Going to hell in a handbasket

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Become a Premium Subscriber to The Handbasket and help me continue producing quality journalism and holding the powerful to account. Click here to upgrade. And you can support my work here as well. Many thanks.

It’s late afternoon on Friday, October 7, 2016, and I’m at my desk in the newsroom, mentally heading towards the weekend. Election Day is one month away and I’m already exhausted by candidate Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on abortion rights, immigrants, any of his perceived enemies, and particularly his attacks on women. But, I think, soon it will be over. Soon Hillary Clinton will be president and Trump will be banished to stew on his golden toilet.

But then around 4pm, the Washington Post drops a story about an old Access Hollywood tape; one where Trump can be heard telling host Billy Bush, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy.”

By then I knew full well that Donald Trump hated women, but the tape laid bare the abject violence he was willing to perpetrate against any one he felt entitled to conquer. In fact, he had already been accused of this sort of violence by multiple women—but this time we got to hear it in his own words. I felt nauseous. Every cell in my body burned with rage. And then I got to work writing about it, because that’s what journalists do.

I’m not sure if I’ve felt as angry as I did that day until now. The fact that we’re in the midst of a third Trump presidential campaign despite his many confirmed and alleged crimes and an attempt to overthrow the government is so far beyond comprehension that I think many of us have just moved onto acceptance. But we proved as a nation in 2020 that we won’t allow him back into The White House, and the events of this week have served as a reminder of the absolute fury we must carry with us now through Inauguration Day. 

On Monday the Trump campaign visited Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of a a suicide bombing during the withdrawal in Afghanistan that killed 13 US service members. Trump and other political henchmen were there with the family of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, one of the service members killed, and his family, who say they authorized the campaign to take photos. However, it’s against federal law to use Army cemeteries for political campaigning purposes, and when a staff member attempted to enforce the law, she was confronted by two Trump staffers.

Yes, she.

Wednesday we learned that the cemetery official who tried to physically block the Trump campaign from breaking the law and who one of his goons said was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” was and is a woman. No other details about her have been released, other than the fact that she has declined to press charges because, “Military officials said she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” the New York Times reported.

A few other things happened on Wednesday.

Trump reshared a post on his white nationalist social media platform that showed a photo of Vice President Harris and Hillary Clinton with the caption, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” The New York Times characterized it as Trump’s “willingness to continue to shatter longstanding political norms.” I call it sexual harassment.

Then Trump’s running mate JD Vance—who’s basically been told to tuck tail in Pennsylvania through Election Day—spoke before an audience in Erie Wednesday afternoon before taking questions from the press. When a CBS News reporter asked him about the campaign’s shameful cemetery display, he went on a rambling tirade about how the story only blew up because of the media and how the problems during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan were Vice President Harris’s fault.

He closed by saying, “She can go to hell.”

I just so happened to have turned on the rally a few minutes before, expecting to catch him saying something creepy about birth rates or fertility tracking. But I wasn’t prepared for him to say that. The blatant disrespect felt like a kick to the throat. If this is the way he speaks to a woman during a televised event, just imagine what he does behind closed doors. As he wrote himself, “Even at my best, I'm a delayed explosion.”

As Vice President Harris would say, the events of this week exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us. We’ve long known that Trump is an abuser. He was found legally liable in May 2023 of sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll. The facts against him were so egregious that the jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages. He isn’t just a menace to the US government but a menace to society who ought to be in a prison cell, but who any person with a brain would gladly take just leaving us the hell alone. 

Unfortunately, there’s still an election to tend to. When Vice President Harris took the place of President Biden atop the Democratic ticket in July, many women braced themselves. Sure, she’s the first female vice president who’s also been a senator and state attorney general, but the scars of 2016 still have yet to heal. We knew the worst was yet to come, and this week it arrived.

Though much has changed in eight years, certain things feel eerily familiar. Trump recently hired back his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to advise his senior leadership team. Though he’s a character from so many seasons ago, the name probably sounds familiar because he was charged with battery for aggressively grabbing reporter Michelle Fields by the arm during a campaign event. (The charges were later dismissed.)

And his script on abortion hasn’t changed since his first go at the presidency. During his June debate with President Biden he made the certifiably false and insane claim that doctors will “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.” 

As I watched I was transported back to one of the 2016 debate nights—just 18 days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped—when I was watching for work, and when he told the exact same abortion lie. Verbatim. It inspired me to interview women who’d had later abortions, and to ask them what it was like to hear a presidential candidate so callously co-opt their pain. 

“This level of ignorance would be almost funny if not for the possibility that the lives of women and children could soon be in his hands,” I wrote at the time.

(It was a powerful story, but you’ll have to take my word for it: Fusion, the news outlet I worked for at the time, is now defunct, and my writing there has been lost to the sands of countless media implosions. I’m grateful this post from Media Matters about that debate preserved a portion of it.)

At the time, the only bits of context we had for Trump’s ignorance were his disastrous business career and his lucky turn as a reality TV star; Now in 2024, we have a full term as president, the Trump-installed Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the national right to an abortion, and a deadly government coup to inform us of the real, present and expected danger. 

He’ll [supposedly] take the debate stage to face Vice President Harris for the first time on September 10th. While it may seem impossible to sink lower, we know he will. It’s just a matter of how, and in what new ways will he cause irreparable damage to the concept of living in a civilized society.

I’ll be the first to admit that calling Trump and Vance creepy weirdos was a welcome and comparatively lighthearted diversion from the fascism that has been slowly tightening its grip around every facet of our government; but the time has come to refocus on prying the cold, dead hand of hate from our hearts, minds and souls, so that we can preserve the good things that still remain. And start to build again.

(PS: If the title of this post finally made my newsletter name click, welcome 😊)