How on earth is a disgraced, twice-impeached, 4X-indicted, racist, gun culture-supporting, coup d’état-attempting grifter and rapist the GOP’s choice for President of the United States in the next election?
And worst of all, he’s directly responsible for this.
Ways to help from home:
My strategy depends on the particular shade of negativity I’m experiencing.
Since 2016, I’ve been mad – a lot. Anger can be channeled into productivity, but sometimes it needs to be unleashed. I find swearing to be one of the best ways to deal with anger. Sometimes (usually after watching the news), I let rip a loud string of F-bombs and then I can move on. Thank goodness my husband and I are 100% in agreement on politics. I don’t know how anyone is surviving in a politically “mixed marriage” at this point.
Do you remember when Trump visited Scotland in 2016? The coverage of their reaction was the absolute best. Does any other brand of English-speakers curse more creatively than the Scots? I don’t fucking think so.
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Dear Centenarian Mary,
Congratulations! We made it to the big ten-oh. I hope 2065 is treating us well and that we haven’t run out of money. Seriously, we’ve lived 8 years longer than our financial planner modeled. (I hope I didn’t fuck us by retiring at 58.)
In case you’ve forgotten, 2024 was quite a year. If the United States is now a dictatorship under Baron Trump, it’s not due to lack of effort on our part. We worked hard to try to stop his wretched orange father from overturning democracy.
Hopefully things took a turn for the better in 2025—the year we turned 60. Hopefully. Fingers crossed that we get to go out on a high note.
Love,
Middle-aged Mary
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My biggest challenge in the next nine months is our national challenge: to try to make sure Donald Trump does not get re-elected President of the United States. If overturning Roe v Wade and staging a coup d’état was not enough to convince you that a second Trump term would be truly disastrous for both the United States and the world, then please get up to speed.
Free gift article from The Atlantic: The Danger Ahead
This is not a time to be shy about your political views or to sit on the sidelines and see what happens. It’s a Code Red, people. The simple act of handwriting postcards to likely voters in key districts has proven highly effective in the last two election cycles.
Over the next nine months I’ll be volunteering with Vote Foward and my local Indivisible group, along with a bunch of folks from my church.
Yes, Joe Biden is too old to be President. But the likely alternative, a second Trump term, would “instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.”
I don’t want to wake up on Wednesday, November 6th regretting that I didn’t do more.
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If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
According to my son the subtitle of this blog—GenX Mom Keeps Calm & Carries On—is not accurate. According to him, I am not calm or “chill.” He says his father’s the calm one.
I started this blog shortly after I turned 50, in the fall of 2015. The name seemed about right at the time. I wrote six posts about regular mom/life stuff in 2015-16. Then all hell broke loose. The pussy-grabbing star of “Celebrity Apprentice” won the presidential election over a highly-qualified former Secretary of State and US Senator, even though she got 2,864,974 more votes than he did. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in the popular vote by more than the population of the City of Chicago, which has 2.66 million people. I’ve been to Chicago. It’s huge. It’s a huge city. Hillary Clinton beat Trump by more than a Chicago. Think about it.
Clearly I was traumatized by the election of Donald J. Trump and all that followed, including learning that I had Trump supporters among my nearest and dearest.
Blogging suddenly seemed pointless. I didn’t even think about blogging regularly again until Trump was safely out of DC and Biden was sworn in.
That whole time period after the 2020 election, when the networks took forever to declare Biden the winner and Trump kept saying the election was rigged and would not concede, was SO F***ED UP. Those crazy images of “Stop the Steal” rallies in Arizona and endless, needless recounts in Georgia with Trump caught on tape telling officials to “find him 11,780 more votes” like a mafia boss. WTF. We are the United States of America. This doesn’t happen here.
And then…and THEN…two weeks before Biden’s inauguration a fucking RIOT inside the United States Capitol while Congress convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win—a perfunctory, procedural, ceremonial event that never caused a stir before in my entire life. And now we’ve got Senators hiding under benches and Vice Presidents being whisked away by the secret service?!?
