I say "Fascist," You say "Trumpist."

Let's call the whole thing off.

Well, it’s the Saturday before “the important election of our lifetimes,” which comes on the heels of the last “most important election of our lifetimes,” which occurred only four years after the previous “most important election of our lifetimes.” I don’t know about you, but my lifetime can only accommodate so many elections of such import. I’m hopeful the next election is a dreary, inconsequential affair, but for now I am forced to contend with the latest, and loudest, fire alarm ringing in our collective ears.

When I was growing up and well into my adulthood, elections felt consequential but never existential. I think all of us, no matter how much we may have rooted for one candidate or the other, believed that a president might not do a great job, which would be bad for the nation, but that America would survive whatever incompetence any particular administration might bring to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bob Dole or Bill Clinton might stumble, but the nation would not be in mortal danger due to their miscues. Moreover, I never thought either Bill Clinton or Bob Dole or Barack Obama or John McCain or Mitt Romney would actively seek to destroy that which I believed America to be.

Unlike those, which did feel important because electing an American president is an event with global consequences, each recent election really does feel more important, as if we’re trying to keep this American experiment on the rails and each election really does feel as though a wrong decision might send our little choo-choo careening off a cliff.

Is the current election actually as consequential as we have been told, or have I just been fooled into believing so by a fractured media landscape chasing eyeballs by whatever means necessary?

Here's my answer: I don’t know.

And the not knowing is worrisome enough.

What I do know is that the Trump promises are bad promises. While much has been made of his tariffs and his campaign of personal retribution to be enacted as soon as he is done swearing his oath of office, I’d like to concentrate on his most startling, and most under-covered policy proposal, his promise to deport 11,000,000 undocumented immigrants. Trump’s white supremacist policy advisor Stephen Miller (I’m not interested in a debate in whether or not the former Richard Spencer protege is a white supremacist – he is) has been advocating for this sort of action since Trump’s first run and it looks like he’ll have free hand to see it through should Trump win this time around. He’s already polishing his boots.

Orange fruit good, orange man bad.

We don’t have many details about how, exactly, this action would be implemented because, as always, Trump is long on promises and short of policy, but he promises to use the National Guard and local police to go door-to-door rounding up “illegals.” Even in a best-case scenario, this would be a massive, expensive, and dangerous operation. But there are no “best-case scenarios” when Trump is in charge. It will be disorganized and violent. Picture the worst-case scenario, and then make it two or three times worse than that.

So what happens when they knock on your abuela’s door? What happens when that woman’s friends and family step between her and the jackboots trying to extricate her from her apartment? How long before violence erupts? And what happens then?

What happens when you repeat this process 11,000,000 times? There are fewer than 2,000,000 people in our prison system, but we’re somehow going to construct enough camps to house 11,000,000? Where? What does that look like? Who is managing those facilities? How do we ensure that the people within them are well cared-for and safe? And what happens when the first sexual assault takes place? The first killing? How much pain and blood are we willing to endure to see this cruel and unnecessary process through?

I’m furious with the Democrats for ceding this point to the Republicans. Illegal immigration is a problem, sure, but it’s not the #1 issue facing this country, as so many voters have come to believe because they’ve had it drilled it into their heads for the last ten years by a racist conman and the rightwing media empire supporting his scapegoating. The media is all-too-happy to call Trump’s election lies “The Big Lie,” but the phony argument about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump claims, is far more pernicious.

That Big Lie that has done more to pit Americans against Americans than all of Trump’s other bullshit put together. Because it’s that lie, the lie upon which he has based all three of his candidacies, and which motivated almost half of the nation to support those candidacies, that’s stirred up the worst of our American heritage. It’s a heritage of subjugation, racial hierarchies, and fear rooted in nothing more rational than melanin count.

“Criminals and rapists” is how Trump described immigrants in his very first speech as a politician. It’s only gotten worse since then. What’s the difference between immigrants and the rest of us? The answer: a single generation or two. Do you come from a family of criminals and rapists? I do not, although my great-uncle did, in fact, launder money for the Chicago Mob through a literal laundromat. Other than that, I feel pretty good about my family’s contributions to this country. (Also, he was only a great-uncle through marriage so my genetic hands remain clean.)

The fear mongers can point to any number of examples of immigrants behaving badly. It’s absolutely true that undocumented immigrants have committed crimes, including murder. It’s equally true that immigrants contribute more to the culture than they take. That’s cold comfort to any family who lost somebody, and I don’t take anything from them, but I cannot stomach the hypocrisy of my countrymen wanting to confiscate 11,000,000 people when somebody is killed by an undocumented immigrant, but who turns the cheek when schoolchildren are shot to death by their fellow Americans. The Republicans want to take the most extreme measures against people they’ve identified as inherently dangerous due to the color of their skin and the languages they speak, but will not lift a finger to stop the carnage of 40,000 Americans dead each year from gun violence.

Yes, we have an immigration problem, the result of decades of bad policy on both sides of the aisle, including, but certainly not limited to, our disastrous “War on Drugs,” which led to so much of the violence south of our border, and which also had the secondary effect of ramping up racism against the people with whom we share a continent. Now we want to pretend that we didn’t bring this problem onto ourselves. We want to pretend that the decade didn’t turn a blind eye to immigration when it came time to pick crops or slaughter chickens. When we need somebody to fix our roof or do the dry cleaning. That’s all well and good, but now, for some ineffable reason, these same people are a danger? Fuck off with that noise.

Worse, we want to magnify the problem until it blots out the radiation eating us alive from more pressing issues: inequality, hopelessness, crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, our dependence on warfare to prop up our GDP, our hollowed-out manufacturing base (now recovering thanks to Biden policies), declining birthrates, the complexities of globalization, technological advances outpacing our ability to even comprehend them, etc. etc. etc. All of these are big, knotty problems that are a helluva lot harder to explain to people than “immigrants are rapists and criminals.”

Enter Donald Trump and his squirting flower. Pile on ten years of lies, gaslighting, threats of violence, actual violence, riots, and one insurrection (so far). We’ve been living with this American unrest for so long now that we’ve grown accustomed to it, the same way a soldier grows accustomed to live fire whizzing over his head. Each of those bullets shoots something, Too many just keep our heads down and hope they don’t shoot us.

Of late, the conversation has turned to whether or not the MAGA movement is fascistic. The hell of it is, it doesn’t matter. When a political movement’s literal closing message is, “We’re not Nazis. We’re garbage and proud of it!” then I feel like the conversation is already lost.

It’s not that Trump frightens me. He doesn’t. He’s a clown. What frightens me, and the reason this election feels so important, isn’t because of him. It’s because at least 47% of the nation is, apparently, fine with whatever ideology you want to affix to Trumpism. They’re fine with the hate. They’re fine with the violence. The racism. The misogyny. They say they don’t like his tone but they’re fine with the subtext. Which is to say they’re fine with everything he promises to do so long as he isn’t too gauche about it. But, if things happen to get a touch de classe, well that’s just Trump being Trump.

I don’t know whether this is the “most important election of our lifetimes,” but I hate that we even have to contemplate the question. Because it suggests something that none of us want to dwell on too hard: that this so-called American experiment may be coming to an end. Not through national disaster or economic collapse or occupation by an invading power. But because we voted it out of existence. We already voted away the right of women to choose their own healthcare. What else are you willing to vote away? How much progress do you want to erase in the name of triggering the libs? How badly do you hate people who have done nothing to earn your ire? How little do you think of your neighbors that you would have the police round them up and send them to concentration camps? How anti-American do you want to be in the name of patriotism?