So, Now What? Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Nov. 7, 2024

Indy Digest: Nov. 7, 2024

On Nov. 24, 2015, Donald Trump mocked the appearance of New York Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski during a campaign speech. As he doubled down on a claim—thoroughly debunked—that thousands of American Muslims had cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Trump cruelly mimicked Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a bone-joint disorder.

That moment is often cited as something that should have been disqualifying—proof that Donald J. Trump was not fit to be the president of the United States.

Of course, the electorate collectively decided it was not disqualifying. Nor was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Nor was the fact that so many staffers and cabinet members from his first term refused to support him again. Nor were all the felony convictions, Project 2025, concerns about signs of a mental decline, the undeniably xenophobic and racist claims he’s made in recent months, or many other things I could mention here that would have doomed any other modern candidate for elected office.

Nope. Today, Donald J. Trump is the presumed, president-elect—even winning the popular vote this time around.

I am not OK. I am truly afraid, because he and his allies have been very clear about what they intend to do regarding the rights of immigrants, transgender people, women and many other groups—not to mention the news media. His economic policies are baffling. Again, I could go on.

As I attempt to reach a place where I am something resembling OK, I’m determined to better understand what led us to this point. I do not comprehend how a majority of voters could willfully pick this candidate. Yet they did—so I must admit that I am missing something.

Exit polls show, rather clearly, that the driving force behind many people’s votes was the economy. All the nerdy official numbers—the gross domestic product stats, the employment rate, the stock markets—indicate that the economy, in fact, is doing quite well. However, many inflation-weary Americans clearly don’t think it is; look at the struggles of sit-down chain restaurants as one example of this.

I also know, based on a couple of aggravating conversations I’ve had with loved ones, that many Americans either don’t realize everything that Trump has said he’d do, or don’t believe he’ll actually do those things. A relative confidently told me yesterday that I didn’t have to worry whether my marriage to my husband would still be legal across the country in several years, because “the Supreme Court is keeping things the way they are now.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and the authors of Project 2025 indicate otherwise.

But what else am I missing? The impulse to raise a middle finger to Trump voters and brand them as all bad or ignorant or, at the least, dismissive, is strong, but it’s not productive. They are a majority of the country now, as far as voters are concerned, and whether we like it or not, we’re all still part of the same country.

Our nation is getting what it collectively wants. I am certain that the vast, vast majority of us, Trump voters included, won’t like what we eventually get. We’ll all find out soon enough. God help us.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Gov. Gavin Newsom announced today that he’s calling a special session of the Legislature to help protect the state from the next Trump presidency. Our partners at Calmatters report: “Gov. Gavin Newsom today called newly elected state lawmakers to work as soon as they’re sworn in on Dec. 2 for a special session to ‘safeguard California values’ as the state prepares—again—to be a liberal antagonist to the upcoming Trump administration. In other words: Gear up for lawsuits. In a proclamation declaring the special session, Newsom said he wants the Legislature to approve funding for the Department of Justice and other state agencies to ‘immediately file affirmative litigation.’ Legislative sources said the special session is intended to be narrowly focused on providing legal resources to the attorney general’s office—perhaps as much as $100 million—to fight the Trump administration.”

• Here’s an awful yet tragically predictable headline from The Washington Post: “LGBTQ+ crisis hotlines report spike in calls after Trump victory.” The story says: “The call to the Rainbow Youth Project’s crisis hotline came in three days before the election. On the line was a nonbinary teen. The 16-year-old had made a pact with three other queer youths: If Donald Trump won the presidency, they decided, they would commit a ‘group suicide.’ A case manager chatted with the teen. The high-schooler didn’t want to follow through, and the nonprofit was able to help mitigate the situation, said Lance Preston, executive director of the Indianapolis-based network. Across the country, organizations and crisis hotlines catering to LGBTQ+ youths and adults have reported a staggering spike in calls in the run-up to the election and since Trump’s resounding victory. The Rainbow Youth Project said it has received more than 3,810 calls so far this month, surpassing its monthly average of 3,765 in just six days. The Trevor Project, a group focused on suicide prevent among LGBTQ+ youths, said it saw a 125 percent increase in calls, texts and chat messages on Election Day and on Wednesday, when compared with a regular day.”

