Three blocks down the street from where I live in South Texas lives another Treviño.  I know this because a real estate agent knocked on the door about two months ago looking for him.  “I’m sorry,” she said, clearing up the confusion. “I thought this was his address.”

Curious who this other Treviño might be, I soon found him through a map app.  On a hunch, I had wondered if his was the house on my walking route with a TRUMP sign on his front lawn.  It was, and is. The sign was no cardboard paper-thing the like with which we are all familiar.  His was huge, held up by wooden posts.  From a marketing perspective, his investment in time and effort was rather useless.  His house is on a dead-end street.

I have been tempted to knock on his door and have a conversation with him in my hope of understanding the Trump attraction among the sizeable minority of Hispanic/Latino voters –  beyond what I think I know already.  I might be wrong.  All I know about him is that he permanently and prominently flies what I think is a Marine Corps flag for anyone who might walk by.

When President-elect Biden at last was declared the winner in November, I wanted to get in the truck and engage in the same insufferable, car-honking Trump caravans that I was subjected to twice before the election. (Now that was a good marketing ploy: 200 cars bedecked in Trump signs stretched out for blocks looked like 2,000 cars and their shrill, incessant blaring made them sound to be more like 20,000.)

But I resisted sinking to their level.  I was taught never to chortle nor gloat after victory – not even after Texas beats Oklahoma.

Given the mob-attack on the Capitol yesterday by the worst of Trump’s supporters, I do want to ring this former Marine’s doorbell to see if we could have a gentlemanly conversation about where we are as a country.  Perhaps he regrets voting for a man who not only failed to protect the Constitution but sought to undermine it?

Watching the protest-turn-riot, I could not imagine these low-life traitors getting into the building.  Having worked there, I knew how fortified the place is – when properly staffed.  The police will get it under control soon, I assured a friend who had called from New York while I repeated the same wrong-headed assumption in texts with other very upset friends and family members.  The level of their revulsion to what they were watching live on television surprised me.  It was heart-felt, from deep within – and that continues today as the texting has churned up again.

When the disloyal know-nothings pushed past the tall and thick Columbus Doors, I changed my mind.  My immediate concern were the doors themselves.  However one feels about Columbus, the front doors of the Capitol retell how Spain inaugurated the modern age and the United States – no small thing in my book even though it is hard for Hispanic/Latinos to reconcile how to feel about our history, for we are both the conqueror and the conquered.

Another friend calling from San Antonio reminded me during our conversation during the betrayer-riot that it was his birthday – ‘soon to be a national holiday, however this turns out,’ he deadpanned.  I needed a good laugh by then. 

The day-after, of course, is no laughing matter; and this morning I read in the Times that two Spanish-surnamed members of Congress from Florida voted to disregard and disenfranchise the voters of Arizona or Pennsylvania when called upon to certify those states’ electoral votes for the democratically elected President and Vice President of the United States. 

You would think that these two Republican congressmen – Carlos Giménez and Mario Díaz Balart, with memories of Fidel Castro’s Cuba on their minds – would know the dangers of fascism, dictatorship and tyranny. These two – hypocrites, morons or partisans blinded by revenge or all three – were joined by sixteen – 16! – quisling members of Congress from Texas, thankfully none of them Hispanic/Latino.  

All this occurred in the aftermath of tens of thousands of Hispanic/Latinos having voted for Trump in November, including my Marine neighbor and at least three members of my family.  Voting for the treasonous, incompetent fool now feloniously occupying the White House, too, might have been other distant cousins, some of them most likely infected by religious or, ironically, racial intolerance.

I probably shall not engage any of them, but I am intrigued to know if the veteran down the street actually fought in war or if he like Trump is a cowardly blowhard.  Men and women who have actually seen battle not only deserve respect, they at times have far different insights than one suspects.  

If I ever do see him during one of my walks, I shall say hello and see if I have reason to be optimistic about the reunification of the country – which, curiously, is now more possible than the day before the riot, for the country at last has seen the best evidence yet to reject and defeat Trumpism.

Or we indeed shall have reached a dead end.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.