‘Daddy, what do we do if he does win?”
That question during the first debate between Trump and Clinton finally made me stop and really consider an answer. My 13-year-old tossed in the casual, “We’ll move to Canada!” But I cut that off with a curt “Only (expletive deleted) will move to Canada.”
But it’s got me thinking: What can be done?
A recent article in the New Yorker noted that during the 20th century most presidents fulfilled about 70 percent of their campaign promises, and if Trump does win he can be counted on to hit the ground running on four issues: deporting illegal immigrants, building a wall on the Mexico border, barring Muslims from entering the country and instituting a nationwide stop-and-frisk policy.
It is possible Congress will split and the Democrats will take the Senate and be able to thwart the worst Trump can do. But if it stays in Republican hands – and by that I mean the ape-like paws of the right wing that now controls both houses – he will move on all four fronts with Congressional approval, and the money, to do his worst.
Under that scenario it seems that a President Trump will first go after the undocumented – he’ll have to as he has bloodied the waters with his lies about murderous “illegals” killing us in our sleep. And it is the place where, as commander in chief, he will have the most freedom to do so. In fact, Trump has already said that in his first 100 days he will federalize local police forces and put them under the Department of Homeland Security.
If he does that, stop-and-frisk will also become a national policy. And if Congress stays Republican, or close to it, he will begin building the wall in his first 100 days as well.
I am not – as some lefties secretly are – hopeful that he wins in the childish belief that the worse things get the better the conditions for “revolution.” America doesn’t have a great record at standing up to power, despite the foolish nostalgia-dream that somehow we’ll all go “Sixties” again the day after a Trump win.
Greybeards like me remember the fight we put up against Ronald Reagan in the 80’s, but we forget we lost most of those battles. We did not stop his funding the slaughter in the Central American wars, we did not stop American support for apartheid in South Africa. We did not stop his draconian drug war that has filled our jails with non-violent drug offenders. And 20 years later a new generation of activists did not stop Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
But that is no reason to despair, yet. Because each Trump atrocity does offer at least the possibility of resistance.
— The Wall. We can’t stop him from building it, but we can organize that for every mile of wall built we will force him to arrest 10,000 protesters who will have invaded the work site and chained ourselves to the machinery. It makes a good slogan: For every mile, 10,000 arrests. There would not be an empty jail cell within a hundred miles of the border.
— Stop-and-frisk. In every city that adopts it, thousands of volunteers will roam the streets dogging the police, hands in the air, chanting “I am a suspicious person and I demand to be stopped and frisked!” If this is too risky for African-Americans to do, then fine, it is a perfect protest for white people, a way to put all the white privilege to work. And it will likely result in arrests for interfering with a police officers, but how ironic to be charged with that for insisting you be stopped and frisked.
— Rounding up the undocumented: Northampton is a sanctuary city – meaning elected officials have instructed local police agencies not to cooperate with the feds in the deportation of the undocumented. But that will no longer be enough if our own “federalized” police chief faces federal charges for obeying our mayor and City Council. There was a time when people would answer a call to use their bodies to block the sheriff from evicting people from their homes. Bodies will be needed to surround local police stations to prevent the transfer of the undocumented to federal agents.
— The barring of Muslims from entering the U.S. is the only trump in Trump’s hand I can’t yet find a way to meet with civil disobedience inside our borders. But someone can.
Is this a greybeard’s pipe dream? I’m not sure. Trump and a unified right-wing Congress might steamroller all of us. But the militancy of Black Lives Matter, for example, fills me with hope that his worst can be met with our best in the form of massive civil disobedience.
But when my teen demanded a non-expletive-deleted answer, all I could say was, “Well, we’ll go to Washington Jan. 20 and get ourselves a whiff of tear gas.”
It’s a start.
Joe Gannon is a novelist and teacher who lives in Northampton. His column appears monthly. He can be reached at jgannonoped@gmail.com.