To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.

We are not enemies. We are Americans.

The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal.

This is the time to heal in America.

In my chronicle of 2020, which is only half done, a key theme is the bitter and rancorous rhetoric, the executional incompetence, the antagonism, and the bullying of the 45^th president, Donald J. Trump. Facing him in an election on the 3^rd was former vice-president Joe Biden. Despite having mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic to the tune of nearly one quarter of a million deaths, continuing a display of manifest bankruptcy of character, and corroding the honor, norms and decency of the office, Trump’s brand remained surprisingly strong — far stronger than polls predicted. The day after the election, the key states were too close to call and an anxious nation waited for the declaration of the winner.

In the days after the 3^rd, we refreshed news media constantly looking for an update. While early returns seemed to favor the president, so much so that he announced his victory on the 4^th, slowly but surely an edge emerged for Biden in several battleground states as mail-in ballots were counted. We hoped the edge would endure and grow. As Biden’s edges endured, the possibility of denying Trump the electoral votes needed to win inched painstakingly to become reality.

On the 7^th, I stood cleaning out my Bialetti pot over the kitchen sink. Lauren was about to run errands in the hollowed-out, plague-ravaged shops along Broadway. It was the most quotidian of moments. Suddenly from the streets, we heard screams of joy and the clanking of metal pans and spoons.

The streets of New York City were telling us to check our news outlets.

The election had been called by cnn.com. It seemed too good to be true so we set to reloading other news sources to wait for confirmation. The jubilant sounds from the street continued growing louder. That Trump, the odious, repellent, authoritarian-leaning, lying, narcissist could soon become an irrelevant, orange, one-term memory hung thick in the household. Nothing that good could happen in this plague-riddled year of 2020.

Several tense, skepticism-laden moments later, the right-wing outlet, Fox News, and The New York Times announced the same and we knew it was really real. Biden had taken Pennsylvania to lock in both a popular win and an electoral victory.

There’s only one thing a New Yorker could do on a day like that: head to our streets. We grabbed Byron, our masks, and spilled out to share our joy and to see others’ in the streets.

Here's what happened next...and what our glorious city looked and felt like.

When the Coronavirus crisis came calling, Trump voters of 2016 might have expected Donald Trump to do well.

If the 2016 voter had bought into the story of Donald Trump as a successful businessman, a sage on unleashing top talent, a canny deal-maker, a maestro orchestrating the best and brightest in a way no career politician could, etc., this should have been his time to shine: clear communication, rallied industrial sectors, hot-spots of need snuffed: the team of America that churned out B-45’s for Europe united, quarterbacked by Donny from Queens.

That myth was a tragic farce: Trump’s many pretensions to business leadership were unfounded.

As I type this, my relative is in a hospital, his wife is ailing at home, and the US saw a record day of infections on November 4^th, 2020¹. Trump’s no Harvard Business School case-study chief executive, clearly. Satya Nadella, Jack Welch, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet: to these ranks of vaunted business leaders like these, Trump’s name will never be added. His companies’ six bankruptcies², his personal financial losses³, and that proven leaders reporting to him (Rex Tillerson, Gen. James Mattis) walk away, and even repudiate him in existential terms (Mattis⁴), prove that. He’s leveraged dynastic wealth made by his grandmother (and loaned to him by his father) and a favorable tax code to fail upward into the nation’s highest office.

But if there was one area in which his toxically macho and latently-violent persona should face headwinds, it would be when a nation was in need of healing. A distractible pugilist by nature and ever on the defense against litigation, Trump can concede no ground — ever. His narcissism can brook no “How might I be wrong?” or “How might it be different than what I feel?” Consequently, he can has no-to-little empathy. Consequently, he can build no shared emotional arc whereby he and an other are changed and, in that shared change, find understanding, growth, and/or reconciliation.

He is temperamentally unsuited to communicate healing.

His zealous and passionate rallies (with droves of attendees braving a pandemic, maskless to show their commitment despite the publicized deaths!⁵) prove that he can perform, he can excite, he can triangulate, he can tap into latent pools of class anxiety and grievance and mobilize action…but healing? This he simply cannot communicate.

Barack Obama could communicate healing in the wake of the grievous killing of children at Sandy Hook. George W. Bush could communicate healing on the scraps of the World Trade Center. Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, even George H.W. Bush had a capacity for communicating healing. But Trump’s greatest emotional intelligence is grievance recognition and amplification thereof for purposes of manipulation to his ends.

And if ever there was a topic that wept for a healer, it was the two racially-charged killings that (yet again) ripped open the slapdash suturing of the racial divide in America that’s been malignant, gangrenous, and fetid for 400 years.

And if ever there was a man perfectly inadequate for that task, it was Donald Trump. And if ever there was a genius on how to turn true human suffering into a handy tool to triangulate and engage a voting bloc for his election bid, it was the same man. So in this world-historical year, surrounded by pandemic death, the racial blister popped (again).

Footnotes

1. Smashing a single-day record, U.S. enters new terrain as hospitalizations increase. (2020, November 5). New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/05/world/covid-19-coronavirus-updates#smashing-a-single-day-record-us-enters-new-terrain-as-hospitalizations-increase
2. Lee, Michelle. (2016, September 26). Fact Check: Has Trump declared bankruptcy four or six times?. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/general-election/real-time-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-the-first-presidential-debate/fact-check-has-trump-declared-bankruptcy-four-or-six-times/
3. Buettner Russ, Susanne Craig, Mike McIntire. (2020, September 27). Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance. New York Times. https://nyti.ms/3jmgeBf
4. Goldberg, Jeffrey. (2020, June 3). James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/
5. Stracqualursi, Veronica and Karl de Vries. (2020, July 30). Herman Cain dies from coronavirus. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/politics/herman-cain-dies-coronavirus/index.html