OK, so clearly I’m not calm anymore. I may never have been. It’s sad that I’ve been like this for so much of my son’s life. He was just 15 when Trump won, and now he’s a senior in college.
I probably won’t change the name of my blog (because I’m not sure how to do it and I’d probably end up deleting the whole thing by accident), but I’ll try to find a more accurate title for my imaginary forthcoming biography. Suggestions welcomed.
Here are a few more pictures of my one and only trip to Chicago. I went with high school friends not long after we reunited for our 20th reunion. We were 40. We liked it!
As a proud feminist and longtime supporter of abortion rights, I’m still struggling to understand what the fuck happened in the United States on November 8, 2016. The last seven years have been extremely tough to watch. And there’s no end in sight. Unbelievably, both Trump and Trumpism are alive and well. All three of his Supreme Court appointees are younger than me (actually Brett Kavanaugh and I are the same age). I’ll probably outlive Trump, but not his legacy. In many ways, it’s just really depressing. All these years of protesting and donating and voting, and we’ve gone backwards.
Here are some black and white photos I took at a Pro-Choice Rally in Washington DC in 1989. I used my 35mm Canon camera.
Here are some photos from the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017—the day after Trump’s inauguration. It was the largest single-day protest in US history.
The Forced Birth Movement is terrifying and misogynist. Abortion is essential healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. Federal law should protect that right.
In my experience, one key to leadership is being able to inspire people. You’ve got to: a) have a vision; and b) be able to communicate your vision in a way that makes others want to get behind it. This does not necessarily mean that your vision is a “good” or moral one. Massive numbers of people have gotten behind leaders with sickening visions. Hitler is the most obvious example, but Trump is another one. He’s literally running on revenge and lies.
I learned a lot about two of the most famous leaders of France on my trip to Paris in December—Louis XIV and Napoleon I.
Louis XIV, a.k.a. the “Sun King” because the nation revolved around him, reigned for a loooong time (1643-1715). He loved his mother and the arts and had a great personality. Allegedly, he made everyone feel comfortable when speaking with him. He managed to move the entire French government out of Paris to his favorite sleepy suburb—Versailles. People liked the guy!
Napoleon, as you may have heard, was good at war. Eventually, he got cocky and went too far, but still, the French took him back. It was said that having Napoleon on the battlefield to rally the troops was equivalent to having 10,000 additional men. Clearly, he had something good going on personality-wise. Even now, he looms large in French life. A French couple asked me to take their photo, with his tomb, when I was in Paris.
Whatever it was, the 2023 film “Napoleon” starring Joaquin Phoenix completely missed it. Boy, was it bad! I hope the Oscar nominators agree. (Check out Dan’s predictions here.) As my husband said when we left Les Invalides, “The guy that Joaquin Phoenix played in the film did not deserve that tomb.” He was wasn’t the least bit inspiring – or likable. For a laugh, check out what the French had to say about the film here.
No, I am not a good judge of character. Prior to the 2016 election, I would’ve had a different answer. Back then, my idea of “good character” was still based on what I’d learned over the years in school and church and from my family. Lying and stealing were bad. Racism and misogyny were also bad. Nazis were the absolute worst. Sure, I had rejected the Catholic Church and become a Unitarian Universalist, but I believed that most people (liberal or conservative) had a common understanding of the differences between right and wrong. I did not vote for John McCain or Mitt Romney, but I understood why reasonable people would. They were men of good character. Then, 63 million of my fellow Americans, including the man I’ve loved and trusted since Day One (my dad), voted for someone who had been caught on tape admitting to sexual assault and I realized that I never really knew anything about anyone.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that people I know–close family members–voted for Trump. That’s it. That’s the grudge. Sadly, it permanently changed how I feel about them.
Given how excited I was feeling about voting for the first woman president (in my pantsuit) on November 8, 2016, it was the Access Hollywood tape that I cannot believe they overlooked in order to pull the lever for Trump. In 2020, it was just everything. I feel like their decision revealed a fundamental difference in values so deep that I never really knew them.
So now we just don’t talk about anything remotely political, but that’s hard. Small talk can be tedious with people you know (or thought you knew) well. It’s a real rift and that’s sad.
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