President Joe Biden has signed an executive order reversing Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service members. This is great news! I mean, kind of. These past four years have been particularly brutal for transgender Americans. The Trump Administration had a very hateful reign, and they reserved a targeted and open hostility towards transgender people, from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos telling transgender students that they don’t deserve a place to pee or change their clothes for gym class to Trump announcing that transgender service members were no longer welcome even after they have sacrificed more for this country than his pathetic ass ever has.
So, yes, Bidens EO is good news. But it doesn’t heal the pain or fix the fractures of this previous administration.
Neither will bringing Trump to justice and holding all who aided and abetted his attack on the U.S. accountable. And this seems to be the argument behind the Republican Party’s sudden keen interest in “unity.” But, hey, convicting a murderer doesn’t bring the person he’s killed back to life, and we still think justice should be, like, a thing, right? So the idea that we should just let a president and his party incite an insurrection and use the Constitution as scrap paper for Q-Anon fan fiction and do nothing about it is pure bulls*** from the party that elected Trump, supported Trump, and still supports Trump. So, like, f*** them.
As I’m writing this, the House is delivering the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate making Trump the only president to be impeached twice, which honestly doesn’t feel like enough.
Yet even as Trump is the epitome of disgrace, Republicans are doubling and tripling down on their commitment to him. Make no mistake, Trump wasn’t a blip on the GOP radar. He’s the whole radar. Republicans who don’t support Trump are the minority. All over the U.S., MAGA die-hards are at the helm, sanctioning U.S. House members who voted for impeachment. Or in the case of Arizona Republicans, censuring Cindy McCain, John McCain’s widow, for opposing Trump and believing that “Burning down the Capitol is bad.” She’s not even an elected official.
I, personally, would like to see every Republican who supported Trump and who fueled the fire of insurrection with their lies and blind fealty to this reality host joke held accountable. I’d like to see them lose their offices, since they’ve betrayed the public trust and the Constitution. I would like to see each and every one of the Capitol rioters arrested and put in jail, even those who “accidentally” stormed the building. “I thought it was a really nice Starbucks” is not an excuse. And I would love to see Trump impeached by the House and then, this time, actually convicted in the Senate.
Am I angry? Why, yes, I am angry. Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do his fucking job and was incapable of it from the start. We’re churning toward 500,000 dead from COVID-19. Half a million people! And Biden’s administration has walked in to find that Trump had no plan for prevention. For vaccines. Not a goddamn thing.
Meanwhile in Michigan, Republicans are hell-bent on getting restaurants open to full capacity again and are upset with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s vaccine distribution so far. Never mind the fact that they have themselves to blame for any problem with vaccine procurement and distribution because their boy, Donald Trump, didn’t do his job and they were too busy kissing his MAGA ass and pretending COVID-19 was a liberal hoax to care.
We haven’t had a national strategy for a year. One can hardly be surprised that states — and, by the way, Michigan is doing better than most — are having a hard time taking on COVID all by themselves. A deadly pandemic is basically a textbook example of what a federal government is for. It is why who we elect matters and why we as a nation need to wrest control away from the party of Trump.
“When I began in the Republican Party officially, the Republican party was the party of inclusion. It was the party of generosity. It was the party of ‘country first,’” Cindy McCain said on “The View.” “We have lost our way and it’s time that we get back on track.”
Calling the Republican Party the part of “inclusion” is correct, for a well-to-do white woman, that is. It’s anything but and has only become more exclusionary since Ronald Reagan. The GOP hasn’t been a welcoming party for a very long time. And they’ve taken the “country first” idea to one that more closely mirrors fascism than patriotism.
But she’s right that they’ve lost their way. But they’ve blown up the track when they elected Trump, and they just keep digging deeper into the abyss.
D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.