We’re exactly one month into Donald Trump’s second presidency (when I started working on this post) and from what I’m hearing and reading, it’s been quite the shit show. Massive layoffs at government agencies. Elon Musk and his minion DOGE-bags obtaining access to sensitive data (i.e., social security numbers, bank account numbers, email addresses, etc.). USAID and other important government agencies had their funding cut, forcing closures of clinics and offices that provide lifesaving information and medicine to millions across the globe not to mention much needed income to American farmers.
Just in: Trump calls President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “an unelected dictator.”
Update: Trump and his bitchboy, JD Vance, insult and kick President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of The White House.
Each of the last thirty-one days, now 45-46, has brought one shocking story after another in quick succession.
My response to all the coverage varies from an “Oh, well” to a boisterous “Hah!” to an exaggerated shrug with hands raised like an excited Italian.
When speaking to someone, I proudly exclaim that I will not do a damn thing except keep an eye on the news so I can remain informed enough to plan my next move(s).
And I’ll proudly state my thesis here, I will not roll up my sleeves and join the resistance.
I’m writing this on my blog primarily for me because I can’t stop thinking about my response to people (I’m looking at you, Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America) who can’t stop saying that they hate people who say, “They got what they voted for.”
Tommy and others like him take serious issue with anyone saying this or something similar; he and others like him take serious issue with anyone not wanting to fight the good fight against Mango Mussolini.
My response: Motherfucker(s), I’ve been fighting the good fight way before Agent Orange was on anyone’s mind. I’M FUCKING EXHAUSTED! Where the fuck have you been? Where were the millions of Americans who felt and feel “left behind”?
I’ve been showing up consistently ever since I registered to vote. I have volunteered my time to help immigrants with their citizenship test or to hand out food to people in need. I have donated what little money available to me after taking care of my own expenses to organizations working to uplift underserved communities.
In my own life, I’ve tried to live by the idea that no man, woman, or child should ever suffer what I suffered in life.
And I’ve been through some shit in my life. I grew up poor and in a violent home. My father consistently gambled what little money we had and was a violent drunk who once threatened us, my mother, brother, and me, with a knife. My mother stood in front of her two children at that moment, providing what little protection she could, as this raging lunatic inched closer to us, knife in hand.
If only the wall we were pressed up against could swallow us whole at that moment and transport us to safety, but alas it was only a wall.
So, don’t fucking tell me that I shouldn’t say or believe that Trump voters are getting what they voted for or judge me or anyone who throws up their arms in complete resignation to the never-ending stupidity of the American people.
I’ve done my part as a citizen of the U.S., as a denizen of my beloved city, and as a human being. I’m an exhausted 42-year-old woman who has seen consistent negative returns on her investment in the American experiment.
SOD OFF, motherfucker(s)!
America & Americans Before Trump
We need to stop talking about Trump, and we need to talk about the U.S.A and Americans before Trump, way before Trump.
What was the U.S.A before Trump? The same shithole it is now: daily mass shootings, no reliable public transportation in many cities and towns, no universal healthcare, a broken educational system, corrupt politicians. It’s a pretty long list, one I cannot cover in one single post.
What were Americans like before Trump? The same pill-popping-insulin-injecting-monolingual-faux-freedom-loving-conspiracy-believing idiots who dominate every social media platform today, a bunch of broke, sick, and stupid people.
Donald J. Trump is the absolute embodiment of the U.S.A and the American people. He’s broke (he’s not poor, but he’s not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos rich), he’s sick (there’s no way that man isn’t popping 3-4 different medications for a myriad of health issues), and he doesn’t know how anything works just like your average American.
Mass Shootings
On April 20, 1999, I was in my high school’s Dean’s office. I was not in trouble. I was there because a few kids were allowed to work part-time at the school. I don’t remember how I got the gig, but I was there with a few classmates. We joked around that afternoon, then the bell rang at 3:00 p.m. and we all disbursed to our respective cliques to hang out for the rest of the afternoon.
Normal day at school. Normal day after school.
The next day at school and in the Dean’s office all anyone could talk about was what had happened in Colorado the previous day. Two fucking psychos shot up a high school in Columbine, Colorado. One of the adults in the Dean’s office had a newspaper, and we all gathered around to look at the images of bleeding kids, one kid being pulled out of a window, swat teams surrounding the building. It was shocking.
As the days passed, more information was provided on the killers and the killed. I had known violence in my short 16 years of life, but I had never known that kind of violence. No kid in New York City has ever known violence to that degree. The Columbine Shooting was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at the time. We, the United States, have done a spectacular job of breaking that record time and again.
