This Country Can Break Your Heart

Rarely has American democracy felt so precarious as we await November 5. Will voters decide that Donald Trump, who has mused about suspending the Constitution, is fit to protect it? Will they ignore the warnings of Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, and other former officials and ex-generals, about the GOP nominee’s fascistic tendencies? Will the loss of bodily autonomy, a right that women had for almost fifty years, be the breaking point?

Though America may feel more fraught than ever, the country’s values, for me, have always been an uncomfortable fit. America was once run, at least partly, by Republicans who jailed my grandfather Howard Fast for refusing to name names when he was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At the same time, it was also a safe haven for thousands of Jews who fled from a global wave of antisemitism. That includes my great-grandparent, who arrived here in the 1880s to escape the pogroms in the Russian empire. They were storytellers and truthtellers (many of them were also alcoholics). But while America was safe for my ancestors, it wasn’t for every minority. In fact, it was politically perilous for Indigenous peoples—as well as the men, women, and children who were enslaved in the antebellum South, oppressed during Jim Crow, and who have faced decades of continual racism since.

Why am I meditating on my family history—and America’s—a few days from the 2024 election? Because the country has long been imperfect, but it has long strived to be better. Electing Trump will be a rejection of the nation’s upward trajectory.

While Trump promises to “Make America Great Again,” a slogan he borrowed from Ronald Reagan, his actual agenda runs counter to what his predecessor called “the shining city upon a hill.” While Trump refers to America as a “garbage can for the world,” Reagan actually granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. Upon leaving the presidency, Reagan spoke of America being “a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home”—words that would be completely out of place in today’s MAGAfied GOP.

My family, like so many families, hurtled through darkness toward a new home. But if Trump returns to office, America may no longer be a home for millions who navigated themselves to the light. “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country, and we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado],” Trump said in September, hinting at his immigration plan that includes deportation squads, deportation camps, and an end to birthright citizenship.

On Sunday night, Trump held a rally in Madison Square Garden, which drew comparisons to the 1939 German American Bund rally where speakers brandished Nazi banners and complained about the “Jewish-controlled press.” It’s been 85 years since then, but Trump’s set somehow managed to keep that toxic tradition going. It featured “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe, who joked about Black people carving watermelons and called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean”; Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, who mused lovingly about the turn of the century, a time when only white men could vote; and Trump’s childhood friend David Rem, who claimed that “the fucking illegals…get whatever they want.” And Stephen Miller, who would surely have a prominent place in a second Trump administration, declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

America has seen what Trump is shopping before: In 1919 and 1920, J. Edgar Hoover deported a few hundred people, including Lithuanian activist Emma Goldman, during the Palmer raids. At the time, The New Yorker wrote, the Anti-Alien League was “alarmed by the growing presence of ‘peoples of Asiatic races,’” and sought “to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship,” i.e., white people. This isn’t just the vibe of Trump’s platform but the vision itself. We know this because scores of GOP voters were literally waving signs at the Republican National Convention that said things like “mass deportation now!”

I grew up thinking Reagan was the most destructive force the Republican Party could produce, and later, watched as George W. Bush led the country into war under false pretenses. Still, neither of them outright rejected the larger notion of what the country is. Neither openly mused about ending the American experiment nor vowed to be a “dictator” if able to return to power.

As I watched Sunday night, I thought about the rest of the country, my fellow Americans, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants. We are about to be faced with a test—a question, really: Can we reject the nativism, the racism, and the dysfunction that is Trumpism? Are we not better than this?