structure for outright sexism and racism to flourish openly. It’s not for nothing that the GOP’s first reactions to Harris’s candidacy were to call her a DEI hire and accuse her of sleeping her way to the top. Trump’s pronouncement that Harris had only recently decided to “turn Black” was a ludicrous insult, but also an effective dog-whistle signaling untrustworthiness and opportunism.

Still, the impact of racism and sexism is hard to quantify. Most people know better than to say to a pollster or a reporter what an older White man cheerfully told Jennifer Egan when she was canvassing for Harris in Pennsylvania: “I would never vote for a Black, and I would never vote for a woman.” Yet that’s exactly what I suspected people meant as the chorus of “I don’t know, I just need more specifics” grew every time Harris rolled out another concrete proposal.

Mentioning the possibility of racism and misogyny as factors in Harris’s defeat in the early days after the election generated such an intense reaction that you’d think the women of America had risen en masse to force spoonfuls of Skippy down the throats of men with severe peanut allergies. Per usual, women were blamed for Harris’s loss, although the candidate herself almost never talked about her race or sex. As New York Times columnist Jessica Grose pointed out, Democratic strategist James Carville often opined that “preachy females” are the problem and Democratic messaging comes across as “too feminine.” Grose wrote her essay as Trump was floating his fellow sexual predators Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth for Cabinet heads, and as the post-election slogan, “Your body, my choice,” became a taunt many boys flung at their female classmates on school yards across America. No wonder Grose acidly wrote, “But I guess I should stop talking about it” in response to the outrage common if someone dared suggest that sexism may have played a role in the election outcome

So here we are. Trump will be inaugurated again tomorrow, making what could have been a first-time fluke seem more solid, uglier than ever. As Ezra Klein notes, “the present feels decidedly male,” an even more amped-up version of Trump’s “gaudily masculine” campaign. I can think of less diplomatic adverbs, but I guess I should stop talking about it, too.

Caste has not yet loosened its grip. Equal Rights Amendment or not, we are going back. There’s no ambiguity to the diminished status of women and that sexism played a role in Trump 2.0.

The Fire This Time

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My daughter Emma and her husband, along with their two cats, are back home in their LA apartment for the moment. They’d spent two nights in her studio (Emma’s an artist), a bit farther south and more removed from danger. The studio lacks heat and a place to sleep or shower, but at least it had electricity and better access to more escape routes. The cats loved exploring their new digs, blissfully oblivious to Santa Ana winds, go-bags, whether an evacuation warning would turn into an order, and if there’d be time if it did.

After a brief respite that included showers and a warm, soft bed instead of a concrete floor, the winds are picking up again. There is no rain in the forecast, no end in sight for the City of Angels.

Into this tragic hellscape blusters our once and future President, convicted felon Donald Trump. As usual, he is pouring gasoline on the fire. The firehoses in some parts of LA ran dry due to pressure drops and the magnitude of the catastrophe, but Trump’s divisive firehose of lies and vitriol spews at full force. He has not even had the decency to muster desultory thoughts and prayers for the millions of Angelenos, tens of thousands of whom have been displaced and whose homes and neighborhoods lie in charred ruins.

In the past decade since Trump has wormed his way into my brain, I have mused about what epithet best suits him: Thug, carnival-barker, wrecking ball, charlatan, mob boss, and some others I reluctantly rejected because they’re the same dehumanizing words used by Nazis and Rwandans to soften the ground for genocide. Arsonist-in-Chief strikes me as the most apt.

Trump delights in setting fires and watching people scramble amid the unpredictable chaos. The more, the better, so people are overwhelmed and have no safe place to turn. It’s a sadistic form of shock and awe. Right now, his lies and finger-pointing about LA have added to the conflagration. Before that it was the victims of Hurricane Helene, the residents of Springfield, Ohio, Puerto Rico, trans people, and–always in the line of fire–immigrants, women, reporters, Black and Brown people, anyone who dares to defy him. He even has the tell-tale fixation of the firefighter who lights the match–the stealth arsonist cloaked as hero. “I alone can fix it,” trumpets Trump about the fires he starts. But there is never any repair, just the kind of fix that is in for him and his rich and powerful cronies. Broken families, broken hearts, broken country be damned.

It breaks my mind that America has re-elected Trump despite, or even because of, his clear unfitness and incendiary vengeance. Now we are stuck with another round of the Arsonist-in-Chief, also the Climate-Denier-in-Chief. Climate change is the real culprit in LA’s fires (besides the original water theft from Owens Valley to create a city of millions in a desert).  

We will not be spared the floods, or the fires, next time. They are here now, and will come more frequently and with more devastating impact unless we wake up. But being woke is out of vogue, so instead we’ll have a President hellbent on unraveling the fragile progress we’ve made to try to keep the planet from burning.

Trump voters and voters who stayed home, what have you done?