Why am I recounting the Columbine Shooting here?
I’m recounting the story because an American parent will look you dead in the eye and say, “I know what’s best for my child,” while they vote against banning guns. Americans have consistently failed to protect children from gun violence. No parent in any country equivalent to the U.S. would ever vote to protect a weapon instead of the life of a child.
I was too young at the time to do anything. The adults in the country, however, decided that that horrific event was not enough to spur them into action. As result, the country saw an even worse mass shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, in 2007. There’s no point in listing out every single mass shooting since Columbine. Mass shootings are a daily occurrence in the U.S.
Americans always say, “It’s not the guns. It’s mentally ill people.” It’s something (it’s the fucking guns!), and a majority of Americans haven’t done a fucking thing to stop it.
But I have to roll up my sleeves and resist now, right?
Healthcare
The United States does not have universal healthcare.
It has Medicare for adults over 65 years old, and it has Medicaid for adults and children “with limited income and resources.” The private health insurance market is expensive and, up until recently, would deny coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition (e.g., Cancer, Heart disease, Diabetes, Lupus, Depression, Mental disorders, and Alzheimer’s/dementia).
The fucking audacity to deny someone health insurance coverage because they had once had cancer.
For the most part, Americans rely on their employers for health insurance.
Health insurance saw a major change in 2010 when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a.k.a Obamacare was signed into law. It was a medium-size win for Americans: health insurance plans became slightly affordable, and health insurance companies could no longer deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The immediate downside was the penalty imposed on those without health insurance.
The penalty: $900 (at least for me).
I recall filing my taxes one year after the law took effect, and I was informed by my tax preparer that I was going to be on the hook for $900 for not having insurance part of the year. What the fuck? I was going to be penalized for not having health insurance, health insurance I couldn’t even afford at the time.
Absolutely fucking nuts!
The woman preparing my taxes did something and made sure I didn’t pay the penalty. The penalty was ultimately reduced to $0 in 2019.
There’s no denying that millions of Americans can now afford health insurance through the ACA or through Medicaid expansion programs. But just as some saw their health insurance fortunes change, many did not. Many Americans are still uninsured or underinsured. Many Americans, like myself, find themselves paying for health insurance through an employer that doesn’t fully cover life-saving exams or treatment.
Even though the following anecdote happened after Trump’s arrival in American politics, it’s relevant to a pre-Trump America.
On September 9, 2024. I had my first mammogram. A few days later, I was informed that my left breast was too dense, so another exam was needed. Since I didn’t request anything, I thought my insurance would cover it. I remember my OB-GYN office telling me that the sonogram would not be covered, so I told them that I wouldn’t request one. On September 24, I returned to NYU Langone Radiology in my neighborhood for what I thought was another mammogram but turned out to be another mammogram and sonogram.
A couple weeks later, I received a bill for $1,123.22. I was shocked, so I called NYU Langone. The woman on the phone explained to me that the first mammogram was covered in full but that the second exam was not fully covered. She said to me, “It’s not that much money.”
Really, bitch?!
I replied, “Oh, you don’t think eleven hundred dollars is a lot of money? Do you want to pay my bill?” I was one second away from going full ape shit and saying, “Because you sound like you’re from a country that doesn’t have running water and you work answering phones, so I doubt you can afford your own rent let alone a medical bill for eleven hundred dollars.”
Yes, I wanted to be a grade A cunt. Not that much money! Shiiiiiiiiittt!
On December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan. As the details emerged, all I could think was “Why the fuck did you have to kill him in New York City? Why?”
I did not join in celebrating this man’s death, and I did not join in praising the killer. I won’t do either. On the contrary, I posted on Instagram, “Americans will cheer the death of a human being and still fight against universal healthcare.” I didn’t have many followers (I deleted Instagram), so it’s not like my story had an impact. I doubt it would have made any impact if I had millions of followers.
By December 2024, I had paid $574.40 of the $1,123.22 I owed NYU Langone. I decided I was going to pay $100 a month after my initial payment of $374.40. I called to set up a payment plan, but I was left on hold for thirty minutes. I hung up. I figured I wouldn’t have a problem so long as I paid part of the bill every month. I wanted to pay a small amount each month because I didn’t want to wipe out my HSA account in one go.
To my surprise, I was sent to collections my mid-January 2025. This time, however, I flipped my shit at the guy on the other end of the phone when I called, prompting a warning from the agent. I told him to “suck my big ol’ nonexistent cock. You chose to work for this company, asshole.” I hung up the phone.
I paid the remaining balance before cursing the agent out, because the last thing I needed or wanted was to be in arrears on a medical bill.