• So what will happen to all of the legal cases pending against the presumptive president-elect? Time magazine explains: “With the power of the White House, Trump stands to effectively shield himself from the legal accountability he has long sought to avoid—at least for the duration of his presidency. He now becomes the first convicted felon to ascend to the presidency, and his sentencing in that New York case is set for later this month, setting up another unprecedented challenge for the judge. Trump has long framed the criminal and civil cases against him as politically motivated attacks orchestrated by his adversaries, particularly Democrats, and has used the legal scrutiny as a rallying cry to bolster his base. But with his electoral victory, he now possesses enormous leverage to sideline or completely derail those cases.“

• Evidence-free claims of presidential election theft are still a thing—but this time, they’re coming from the left (albeit not from the presidential candidate itself). Wired reports: “Gordon Crovitz, the CEO of NewsGuard, told WIRED that the term ‘Trump cheated’ was trending on X on Wednesday morning. ‘There are 92,100 mentions of “Trump cheated” on X since midnight,’ Crovitz said. The exact details of the conspiracy theories are still being ironed out by those promoting them, but for the Harris supporters sharing them, her loss was reason enough to indulge in pushing baseless disinformation about the election being stolen. Meanwhile, the massive pro-Trump election denial movement that sprung up in the wake of the 2020 election remained virtually silent on Wednesday morning, in comparison to the flood of content it shared in the days and weeks leading up to the election.”

• Californians made it clear on Election Day: They want harsher punishments for the crime that’s been making the news. Our partners at Calmatters report: “From their phones and their television screens and sometimes out their windows, Californians saw their state change quickly in the pandemic. Homelessness grew then and continued to grow. Fatal fentanyl overdoses soared. Brash daytime smash-and-grab robberies floated from TikTok to nightly newscasts. A constellation of law enforcement, prosecutors and big-box retailers insisted the cause was simple: Punishment wasn’t harsh enough. They put forward a measure that elevated some low-level crimes to felonies and created avenues to coerce reluctant people into substance abuse treatment. That measure, Proposition 36, passed overwhelmingly Tuesday night. It led 70% to 30% early Wednesday. It undoes some of the changes voters made with a 2014 ballot measure that turned certain nonviolent felonies into misdemeanors, effectively shortening prison sentences. … The victory of Prop. 36, despite opposition from the governor and most of the state’s Democratic leadership, was not about what people know, it’s about what they saw. An IT technician was afraid to walk five blocks to work in downtown Los Angeles, so he bought a parking pass and drove. A big-box retailer moved all of its goods to its second floor because people kept stealing from the ground floor. The fentanyl crisis had police on body camera videos panicking and fainting when exposed to the substance. The Prop. 36 campaign ran on images like those, and it promised to make them go away.”

• And finally … while I expected things to get weird this week, I didn’t anticipate that weirdness would involve escaped monkeys. Yet that’s what happened in a South Carolina community today. CBS News explains: “Authorities in South Carolina on Thursday warned residents to lock their doors and windows after more than 40 monkeys escaped from a research facility. The primates broke loose from a Alpha Genesis facility in Beaufort County and traps have been set up and thermal imaging cameras are being used in an effort to locate the fugitive monkeys, the Yemassee Police Department said in a statement. In an update posted Thursday, police confirmed 43 rhesus macaque primates escaped and none had been captured as of early afternoon. Authorities said the primates were ‘very young females weighing approximately 6-7 lbs’ and had never been used for testing due to their age. ‘Alpha Genesis currently have eyes on the primates and are working to entice them with food,’ police said, describing the monkeys as ‘skittish.’”

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