As I write this, I’m learning that there’s been a shooting at yet another school in the United States. This time in Wisconsin. Reportedly a 15-year-old student shot and killed a teacher and a student and then herself. Other students were also wounded, some critically.
It does not bode well for the foreseeable future that the party taking over the entire Federal Government next month believes that the solution to gun violence is more guns.
But gun violence isn’t the only worry parents and kids will have under Trump 2.0. Previously eradicated diseases like polio could once again rage through communities thanks to an incoming administration hostile to “vaccine mandates.” The vaccine for polio dropped in 1955. And so did the rates of polio. According to the Mayo Clinic, “About 16,000 cases of [polio] occurred each year in the U.S. in the 20th century compared with none in 2020.”
I am not a mathematician, but 16,000 seems like a lot more than zero. Sounds like the polio vaccine was a good thing. But we are living through the dumbest timeline in U.S. history.
The man Trump wants to be the next health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a long-time skeptic of vaccines and has been repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism for decades, a causal relationship that Trump appears to also believe now.
During a Dec. 16 press conference, Trump said, “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine.” He does not, however, believe it should be mandated. In fact, he’s been railing against vaccine mandates, even threatening to take away school funding for schools that require students to be vaccinated.
It’s fucking bonkers.
Trump and RFK Jr. have got me agreeing with Sen. Mitch McConnell, of all people. The 82-year-old had polio as a child.
“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said in a statement.
As a warning to Kennedy, he said, “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
If you’re wondering if Trump’s other nominees might also be dangerously unqualified to lead the departments he has nominated them for, rest assured that they most definitely are.
Trump’s first administration was a master class in incompetence. The next Trump administration will be, too, except they will have none of the constraints that existed during his first term. Trump has already learned that he can get away with anything and everything and that he will never face consequences for anything.
The fact is, the American people can count on Trump for very little. Supposedly, one of the things that helped him win the election was his promise to lower grocery prices, which were already on the decline. Now he says — surprise, surprise! — he probably can’t.
“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he told Time Magazine.
Yeah, no shit.
What we can count on Trump to do is to hurt people: mass deportations, appointing more judges hostile to marriage equality and, hey, maybe even bringing back polio. Sadly, transgender people are a favorite target for right-wing hate.
Trump has promised to protect children from “left-wing gender insanity.”
“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender — a concept that was never heard of in all of human history — nobody’s ever heard of this, what’s happening today,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. “It was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”
This is, of course, not true. The “left” did not invent gender identity and children are not going to school and coming home several days later having undergone gender-related surgery. Yes, this is something Trump actually said and believes.
To paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg from the movie “Ghost”: We in danger, girl. But we’re not alone.
If you are trans, please know that you are not alone. The entire country isn’t against you. Your life matters and you deserve to not only be here, but to live as your authentic self. If you are the parents of a trans child or just have people in your life who are trans, go out of your way to let them know that you love them and care about them. Don’t assume they already know. Explicit demonstrations of hate demand even more explicit demonstrations of love.