Dear Trump Supporters: Is This the America You Wanted?

 by Stephen J. Lyons
12/01/24
GLOBAL POST

Dear Trump supporters: Congrats, your dreams came true. He’s back, almost like he never left.

Will this finally make you happy? Will your constant whining and raging rants about inflation (2 percent) and jobs (unemployment rate of 4.1 percent) end? Will grocery prices now plummet to a level where you can now afford milk, $20 lottery tickets, and a carton of cigs?

Will your kids now rush to fill all those lucrative jobs the illegals are stealing from them, you know, like working 10-hour shifts without disability insurance in an unforgiving slaughterhouse in Dodge City, or picking lettuce in the 100-degree heat in Imperial Valley, or carrying 50 pounds of shingles up a ladder on a Phoenix rooftop when the temps hit 115 degrees? Applications are now open.
Fake News, Real Consequences

You must be filled with MAGA pride when you read these recent headlines from the Washington Post: “Trump Team Weighs Pentagon Pick After Sexual Assault Allegation Surfaces;” “Global Health Experts Sound Alarm Over JFK, Jr., Citing Samoa Outbreak;” “Gaetz Nomination Brings New Focus on Underage Sex Allegations.”

Oops, I forgot, you don’t read the fake news in the Post or the Times, or any newspaper that fact-checks its stories. Facts are just so woke, aren’t they? And books? In your minds, they are dangerous grooming how-to manuals to convert your precious children from turning trans, gay, or simply different, or discovering inconvenient truths about our vicious history of race and genocide. Or perhaps bumping into the literature of Nobel laureates like Toni Morrison.

Instead, your brains are attached like IVs to FOX News and to your social media silos on the Dark Web, or X, where second-in-command, Elon the Great, controls your every keystroke, compiling algorithms to feed your paranoia and quench your insatiable thirst for conspiracies.

“Make America Great Again” is what you red hats have been bellowing for the past four years. Does that mean America was only great when your man occupied the White House from 2016 to 2020? You know, when a million of our neighbors and relatives died needlessly from COVID because your guy dragged his heels, went golfing, and then ignored the science before declaring an emergency? If only they had listened to the president and injected bleach into their sorry asses.

Was America great when migrant children at the border were wrested out of their sobbing mothers’ arms by pumped-up ICE agents to disappear into some holding pen in New Jersey never to be reunited? Those were some great made-for-TV moments, eh?

And so many memories yet to be made when your heavily locked, loaded, and tatted border cops begin to round up all those brown people and stuff them into camps. But no pictures this time. I mean, in your patriotic red, white, and blue minds, those illegals are diluting the purity of the American bloodlines in states like Mississippi and Kentucky, so they deserve whatever punishment they receive.
Border Patrol agent apprehends undocumented immigrants shortly after they crossed the border from Mexico into the United States in 2018. Photo: Loren Elliott, AFP

But you do honor the men in blue, right? Well, not the 150 police who were injured, killed, or took their own lives when you red hats stormed the Capitol because your cowardly leader implored you to take back your country and overturn the will of the people. He was marching alongside you, well, not really, but in spirit, correct?

Heck, you will do anything he tells you to. So when he pardons the brutes who staged that violent coup attempt, even the ones who battered officers and defecated in the Capitol rotunda, and they are released back into your communities, will you salute them with a heroes’ welcome, trot them out at NFL halftimes to sell the show, maybe even hold parades, ignoring the fact that more than a few of them had rap sheets and outstanding warrants before January 6?

Details, facts, truths. Who needs ‘em? After all, your re-elected dude said January 6th was a day of love. Anyway, that was in the ancient past, and history is for the woke mob.
The ‘Great’ America You’re Bringing Back

Next year, because of your anger, the best people will soon be in charge of your health, your environment, your wives’ and daughters’ bodies, your libraries, and your schools. Fluoride in your water? Gone. Contraception? Illegal. Doctors locked up because they dared save a woman’s life who had an ectopic pregnancy? Heck, that’s already happened. Been to Texas or Idaho lately?

Books on the Civil Rights movement or any novel by Margaret Atwood or Kurt Vonnegut? Burn, baby, burn. Required Bible studies in public schools? Why not, as long as they are Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible ($59.99 plus postage. Oklahoma’s education superintendent has already bought 500 for its school indoctrination program called the Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism.)

Attention to climate change? Drill, drill, drill. And if those libtard, tree-hugger, DEI crackpots dare take to the streets to protest? This time the US military is standing by to bash in their heads. Stand back and stand by!

Please note, all you “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Guns, God, and Trump,” and “Let’s Go Brandon” folks, thanks to you the country’s fate is now in your hands. Well, not really, as you will soon find out. You see, you are simply pawns, electoral cannon fodder for Trump Inc., and the billionaire tech bros that control all of us.

So when the international tariffs take effect and when the cost of your iPhones and Mr. Coffees skyrocket, when the veggies and fruits are rotting in the fields because all the farmworkers are locked up in Stephen Miller’s concentration camps, and prices on your groceries spike, when all those unwanted babies born to underaged girls (more than a few conceived by their closest relatives) apply for welfare that doesn’t exist and instead end up homeless and addicted on the streets, when you become ill from fouled air and poisoned water, when your family doctor and your neighborhood librarian are arrested, or perhaps “disappeared” for “crimes against the state,” when you see the bloated profits Trump and Elon will rake in during the next four years (or longer) as they plunder the US Treasury, I do not want to hear any of your complaints or gripes.

Just keep foundling your ARs, waving your little flags, downloading the latest Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood anthems, keep your tellies tuned 24/7 to Fox or News Nation or Bannon’s War Room, and remind yourself that whatever happens, thank God you didn’t elect that damned woman of color.



Stephen J. Lyons
Author of six books of reportage and essays, most recently “Searching for Home: Misadventures with Misanthropes” (Finishing Line Press)