It should have been just another Saturday morning in November.
I’d drive to my local Grease Monkey Station, check my car in with the technician, and then hand over my cars keys. I’d step into the waiting room and sit in one of the socially distanced chairs, a novel draped over my lap as I devoured words on pages. I’d read and wait for a technician to enter the waiting room to call out the model of my car, announcing its preparedness for the road. But this wasn’t just another November Saturday.
It was November 7, 2021, four days after the conclusion of Election Night in America. Joe Biden had accumulated more raw and electoral votes than Donald Trump, but the contest between Trump and Joe Biden had not yet been called by any of the television networks. My eyes were alternatively glued to my television and cellular phone, a knot hanging in the middle of my chest. These bloodsuckers, I thought as I folded my arms. They’re just trying to string us along so that they can juice their ratings. My temple was throbbing. I grew more restless with the passage of each minute that went by without a declaration of the winner.
And then, when the anticipation threatened to overwhelm my senses, regularly scheduled programming was interrupted by Breaking News! The camera focused on a television anchor who announced Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election. I felt the knot, continuously tightening over the last four years of my life, start to loosen.
The Mexican American man sitting in the next chair turned to me and said, “Is it Biden?”
“Yes,” I said. “Biden just won.”
The man’s full cheeks extended a few inches beyond the borders of the mask he wore as he grinned. “Oh, yes! It’s about time we got rid of that cabron.”
I clapped my hands together. “Heck yeah!” I exclaimed.
Then I extended my elbow in the direction of the stranger. He reached his elbow across the remaining space until it connected with mine.
Not too long after the stranger and I had bumped elbows, I witnessed spontaneous outbursts of exultation, horns blaring from cars that drove past, fireworks popping in the skies of Paris, France, and jubilant young people dancing in the streets of Washington D.C. Our four year long national nightmare was nearly over. All Trump had to do was concede the race.
I concede nothing! wrote a defiant Donald Trump through Twitter, his favorite social media platform.
***
Despite being declared the loser of the recent presidential election, Donald Trump wasn’t going to give up the fight so easily. He flooded with court system with his lawsuits, seeking to overturn the results of an election that he clearly lost. The knot began to reform in my chest again. Donald Trump had appointed a good number of the judges who would be presiding over the lawsuits.
I kept my cell phone in my immediate vicinity as the cases wound their way through the court system. Every few minutes, I would scour the news websites for information on court decisions that were handed down throughout the day. And each time I read news of a judge rejecting one of Trump’s lawsuits, I’d pump a fist in the air. My anxiety would not ebb with the publication of each defeat in court though. Because although he was losing in the courts, Trump was a devil, unbowed by each resounding defeat.
After he lost sixty lawsuits in a row, and watched helplessly as the states certified Biden’s victory, Trump focused his attention on January 6th, 2021, when the House of Representatives and the Senate would count the certified electoral votes. Trump exhorted his followers to converge at the United States Capital building, tweeting, It’s going to be wild.
Trump followers would storm the Capital building during the afternoon of January 6th, desecrating the halls, stalking lawmakers, beating and killing cops. After authorities had regained control of the complex, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives would meet to count the votes. My relief was temporary, as there was still two weeks left for Trump to do more damage.
***
Two weeks passed without Trump bringing on the apocalypse, a welcome portent for those of us who feared the oncoming of a failed democratic state.
***
I held my breath as Biden put his hand on the bible to recite the oath of office. Despite the fact of there being mere seconds before Biden officially took the reins, there was still enough time for something unusual to happen, disrupting the transfer of power. After Biden said “so help me God,” I let out a huge exhale. Trump, dressed in black suite with his signature too-long red tie, would slink his way onto the Marine One Helicopter that same morning. As the helicopter lifted off the ground, turned south, and began flying into the distance, I grinned from ear to ear.
The knot was gone, replaced by a warm feeling that spread across entirety of my chest. There was some hope to look forward to now. Hope and possibility, the exact opposite of the emotions — despair, disappointment, and fear — that Donald Trump’s ascension to the American presidency stirred within me a little more than four years ago.
“Good riddance you asshole,” I said. “The anti-Christ is being flown back into his cave.”
