My family and I had barely been in our Lisbon Uber for ninety seconds when our gregarious driver Nuno, recognizing our accents asked, “So… are you pro-Trump or anti-Trump?”
Now, unlike my driver, English is my first language, but I blamed the bizarre response on a sedating cocktail of jet lag and PTSD. No matter, he understood perfectly.
“OK,” he shot back. “Here’s why tariffs don’t work the way he thinks they do…”
He then began the kind of eloquent and surgical dismantling of our Imbecile-In-Chief that should be coming from Republican senators and American journalists instead of a Lisboan cabbie.
“Trump is a criminal who only cares about himself. He has no idea what he’s doing and everyone here knows it!” Preach, Nuno, preach.
Conservations like this took place dozens of times during our week in Portugal.
A soft-spoken restaurant server from Mozambique said, “We Africans know all about being led by unstable, corrupt, violent men.”
She asked us if we in America are afraid because we’re losing so many rights and our Government is becoming violent against citizens, and we shared the way good people are becoming more and more worried.
“Let me give you advice,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing to stay and fight for your. country, it is. But you also need to care for the safety of yourself and your family and leave if you need to. These are scary people.”
Over and over, whether it was a family of four-year ex-pats who celebrate every day that they’ve escaped the existential crisis we in America are currently living through, a small-town produce vendor terrified for her cousin living in Texas, or the twenty-something tour guide who quietly confided in us, “We know he doesn’t represent most Americans.”
It was somewhat heartening to realize that people all over the world see the mental instability, gross incompetence, and fascist aspirations of the person occupying the White House. It helped to dispel the narrative that many of us are hearing in our heads right now, where we are in this historic farce alone. We definitely are not.
And yet, it was both grief-worthy and rage-inducing to realize that America is now synonymous with spectacularly ignorant voters, unrepentant racists—and with a vile ignoramus whose presence in the loftiest position he neither respects nor deserves, is disrupting life for people across the planet.
My time in Portugal helped me to remember that we are citizens of a single interdependent community of decent human beings who call this place home, and despite the efforts of this American president to pull us apart and border us off from one another, our fates are tethered together. As we fight authoritarianism here, others fight alongside it thousands of miles away.
Sitting in the fronts of cars, standing table-side in Italian restaurants, and walking the tiled streets of cities older than our nation, beautiful, diverse human beings are with us.
It isn’t Americans against our government, it’s good people versus fascism and hatred.
My money’s on us.
