Walking into a restaurant I frequent in Austin on Jan. 20 a little after noon, a wry smile edged its way across my face. On any day other than that of Donald Trump’s inauguration, most of the restaurant’s patrons eating alone face the television on the wall. But not on Friday. Every customer sat opposite the screen, defiant if not numb to the coverage from Washington.
Before I sat down in the order laid down by the opposition, I saw about five seconds of protesters somewhere fighting the police. A sign of things to come. The television that made Trump is going to destroy him, like the tiger that John F. Kennedy warned us in his inaugural address would consume ultimately anyone daring to ride it.
I saw nothing of that day’s usually grand events, which is odd, drawn to history as I am. I will spend hours in front of the television watching things of historic importance, state funerals, for example, whether for a Kennedy, a Pope or a Reagan. I watched Strom Thurmond’s funeral, for goodness’ sakes, one of the country’s most reprehensible racists. Speaking of state funerals, I panicked when I heard that Queen Elizabeth II recently struggled to overcome a cold that sounded more like near-pneumonia, a dire threat to someone of that age, 91.
The idea of Trump going to England to represent the United States were the queen to die in the next four years appalls me. Trump hauling his red hair and history with women into St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service for one of the most respected figures of the last 100 years would be outright desecration. And what about Pope Francis giving up the ghost during this specter of Trump? His arrival at so august a ceremony as a papal funeral corresponds to what this country has done to itself: It went from electing a highly capable Hillary Clinton to empowering a ridiculous man, whose appointments to his Cabinet follow suit.
It is not the purpose of this space to regurgitate what we patently know about Trump’s Cabinet picks: That across the board the men and women he selected for some of the highest offices of the land are so evidently out of their depth that our once-worry about the future is now real fear.
Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, did not know before he was nominated to be Secretary of Energy that on his shoulders would fall the responsibility of securing the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Before I went to work at Energy as a speechwriter to a truly competent man whose desk Perry will now occupy, I myself did know about that particular part of the department’s portfolio. Hard to believe that the governor of the nation’s premier energy-producing state did not.
Would that the Cabinet gathered only as a dance for dunces! We could laugh them off and sit opposite our televisions in mirthful spite for a day or two. But something more profound is at hand, and I am elated this Cabinet does not include a Hispanic/Latino. No Hispanic/Latino of any note or reputation would want to be associated with what might well come from this crowd. Should all go up in flames, we might be the ash of history but not responsible for it.
As important, I am glad that Hispanic/Latinos* are grasping – each day more thoroughly, deeply and communally – what Trump and most of his supporters think of our community of more than 58 million: That we – the demonstrable demographic future of the nation – are not worthy nor important enough to be included in the Cabinet. Into this oppressive quicksand of reality should be sinking those Hispanic/Latinos who voted for Trump, including a scant few friends of mine.
From this lack of inclusion in the Cabinet comes also an important lesson: No Hispanic/Latino should ever feel that he or she is not entitled to occupy any office of the land at any level. But we have to be better than that. The bar has been set so low that we have to be conscientious about how we raise it in the future when this nightmare ends, hopefully without total devastation.
Observing the Cabinet selection and confirmation process reminded me that we shall never know how the Roman Senate would have reacted had the emperor Caligula named his favorite horse a consul of Rome, an office of superior rank then to that of Cabinet member today. In our time, the U.S. Senate, being in Republican hands, already has proved too passive letting this Cabinet come into being when more is at stake than was two millennia ago. An empire then, the whole earth today.
My sister Rosario texted me that she cried when she saw President Obama leave Washington. But she and we should remember he will be back soon enough. After a short vacation, he will join Eric Holder, his former attorney general, to lead the fight against the gerrymandered distortion of our congressional representational system that usurps the popular will. It is the first step to turn this thing around. And in the name of those three million more of we voters who formed the majority of the electorate in November, Obama will no doubt act to help stave off any direct madness that emanates from this already iniquitous administration.
Still, Obama and Holder and the millions they rally will need the likes of Sens. John McCain and Rob Portman and Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and other Republicans in the Senate to write their own profiles in courage to avert the clearest and most present danger of our lifetimes.
Heroes can hold in this time of dunces, before the horses.
Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.
*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo. It is an editorial confection to overcome the rhetorical divide between those Hispanics who consider themselves not Latinos and those Latinos who do not consider themselves Hispanic.