Overcome. Overwhelmed.

(GirlUncensored will always be free. It’s important to me to get as many people engaged as possible. So I hope you will consider not only subscribing, but reaching out to provide suggestions and feedback on how I can provide the best information.)

It has taken me over a week to write about the election. I started last Saturday, November 2nd, 4 days before the most important election of my life. The title then reflected how I was feeling at the time for our candidate who, according to all publicly shared metrics, would likely become the 47th President of the United States. 

It is now an entirely different piece.

Last Saturday I was both overcome and overwhelmed with pride, with joy, with optimism, with affirmation and with hope that after almost 10 years, a seemingly endless decade, we had the opportunity to rid ourselves of a terribly flawed man, a convicted felon, a man, who by any other model, in any other election, would have been completed eliminated from seeking another term as President of the United States of America. Most certainly eliminated after attempting to overthrow a free and fair election to remain in power, simply because he lost fair and square.

I convinced myself the election would be close, dangerously close, but he would lose because I had faith in my American brethren they would see through his con, his grift, his criminality, his sexism, his racism, his misogyny and that my White sisters would rise up to take legion of their bodies and their lives.

I couldn’t have been more gut-wrenchingly wrong. I’ll admit it.

There were warning signs, of course. Any number of ruby red, glaring flags hitting me in the face, which I willfully ignored.

Yes. I was excited at the prospect that as a woman of certain age, at long last a woman, a woman of color, might be elected to highest position in the world. But I was also looking for a whiff of normalcy in our government. More willful ignorance.

And so a week and two days after I began writing this post, I am now facing my demons where “overcome” and “overwhelmed” are taking on new meanings.

For the last 3 1/2 years, I have watched almost every Trump rally with the idea you can’t confront what you don’t know. I was less interested in what Trump had to say, because his words and actions are so predictable. I was far more interested in watching and listening to his crowds’ reactions. His rallies typically ran between an hour-and-a-half to two hours. There was rarely anything new in his prepared remarks. What was new was his veering away from the teleprompter to adlib to the absolute joy of his cult.

As the election drew near, pundits and anti-Trumpers remarked how the once and future president’s crowd sizes were thinning. His followers seemed less interested in what he had to say. It was never the case. More willful ignorance.

I have watched Trump simulate a sex act on a microphone, talk about the size of a pro-golfer’s genitalia, dry hump the American flag, call out women from the audience to remark about how beautiful they are, make vulgar remarks and insults about Democrats and elected officials, threaten to have members of the “fake media” arrested and jailed for writing and producing pieces that didn’t paint him in a favorable light, fantasizing of the press taking bullets first, before reaching him onstage, calling people names in much the same way elementary or middle school children would of their classmates, lying incessantly with impunity, painting the most violent, repugnant picture not only of our country, but of immigrants coming into this country, ironically to escape repressive regimes. I listened while he, the racist that he is, singled out specific countries, like the Congo, claiming without evidence, they were emptying their prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums, spilling hundreds of thousands murderers, criminals and terrorists into our country. An invasion. Our country was being conquered by “illegal aliens,” who were poisoning the blood of our country, in every city across the map.

While the average person would be absolutely repulsed by his words, his overt racism, misogyny, xenophobia, oversized machismo and bravado, Trump’s crowds ate it up. Uproarious cheers and applause, sometimes it was deafening.

Chilling. Disturbing. Sad.

I watched Bubba’s, bedecked in their union gear, from the Steelworkers to the Teamsters and those in between, jump out of their seats with cheers as Trump promised “no tax on overtime,” all the while hypnotically taking a serial liar at his word. Point of fact, not only is his de facto Co-President Elect and soon-to-be Co-President, Elon Musk, one of the biggest union busters on the planet Earth, but both he and Trump abhor the notion of paying workers overtime. Trump admitted just that, point blank, during at least 3 of his rallies. Bottom line —- there will be no overtime to tax, because there will be no overtime. Collective Bargaining —- gone. Labor unions that built this country’s middle class —- gone.

But hey, let’s keep our heads in the sand. Because no way can any of what Trump is promising, or Project 2025, or oligarchs and friends of Putin, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, can happen here. Nope. Never. Not in the good ‘ole U.S. of A.