Here’s the problem:
Money is deducted out of my paycheck every two weeks to cover my health insurance and I set aside $70 pre-tax every two weeks for my HSA (I have a high deductible plan because I don’t require constant medical attention or medication), so I pay close to $200 every two weeks for health insurance.
My employer pays a portion of my health insurance, health insurance companies are heavily subsidized by the U.S. government, and yet I still had to pay $1,123.22 for a breast exam that could save my life.
Americans have been living with this corrupt system since health insurance companies came into existence but instead of fixing it, they have voted time and again for politicians who demonize a public option (universal healthcare). The leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is medical debt. People have died because they’ve been denied treatment. Yet, Americans have done nothing to change the system.
Americans would rather expend energy complaining about the Affordable Care Act being called Obamacare than expend energy voting for politicians who would rein in health insurance companies. Americans applaud and cheer the death of a CEO of a health insurance company instead of fighting to prevent any death.
They yell, “I don’t want socialism. I want to choose my doctor.”
But I have to roll up my sleeves and resist now, right?
Women
No conversation about America is complete without acknowledging the happy cheer leaders and obedient foot soldiers of the patriarchy: women. White women to be specific, but there’s no denying the participation of my fellow Latinas, and Black and Asian women in upholding the patriarchy for their own benefit.
Women have done an exceptional job at towing the patriarchal line. We all know a woman who’s blamed a mistress for “stealing” her man as if her man was a helpless bystander. We all know many women who blame other women for their own rape.
There was a fascinating story by Jenisha Watts in the October 2023 issue of The Atlantic magazine. She recounts her personal story and reveals that her mother was raped by her own father and that her grandmother blamed her own daughter for it, going so far as to accuse her own daughter of seducing her husband. SICK!
I still get emotional about that story because it hits close to home. Ms. Watts’s mother is not alone. There are many women who as girls were raped by their own father or uncle or a male family acquaintance, and their own mothers or female family members failed or refused to protect them.
Women have gone to great lengths to protect the men in their lives at the expense of their own flesh and blood, at the expense of women in general.
Nowhere is this support for men more prevalent than in the fight against abortion.
Yes, baby, I’m taking it there.
Men may be the face of anti-abortion laws, but the backbone of the anti-abortion movement is female.
Recommended reading: Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg.
States began decriminalizing abortion in the 1960s, and that’s when the fight against abortion really took off. The anti-abortion movement has had some strange bedfellows throughout its history. At its inception, the anti-abortion movement saw anti-war activists rubbing shoulders with Catholic women as they rubbed shoulders with Democrats; Republicans at the time tended to support abortion.
Prominent female anti-abortion leaders of the 60s include Majory Mecklenburg, who served at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Ronald Reagan; Dr. Mildred Jefferson, who was the first African American woman to graduate Harvard Medical School and the first woman surgeon general at Boston University Medical Center; and Juli Loesch, who was a Catholic anti-war and anti-poverty crusader known for her headline-grabbing protests.
Of the three prominent women, only two women, Dr. Jefferson and Loesch, worked to improve the broader conditions that impacted women and forced them to consider abortion as an option.
Mecklenburg, on the other hand, wasn’t concerned with the broader conditions that led women to seek abortions. She created and led pregnancy centers that purported to provide legitimate medical information to assist pregnant women, but instead provided “false and misleading information, and used emotional manipulation” to delay or prevent pregnant women from accessing necessary medical care.
More than 2,500 pregnancy centers operate in the United States as of 2021. The goal remains the same: to dissuade, deter, or prevent pregnant women from seeking reproductive healthcare.
None of these centers help address the circumstances that lead a woman to choose abortion.
All of this is to say that women have been participating in their own and other women’s oppression for far too long.
I’ve done my part to fight against it, however small. I did my part when the threat could have been contained and squashed.
I’ve protested for women’s rights. I’ve donated money to Planned Parenthood.
In more ways than one, I’ve tried to lead by example. I’ve tried to show that a woman’s existence doesn’t and shouldn’t come at another woman’s expense.
In one crazy situation, I even tried to help a woman who was being threatened with a knife by her male partner on the Subway (I asked my friend who was with me to call 911). I told her that there were oragnizations that could help her. I told her that she didn’t need to fear him and that she could leave this crazy situation.
What I said to that piece of shit saved my ass that night.
“You and I both know that if you put your hands on me, you’ll go to jail for a long time. That’s why you beat on her, because you know she’ll never call the police on you. My friend’s on the phone with the police right now.”
She refused help.
There’s nothing stronger than a woman’s defense of her fucking man even if it means a black eye.