Recently, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, the one who’d abandoned his besieged Texas constituents for Cancun, gave his skewed opinion of the Biden presidency on Twitter: Radical and boring, is what he wrote.
Of course Ted Cruz is only half right, for the Biden presidency should not be referred to as radical. What Biden has done is wipe away the Trump legacy, rescinding executive orders that promulgated racism, hatred, and cruelty, appointing diverse and qualified individuals to cabinet positions, and pledging to work with members of the opposing party in to craft legislation that benefits all Americans.
Biden, with the help of democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, has recently passed the American Rescue Plan, legislation that injects almost two trillion dollars into the American economic system. One of the most popular provisions included in the bill is the fourteen hundred dollar stimulus checks, apportioned to Americans who make less than seventy-five thousand dollars per year. I am one of those Americans, and I’ve recently received my fourteen hundred dollars through direct deposit. I’m going to use that money to buy a new laptop computer, a necessary acquisition for a nascent aspiring writer.
Besides the passage of American Rescue Plan and the issuance of dozens of executive orders, the Biden presidency has been uneventful.
Biden has just been going about his job, striving to deliver tangible results for the American people. And because Biden is doing his job without attracting any sort of drama, I’m not having to scroll through digital news websites for breaking news immediately after waking up from sleep.
During the Trump presidency, I’d come to accept wrestling with toxic emotions more than once a day, because I’d inevitably come across an offensive tweet Trump had published, read about another unnecessarily cruel policy enacted, or absorb news about a law that Trump had broken without an immediate consequence. Still, I was always hopeful that Trump would eventually receive his comeuppance.
“This has to be it momma,” I’d say, excitedly. “There is no way that Trump can escape this time! There is too much evidence for them to deny.”
“Eze my dear,” my mom would say, shaking her head. “Stop hoping for what cannot happen. It’s going to be as always. Nothing is going to happen to him. His supporters love him and they will never abandon him. And the Republicans are scared of him and his followers.”
Of course, my mom was right. Trump had once bragged that he could shoot someone of fifth avenue and not face any consequence. He wasn’t speaking in hyperbole. I mean, during his presidency Trump was accused of raping women, he threatened the leader of a transcontinental ally(Ukraine) if he did not dredge up dirt on Joe Biden, he called mothers of black football players sons of bitches, he referred to Neo Nazis as “very good people”, and he used the office of the presidency to enrich himself. He’d done all of these things, his followers acknowledged that he’d committed all of these aberrant and heinous acts, and his supporters still remained loyal. Trump remained in office despite being encircled by existential imbroglios every single day, scandals that would have destroyed presidencies of some of his predecessors. Trump had laughed in the face of these scandals, knowing that his voters and Republican politicians would never turn on him. And after he was vindicated through fallacious exoneration, an emboldened Trump would skip over reflecting on his behavior and endeavor to commit more criminal acts, an inevitable move for someone who has never been forced to learn from his past mistakes.
His behavior hurt the country.
Trump, a deeply lazy and stupid man, luxuriated in his white privilege, infuriating millions of less privileged people like me, for we knew that if we’d engaged in one scintilla of the offenses committed by Trump against this country, we would have been hauled off to jail for at least twenty years. Hell, if Barack Obama, the former and first black president of the United States, had behaved like Trump with Republicans in charge of the Senate and House of Representatives, they would have impeached and forced him to resign, before throwing him in the clink for the rest of his life; and it infuriated me to know that this was true.
I can count on the fact that Biden will not test the limits of his privilege; he will operate within the parameters of the law. And I won’t have to awake from sleep anxious each morning, dreading the oncoming news of the day, and it’s the most important way that Biden has made a difference in my life. The country has been placed into abler hands. So I feel like I can move on to something new, put a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff — toxic feelings — behind me, you know what I’m saying.
After I buy my computer with my stimulus money, I think I’m going to move on some more by purchasing a new car. It’s going to be my first time buying a car without the assistance from my father, God rest his soul. I’m excited for more than one reason, one of them being that I’ll be contributing to the economic recovery under Joe Biden, who I know will be a decent president.
Wish me luck at the dealership, please.
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