One of Trump’s authoritarian hero’s, one he bragged about endlessly at rallies, Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, managed to dismantle major levers of his then democratic government and institutions, like its Constitution and courts, within a year of being elected.  And when Filipino President Duterte took office, and controlled all three branches of his government, it took him only six months to crumble his country’s institutions.

Enter Donald J. Trump. The 47th President of the United States of America.

What Went Wrong

All of it. Everything we have read and heard contributed to the defeat of VP Kamala Harris. 4 of them stand out.

• 3 months and 9 days was not enough for Harris to cross the finish line. It was always going to be an uphill fight given Trump had spent over 3 years putting his campaign together, developing strategy and implementing his infrastructure. It didn’t matter to whom Biden passed the torch or even if Biden had gotten out earlier. Trump’s victory was all but baked. In fact, no matter who took the mantle, they would not have prevailed. Given her unusual and unprecedented time constraints, she ran an almost flawless campaign. Mistakes? Of course, but overall, she can hardly be faulted for her loss.

• Trump increased White support with both men and women over 2016 and 2020. I wrote about some of that here. Until the Democratic Party acknowledges there is a serious race and cultural problem, seeking constructive ways to address them, we will continue to lose. In the final analysis, White men and White women let our Black brothers and sisters down.

• The Far-Right, for decades, has had an overwhelming advantage over the Democrats when it comes to information ecosystems. Fox News which hit the airwaves in 1996 led the way, but soon wasn’t conservative enough for the Far-Right. Today Right-wing media includes —- Fox News (News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), Sinclair Broadcasting (radio, tv, newspapers), IHeart Media (formally Clear Channel), Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, Podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s, whose staggering reach, 11 million, is greater than MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC taken together. Democrats have nothing that even comes close to the reach of the Far-Right in disseminating information. In addition, the media outlets, both in print, radio, and digital media, are owned by billionaires, which as it turns out, have more than a personal interest in how information is distributed. The mainstream media totally failed.

• And finally, at long last the Democratic Party needs desperately to rebuild. it has been ablaze, a fire seemingly out of control, dating back to 1980. We have tried to put it out with a garden hose. Now that it is all but smoldering ashes, we need to take a serious assessment of the party and where we stand. Are we truly the party of the working man and woman or are we packed to the gills with the elite, consisting primarily of the college-educated, we have little interest in listening to those outside our bubble, preaching instead of taking a moment out our busy day to sit with those in the field and on the ground. We hero-worship our elected officials, forgetting they work for us, not the other way around. We have been top-down for far too long. If we expect to confront the nightmare we are about to encounter, we must, and this is worth repeating, we must reshape, repair, reform and restructure or we have no hope of ever getting out from under this authoritarian regime.

What’s Next

This is the only country I have lived in. I have no idea what it looks or feels like to exist under the thumb of a repressive government nor do I have any idea what it’s like to be governed by a would-be dictator whose only interest is enriching himself, and the Christian Nationalists he surrounds himself, whittling away our freedoms each and every day to suit their whims, and support their misogyny and sexism.

So what comes next? The people who brought us to this moment, those in leadership roles with MAGA, Christian Nationalists and White Evangelicals, have been organizing, indoctrinating and strategizing to reach this very moment for decades. They are very well funded. We have not. We are not.

We need to start from scratch. Building communities. We must in all earnestness 1) admit and acknowledge that while we have been in the fight for a long time, we by no means know it all. I would argue there’s too much we don’t know. It’s all changed. All of it.

While there is still time, we need to live to fight another day. We must in all earnestness, listen and learn from each other. We’ve spent far too many years as Democrats, as activists reacting election cycle-by-election cycle rather than methodically and systemically putting together a long range plan.

I have faith we can do it. The question is, will we.

November 5, 2024 will go into the history books as the Presidential election that not only Trump and MAGA won, but that lies won, that propaganda won, that dark money won, that the oligarchs won, that White men and White women won, that Gen X & Z bros and the tech bros won.

The biggest losers — Democracy. Freedom.

We cannot let this happen again.