“It’s not funny”

Democrats felt the need to celebrate these past few months, and trust me, I get it. When Biden was still running for reelection, I told myself that I wasn’t following the Presidential election because what more could we learn about Donald Trump and Joe Biden? And on some level, that was true. But it was also true that when I did tune in, my anxiety shot up. 

I didn’t think Biden was a strong candidate in 2020. I underestimated how much the chaos of the Trump administration and the pandemic had people craving simple familiarity. But now in 2024, the sheen has worn off, and we can see why so many have been attracted to candidates like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump—none of these candidates tried to gaslight voters into believing the economy was working for them, because for most Americans it obviously doesn’t. (Trump changed his tune when he was President, of course, because that’s just how he operates.)

But the big difference between Trump, and Obama and Sanders is that Trump doesn’t have any principles—he would say or do anything to acquire money, power, or prestige (real or perceived). And when the tide turns, he’ll throw anyone and anything weighing him down overboard. The latest example is Project 2025. At least 140 people who worked for his administration—including six cabinet secretaries—helped draft the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page magnum opus on how to turn the U.S. into a Christian Nationalist Theocracy. But as soon as voters learned about it and were rightly horrified, suddenly Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about it. 

So yes, I tuned out of the Presidential race when Biden was the Democratic candidate. He was supposed to be the one standing between us and the world of chaos and pain another Trump presidency would bring, and he was doing a terrible job. 

Then Biden announced he wasn’t going to run and nominated Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. I was cautiously optimistic because, you know, the U.S. is racist and sexist as hell. But then there was this outpouring of energy, joy, and hope. There were the memes, and Zoom calls, and remixes with video footage of Harris dancing. While some cringed, I understood the impulse. I hadn’t realized how much tension and anxiety I was holding onto until Biden stepped down, Dems and leftists embraced the Harris/Walz ticket, and I realized this election doesn’t have to be a sequel to 2016. 

But enjoying the party doesn’t justify sidelining dissenters at state and national party conventions, like pro-Palestinian advocates pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. I didn’t comment on Harris and Gaza in previous essays because Vice Presidents do not set policy and I wanted to see how her nascent campaign handled the ceasefire movement. But Harris’s statements on Israel and Gaza do not indicate she’ll make the changes necessary to end the genocide and hold Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account. Some advocates are still maintaining channels of communication and hoping they can push Harris to take a firmer stance against Israel, but it may not be enough for some voters by Election Day. 

The gravity of a genocide should be reason enough to support the ceasefire movement and its advocates. But if we’re going to be cynical and political about it, it’s also worth pointing out that the same people who’ve been activated by the ceasefire movement—Muslims, young people, and people of color, even people who worked on the Biden campaign—got Biden elected in swing states like Wisconsin in 2020. 

Democrats tried to keep the party going into the Trump-Harris debate, when Trump said that Haitian refugees were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats. Let’s take a step back—Haiti was the home of a successful revolt by enslaved people and the first nation to ban slavery. France robbed its former colony of a future by collecting billions of dollars as reparations for enslavers. Afraid Haiti would inspire more revolts by enslaved Black people in the south, the U.S. isolated the nation diplomatically, colonized it for 20 years, implemented Jim Crow-style laws, and stunted its opportunities to grow economically. (This is obviously a very abridged history.) 

After earthquakes in 2010 and 2021, followed by political upheaval, Haitians were hoping for compassion from the Biden administration. Instead, the administration deported thousands of Haitian immigrants. 

Meanwhile, a Rust-belt city in Ohio worked to revitalize its economy, found it didn’t have the workforce needed for its new industries, and attracted Haitian immigrants to fill those jobs. Then a presidential candidate humiliated the city and those immigrants on national television by accusing them of eating people’s pets. 

Harris laughed. I can’t entirely blame her for that, because who would honestly take that statement seriously, or think that anyone could? The following days there were more mixes of Trump’s “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” and people posted videos of themselves dancing to the mixes online. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, doubled-down on the claim before admitting it was made-up.

But as we saw in Kiel, Wisconsin, when right-wingers attack a community, no matter how ludicrous the claim, violence follows. The Associated Press reported that more than 30 bomb threats have been made in Springfield since Trump’s remarks. Threats against schools and municipal buildings have prompted closures and evacuations, and that’s the harassment we know of. 

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Last week the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a San Diego-based immigration advocacy nonprofit focused on Black migrants, particularly Haitians, filed charges against Trump and Vance for “disrupting public services, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, aggravated menacing and complicity.” Ohio law allows private citizens to file charges, which then need to be affirmed by a municipal court. Good for them.

During a September 13 White House briefing with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, who is of Haitian descent, to comment on the chaos Trump and Vance caused in Springfield.

“Political leaders should not be attacking vulnerable communities,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s not who we should be. And if they’re going to fall for conspiracy theories online, maybe they shouldn’t be our leaders. Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

Another reporter (unidentified in the transcript, not shown on camera) asked Jean-Pierre twice, and interrupted her another five times, to push her to answer an obtuse follow-up question: “Are there any invulnerable communities?” He probably thought he’d come up with a smart “gotcha,” the same way right-wingers think they sound smart when they “um, actually” that “the U.S. is a representative republic, not a democracy.” It’s all about scoring meaningless “points.” Meanwhile the rest of us are trying to have a serious conversation. 

Jean-Pierre responded, multiple times: “It’s not funny.”

We’re also starting to see the disinformation machine warm up. One of Wisconsin’s (many) top nitwits, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany is on the attack after the City of Madison’s clerk’s office accidentally printed duplicate absentee ballots. Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl wrote a thorough response to Tiffany’s questions and accusations, but that hasn’t slowed down Tiffany’s pointed accusations that a human error is part of a nefarious Democratic plot to win the election… by 2,000 votes… that, if they are returned, would not be counted. Absentee ballot envelopes have barcodes that inform the system if another ballot by that voter has already been processed.

In Wausau, Mayor Doug Diny took pictures of himself carting away the city’s absentee ballot drop box. (While wearing a hard hat… in case he falls head-first into the drop box?) Even though Wisconsin has used drop boxes for absentee ballots for years, right-wing disinformation spread by Trump during the 2020 election alleged without evidence the boxes were stuffed with fraudulent ballots. But, as we said with the Madison ballots, absentee ballot envelopes have barcodes unique to individual voters. So, if they existed (which there’s no evidence they ever did), they wouldn’t get processed. It’s all part of the mountains of evidence that our locally-run, decentralized election processes have checks and safeguards to ensure our votes are secured and counted. People who say otherwise either don’t understand how elections work or are deliberately lying.

It’s easy to laugh at Trump. The man is a deluded, absurd carnival barker and con man whose entire business career has consisted of finding increasingly stupid and desperate ways to blow his daddy’s money. But the lies he spreads, whether they’re about immigrants in Ohio or our election process, have had real consequences. We have to take the threat of him seriously. We didn’t in 2016. We can’t do that again in 2024.