“You’re being divisive.”
Trump supporter, I imagine you think I haven’t heard this.
I have.
I’m really familiar with the playbook by now.
This is the go-to refrain by you and other steadfast supporters of this President, whenever someone exposes the corruption of his Administration, whenever someone illustrates its hypocrisy, whenever someone pushes back against its abject cruelty.
It’s your default response when women speak out against their accusers, when black activists demand to be treated with dignity, when intelligent Americans remind you of the particulars of the Constitution, when dogged reporters come bearing hard facts to dismantle your flimsy fake news.
The prevailing party line to any resistance, is that the people opposing Donald Trump are the problem.
We’re the ones sowing discord and creating division.
We’re fracturing community.
We’re disrupting things.
We’re the dividers.
That this is your spurious charge against me isn’t surprising.
The only problem with your theory—is your President. He’s the loudest argument opposing you.
His entire toxic, counterfeit kingdom is built on separation; solely defined by erecting barriers and creating sides and battle posturing and war rhetoric.
He’s put kids in cages and sanctioned ICE raids in hospital rooms and campaigned for predators.
He’s vilified Muslims and immigrants and Democrats and black athletes and the Free Press.
He wants to build walls, control women’s bodies, take away healthcare, subtract LGBTQ people’s rights, pillage the planet.
He regularly Tweets vicious personal attacks on politicians, journalists, authors, comedians, sexual assault survivors speaking their truth.
He holds weekly rallies catering to his most sycophantic, unhinged faithful, recklessly tossing them raw meat of incendiary sound bites to fuel their fury and bolster their conspiracy and reinforce the narrative of their oppression.
Since he is unable to offer meaningful, intelligence, constructive commentary on painful social issues or complex systemic problems, he tosses out childish, all-caps social media molotov cocktails and revels in the destruction left in their wake.
From the very first days of his campaign, Donald Trump and his cadre of amoral enablers haven’t done a single thing to bring unity or understanding or compromise.
They have continually driven people to the furthest opposite poles and removed any middle ground of commonality, because such a place would expose their contempt for the poor and the marginalized. It would reveal the supremacy at its bedrock. It would highlight their betrayal of our national sovereignty.
They don’t seek unity, they only desire chaos, because in that chaos they can leverage the irrational fear it breeds.
When people like me point out such realities, this all seems divisive to you, because your understanding of the world is filtered through the distorted, whitewashed lens of entitlement that your President and FoxNews have fashioned for you.
You can no longer differentiate between Donald Trump—and America and God and Truth and your whiteness—so a critique of the former, feels to you like condemnation of the latter.
You can’t (or choose not to see) that he is the divider; that he is the source of pain and anger and grief—for refugees, for migrant families, for sexual assault victims, for mothers of young black men, for transgender teenagers, for parents with terminally ill children, for loved ones of mass shooting victims, for Muslim faith communities.
He has even weaponized you, to the point that equality, diversity, justice, kindness, compassion—now sound divisive to your ears.
It all feels like an attack.
I wish you could understand how backwards and how sad that is.
We who oppose this President have unity in our hearts; a unity that transcends faith tradition and nation of origin and political affiliation and sexual orientation and pigmentation.
That you would name this as divisive, is a you problem.
No, Trump supporter, it isn’t Democrats and Liberals and LGBTQ allies and sexual assault survivors and BlackLivesMatter activists and the media and Hollywood and interfaith communities and healthcare advocates—we aren’t all being divisive.
The divisiveness present in this moment in this country, is the man you’ve chosen to identify with and champion and defend, because he has declared expansive diverse humanity to be his enemy and the enemy of the America he’s sold you on.
No, Trump supporter, I’m not being divisive.
I’m being a decent human being.
That’s the disconnect.