But I have to roll up my sleeves and resist now, right?
Trump 2.0
“Guess who’s back, back again? / Trump’s back, tell a friend / Guess who’s back, guess who’s back / Guess who’s back, guess who’s back / Guess who’s back, guess who’s back / Guess who’s back / (Na-na-na, na, na, na, na, na, na).”
What better way to start the final section of this (very long) post than to quote the first refrain in Eminem’s Without Me hit single.
Well, the American people put Donald “Julius-Orange-Caesar” Trump back in the Oval Office. As I detailed in my introduction, it’s been quite the shit show.
If you think that I’m going to end this post by saying that I’m leaving the country, I’m sorry to disappoint you. That’s not how I’m going to end it. It’s not that I don’t want to leave or that I can’t leave (unlike you, I’ve worked my ass off to make sure I have options).
No, I’m going to try to be original. I’m going to end it by saying: Donald J. Trump is not a threat.
Yup, you heard (read) me.
Donald J. Trump is not a threat. The tech oligarchs are not a threat. The Heritage Foundation is not a threat. Shit, Fox News and OAN are not threats.
The only existential threat to the United States of America is the American people.
The American people who rather be scandalized than informed. How are those egg prices holding up against who uses what bathroom? You still don’t know about Project 2025, do you?
The American people who let their children die of gun violence at school. No sassy quip needed!
The American people who believe a healthy welfare state is Soviet-style communism (Russia, friend or foe? These fucking twats don’t even know).
The American people who blame immigrants for taking jobs they will never apply to. Here’s some evidence you’re going to ignore.
The American people who show off their guns in a coffee shop (to remind us of their small dick energy) but are too scared to fight for adequate paid time off. Losers!
The American women who “don’t care” about the sexual assault allegations against Trump. There was one woman in 2016 (I tried to find the video clip) who said that she would be honored (or something to that effect) if Trump groped her daughter as her daughter looked on in complete disbelief. SICK!
The American people who have an infantile understanding of the concept freedom. Whenever an American talks about their freedom and rights, I’m reminded of this Southpark episode. “I do what I want! I do what I want!”
The American people who vote against their own interests in election after election. Have the riches of the wealthy trickled down into your bank accounts yet? Let’s not forget those that have never voted or vote once in a lifetime.
The threat is the hubris, ignorance, greed, and hatred of the American people.
Also, what fucking resistance am I supposed to join?
The Democratic Party is a fucking joke. Democratic Party Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has no plan to fight Trump or the Republicans. Nancy Pelosi steamrolled Rep. (D) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to select a 74-year-old sick man because she was mad at AOC for primarying some fellow Democrats. When are these old people going to understand that they’re not meant to have a job for life. And DNC Chair, Ken Martin, hasn’t learned one fucking lesson. THERE ARE NO GOOD BILLIONAIRES!
FUCKING HELL!
If you’re thinking, “Why don’t you run for office?!”
Run for office so I can have every aspect of my personal life dissected for your entertainment? Run for office so I can be threatened for being a single woman with no children, for being Latina, for being an atheist? Run for office so my family can be threatened because of a lie fabricated online? Run for office so I can have the very people I represent vote for Trump?
FUCK THAT!
I’ve already encountered enough discrimination and violence in my life. I’m not sacrificing any more of myself for a society that doesn’t appreciate my contributions.
Americans, I cannot save you from yourselves. No one in another country can save you from yourselves.
You can start saving yourselves by:
- Minding your own fucking business. Get your own fucking house in order before you stick your nose in someone else’s house. How someone identifies is none of your business. Consensual relationships between two adults of the same sex are none of your business. Your time would be better spent acknowledging and fighting the threats under your own roof. I’m looking at you, women. Many of you are sleeping with the enemy.
- Learning civics. You need to understand the role of government and your obligations as a citizen. Start by understanding government at a local level. You can’t complain about the government not working when you don’t know how the government works.
- Ending your addiction with social media. I proudly say this as someone who does not have any social media. What you’re allowed to say or not say online is the least of your concerns especially when half or all of the garbage you spew online would get you fired from your real-life job or get you kicked out of a restaurant. Plus, you’ve all turned into Dug. The conspiracy theories are the squirrels who steal your attention away from what’s really important.
I love my country.
My love for the U.S. is why I showed up before the alarm bells started ringing. It’s why I showed up when the alarm bells started ringing.
Stupid people salvage relationships at the breaking point, and when has it ever worked out?
It never works out.
Americans, I’m not rolling up my sleeves to fight for you.
I’m taking a much needed break from giving a shit about people who participate in their own oppression, and then bitch about the consequences. Good luck!