Four years ago, my family visited London. Family visits are a rare thing for me as it is pretty expensive to travel to London. I've always lived in a room or studio apartments so I can't have a lot of people stay with me. So it takes a certain amount of love and commitment to come and see me in this expensive city. Also, I don't get back that often because air travel is expensive and the past four years have been fairly awful.

What I remember vividly from that trip was the reaction of my parents to Trump's victory. We saw how he conducted his campaign, we saw how he dog-whistled to white supremacists and I think they both saw a vision of America's dark past. Trump represented the kind of person who could turn back the wheels of progress and laugh while doing it.

While conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists and Nazis celebrated his electoral college victory; online someone called @joelcomm labelled me a racist because I replied to his tweet about the result of the 2016 US Presidential election.  A certain type of person became emboldened by the inauguration of Trump and he didn't let them down. 

There are many reasons to vote against Trump in this election but the most important reason to reject Trump is that he's blatantly anti-American. He has spent his first term destabilising the foundations of our democracy by placing people in the US Cabinet whose main aim seemed to be the destruction of their own department. While that list can go on for a while the most recent and serious offender is the current Postmaster-General, Louis DeJoy who, as SNL points out, is a person whose name we shouldn't know. Trump did not appoint more Democrats to the Republican-heavy bipartisan USPS Board of Governors who then  "independently" selected the GOP fundraiser, and CEO of a competing logistics company, as the Postmaster-General of the United States of America FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS before the presidential election. As soon as people started to make connections between the pandemic and mail-in voting, the US Postal Service started to dismantle their own infrastructure and Trump started to sow the seeds of doubt in postal votes which the US has confidently used since the Civil War.

He's played to the racists and the conspiracy theorists. He has failed to condemn Qanon which, ironically, is tied to servers that once contained child porn. He's told white gangs to "stand back and stand by" which they have taken as a call to arms. 

His affinity for alluding to white supremacy is a long-standing tradition as it serves to target his perceived enemies and undermine democracy. In the wake of a plan to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, and put her on some sort of Mad Max-style trial, Trump stood and basked in the chants of "Lock her up!" at a rally in Michigan after the plot was foiled. These people are trying to be the footsoldiers of a fascist America and Trump literally spurs them on; smiling.

Finally, his response to the pandemic has been a catastrophic example of why he's wrong for the job. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump has tried to shift the blame from his handling of the response to, "it's China's fault for letting it out of their country". The ultimate sign of a leader is how they respond to emergencies. Shifting the blame is not leadership, it's the actions of a con man that just want to keep the circus moving down the road before you realize the good silver is missing.

He's even gone as far as to say that he ended the pandemic. Think about that for a second. The United States has the highest death toll of any country ON EARTH. Over 225,000 people have died from this virus and that number is increasing every day. That number could one day include someone I know and love. To claim that the pandemic is over while your country is reeling from daily record infections is both incompetent and anti-American. While Americans are dying, he's more interested in assigning blame than helping to solve the problem.

The GOP and Trump have prevented any movement on more Covid aid funding for Americans instead, they found it more important to force through a Supreme Court nominee in a fashion very similar to the appointment of DeJoy. While Americans are dying, he's more concerned about holding massive rallies. In the middle of the national crisis, he's holding super-spreader events all over the US where he sometimes forgets to give his supporters a ride home. In the middle of the night. During a pandemic.

So I suppose, four years later, I'm still thinking about that tweet. Has everything "been alright"? Can you "relax" or "breathe"? I suppose certain people can. I suppose that certain people feel emboldened to speak their truths.  Some people have been able to relax and breathe while others have not.

Since the beginning of the Trump presidency, chaos has been his singular goal. To cast this country to the brink. Which has put the United States on the edge of vulnerability. The five-decades-long Conservative project has come to fruition. In their desire to win eternal power they may have lost everything. America is a unique experiment in governance which, to some, seemed impermeable but, in reality, the United States is not impermeable, it can be taken down from the inside because America is not immune to fascism. Always remember that the United States effectively had a fascist slave state in the south for over 100 years. A place where the human and constitutional rights of African-Americans were abandoned so that certain people could feel better about themselves. It was so effective that the Nazis used those southern racist systems to guide the construction of their cruel state. 

So, am I a racist for what I said nearly four years ago? No, objectively, White people have done better than almost every other racial group in the United States. Average White household incomes have risen by 11 percent with the average White household earning over $100,000 in 2019. Compare that with Black households who haven't cracked $70,000. On the opposite side, Blacks and Latinos have higher levels of poverty and, while they are decreasing, it is hard to see light when you are so far down the well and, of course, there's Covid which disproportionally affects the African-American community. If you're rich, white and voted for Trump. I'm willing to wager, you've done pretty well over the past few years.

2020 was always going be an important year but, now as we await some glimmer of hope in the darkness to come, we cannot hobble ourselves with this immature, dangerous, fascist "man" as the chief executive of the country.

This is the last stand.

See you on the other side.