Trump was president for 1,460 days.
I’ve been trying to find a way to describe that time, to summarize in a small space, the depth and breadth of the injury we’ve sustained as a people and a nation.
The word I keep coming back to—is waste.
These 1,460 days have simply been a terrible, unforgivable, unthinkable waste.
A waste of time; the countless hours so many people from every walk of life have had to spend trying to care for people and rebuild their communities and save lives and champion justice and do good work—all while facing their own president as a daily, formidable adversary.
A waste of financial resources; adding 2 trillion dollars to our national debt, stratospheric corporate bailouts, a widening in the gap between the needy and the greedy—a brazen financial flooding of a spreading swamp.
A waste of natural resources; a steady stream of environmental protection rollbacks, wanton disregard for nature and planet and science, and an open contempt for the delicate web of all living things.
A waste of energy; the emotional, physical, and mental drain on so many decent people, who’ve spent their waking days and sleepless nights trying to reckon with a steadfast malevolence that simply defies reason and escapes comprehension.
A waste of ideas; a systematic shutting down of diverse and qualified people: doctors, economists, educators, scientists, creators, and public servants, whose qualified presence served as a threat to the eggshell ego and twitchy ignorance of a historically insecure man-child.
A waste of relationships; the violently uncivil wars waged by people for whom this single person has become the hill they’re ready to let their closest intimacies die on; the fractures in families and friendships and neighborhoods, the cost of which is incalculable.
A waste of human life; children pulled from their parents at the border, refugees stranded at airports, transgender teenagers bullied to self-harm, victims of gun violence left without protection, people without healthcare overcome by financial and physical threat, already vulnerable communities subjected to further violence.
I try to imagine all we could have accomplished in these 1,460 days as a nation, if so many talented, compassionate, gifted, intelligent people hadn’t had to spend so much time trying to protect themselves from their own government; the art that could have been created, the medical advances that could have been made, the humanitarian work that could have been done, the habitats we could have protected, the species that could have been saved, the equity that might have been achieved—and that unfathomable loss grieves me.
I try to imagine how different this place would have been if our leadership had celebrated diverse humanity instead of assailing it; if they’d have generated compassion and not had contempt for it; if they’d have wanted more people to be seen, not less; if they’d have desired collaboration and not confrontation; if they’d have trafficked in hope and not in fear; if they’d have wanted to make America defined by goodness and not “greatness.”
But since we have hopelessly squandered this season of our story with this catastrophic error in judgment, the only way to rectify it is not to repeat it.
By Inauguration Day 2021, we spent 1,460 days of 328 million people’s collective lives—with this cruelty and ignorance and disdain representing and defining us: with the severed ties and fractured families and polluted water and poisoned courts and perverted religion and elevated racism it has yielded.
That is a tragedy that we will never truly recover from.
The only greater shared transgression, the only more horrible sin, would be if we decided to waste a single day more.
