By Rudolf Okonkwo
Forget former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Forget Representative Adam Schiff. I’m Trump’s enemy within. I accept it as a badge of honour.
Lucky you if you are not one of us. I envy you.
Maybe you are not one of us today. But you will definitely join our ranks tomorrow. It is just a matter of time.
You will join us when you feel he has gone too far. And you show any desire for a bit of restraint, just a tiny bit. He will see your repulsion for his excesses as a sign of weakness.
You will get this “enemy within” badge of honour when you think enough is enough. It will happen when you disagree with any aspect of his vision of America.
He wants to use the military to intimidate me. He will try. Some of you will cheer him on. Some of you will make excuses for him. And some will explain away his stab at the heart of the American creed. But he will not win.
He won’t win because he does not know the US military. He sees the commissioned officers. He does not see the non-commissioned officers like us. We obey the commander-in-chief’s orders under one condition – that it does not go against the Constitution of the United States of America, which we swore to defend.
I bet you he doesn’t know that part. Nobody has told him that his power ends where the power of the Constitution starts.
We will tell him when the time comes.
Forget the Haitians and the insult he threw at them about eating dogs, cats, and pets. Forget the Congolese he accused of sneaking out of their prisons in Kinshasa and entering a raft for a 10,000-kilometer journey to the United States. Forget the Venezuelans he accused of taking over estates in the suburbs. Forget the Porto Ricans, whom his people at their love fest at Madison Square Garden in New York said came from “an island of floating garbage.” I’m on Trump’s list of those poisoning the blood of America.
He will want to deport me. He will want to deport you. He will want to deport any of us whose ancestors came not from his grandfather’s part of Europe. He will try, but he cannot wipe off our footprints on the beaches of Virginia.
He will try to separate the air we breathe in and out from the stream of American air, but the air will not obey him.
Let me be loud, just this time. I don’t want you to say nobody told you. I don’t want you to say that you didn’t hear.
The phenomenon of Trump is not a new character in America. We have seen characters like him before. And more are coming.
They typically crawl out of their dark holes during significant national changes and social and economic distress. They disappear when the sunshine reappears.
Trump has already changed America in more ways than we care to count. When the publishers of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post newspapers fear endorsing a candidate in the US presidential election, you know this is no longer your grandfather’s America.
America will survive another four years of Trump.
The wound will heal. But the scars may never disappear. Like an ugly ring on the bark of a tree, it will remain a reminder to generations yet unborn of that time when Americans became so small they allowed fear to win.
History assures us that progress does not follow a straightforward path. Its road is zigzag. But in the end, humanity advances.
Like the stock market, we will survive the crashes and keep moving up. We will leave behind, inside abandoned graves, those who are allergic to change and the ones who defy the natural course of evolution.
One hundred years from now, the children and grandchildren of the Haitian people in Springfield, Ohio, who Trump accused of eating dogs, cats, and pets of the people who live there, will become governors in Ohio and presidents of the United States of America.
Americans living then will read stories of our time and shake their heads in disbelief. They will declare our era the Dark Ages.
So, fear not. You can be sure that we, the people, shall prevail in the end.
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches Post-Colonial African History, Afrodiasporan Literature, and African Folktales at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is also the host of Dr. Damages Show. His books include “This American Life Sef” and “Children of a Retired God.” among others. His upcoming book is called “Why I’m Disappointed in Jesus.”
