Joyce Fegan: How will we recover from Donald Trump?

"Imagine, if like alcohol, we gave up social media for a month. What could we turn all that profitable attention to? We could combat climate change or help a neighbour instead of posting conspiracy theories on Facebook"

President Donald Trump tours an area Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020, damaged during demonstrations after a police officer shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In a coffee shop in a village in the west of Ireland there is a sign that reads: “Please do not verbally abuse our staff.”

Who in their right mind thinks that it is acceptable to abuse teenagers serving tea, coffee and sandwiches in a pandemic? How did this sign become necessary? What are we, as a people, like in 2020? And have things gotten very vitriolic?

Ironically, this sign isn’t too far from Donald Trump’s Irish property, and in seeking answers to the above questions your mind doesn’t wander too far from reflecting on the impact of four years of Trump as leader of the free world.

How will we recover from Donald Trump? That’s if he doesn’t get elected for another four years.

But say he doesn’t and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the new President and Vice President of the United States of America, we’ll have another job on our hands. 

No matter your home address, your nationality or where your vote is based, we need to recover from Donald Trump and the impact he’s had on the global psyche.

He has muddied truth and eroded trust in news journalists who verify facts for the sake of democracy. He relishes in a person’s ignorance or lack of education and uses their unconscious biases to his benefit and others’ detriment.

He dehumanises, he victim blames, he gaslights and if the sky is blue he can say it’s green and there will be people who believe him.

This week he called violence and protests in Wisconsin “domestic terrorism”, without acknowledging the underlying cause of anger and the protests — the shooting of yet another black man by police.

He can say anything right? Even if it’s false, discriminatory or misleading, because of free speech you know?

In October 2017, when Stephen Paddock opened fire from a hotel room in Las Vegas and murdered 60 human beings with no apparent motive, where was the term “domestic terrorism”? 

Oh yeah, that’s right, Paddock had a gun, so Trump was needing to play the middle ground and stay on the side of the National Rifle Association.

Do you remember a time when a natural disaster would hit, say a typhoon, and an entire city got destroyed and you’d rush to donate in some way, shape or form, depending on the capacity of your purse? ‘Can I help?’ Used to be the first and last thing on your mind.

Under Trump, places that are exposed to such harm and are already weakened either economically or politically, are ridiculed, their needs gaslighted and are blamed for their own misfortune. 

Remember Puerto Rico in 2017, when he victim-blamed the US territory for throwing his administration’s budget “out of a whack?” No, a category four hurricane did that.

Do you remember a time when a child would be in distress? You’d see something on the news and your whole body would ache as if it were your own kin? Like the time news outlets took the necessary step of publishing a photo of a toddler’s body washed up on a Turkish holiday beach, a 3-year-old boy who’d fled war torn Syria by craft with his family, but never made it out alive? 

We collectively keened in 2015, and didn’t stop talking about this little boy, who’s name we now knew to be, Alan Kurdi. The only debate was whether there was a y or not in his first name.

Under Donald Trump a tape emerges of wailing and sobbing children in June 2018. Who can forget the chorus of cries “Papa! Papa!” and “Mami” as desperate and distressed children from Central America were cruelly separated from their migrant parents? It was as if they were so young that “Mami” and “Papa” were the only words they knew. 

Childless or not, every half-decent adult with any kind of a heart, heard those cries as if they came from their own babe’s mouths. 

Remember the 6-year-old girl too, who begged the border patrol agents to call her aunty? She’d committed the number to memory, learnt it by heart, just in case. Such abject cruelty and desperation.

And from Trump? His third wife, Melania, boards a plane bound for a migrant child detention centre at the border wearing a khaki jacket with “I really don’t care do you?” written on the back.

Then down at the border, instead of empathy, there was mockery from Trump’s agents.

“We have a chorus here,” joked an agent, “what we need is a conductor.”

But you already had a conductor didn’t you? Donald Trump is your conductor-in-chief, tuning up human hatred and creating choruses of vitriolic victim-blaming with the masses shouting: “it’s their fault, why did they come?”

His orchestra isn’t too attuned to the state of affairs in El Salvador or Venezuela, where corruption and climate change come together to make the most deadly of concoctions.

And climate change. 

After years of diplomatic negotiations on the part of so many different countries, in comes the six-time bankruptee to pull his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which has since been ratified by 189 parties. 

Meanwhile, the Amazon burned and is burning again now, and Australia burned and then California.

His roll call of abuse is now getting too traumatic to continue listing.

But there was the time he blamed Black Lives Matters activists for the murder of a woman at the hands of torch-carrying Ku Klux Klan members in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. He is unwilling to ever apportion responsibility correctly.

There was the time he backed the gun lobbyists and suggested teachers arm-up like robocop as the surviving children of a school shooting roared in grief at the loss of their friends.

There was the time he mocked victims of sexual assault. Ten or so, powerful men were the real victims of the MeToo movement, he said, not the one-in-five girls or women around the globe who are victims of sexual assault.

There was the time, most recently when he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well - the accused co-conspirator of child sex trafficking scheme.

And all this - not to mention the people he has trolled and led pile-ons on, on Twitter, including teenager Greta Thunberg.

Under Trump, as leader of the free world, and at a time when social media reigns supreme, has something has changed within us?

Abuse, whether online or off, is starting to become normalised.

Bitch has become a synonym with woman.

Fault always lies with the victim, be that an innocent black human being murdered in cold blood by so-called “law and order” or a student raped on a college campus.

We need to wrestle humanity and truth back from Donald Trump, not just in America, but in Ireland too, and not just online but offline too.

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