I never held it against Donald Trump that my son died of a fentanyl overdose in January 2021.
Yes, he had been President for four years at that point, and he hadn’t really done anything to stop the wave of drugs coming across our southern border. I just figured it was bad luck for Tim – street drugs laced with fentanyl that happened to be in California but could have been anywhere.
But when Kamala Harris recast the border crisis last week as a crisis of human, weapons, and drug trafficking, it made me think. Why hadn’t Trump done more when he had the chance? And why does he keep attacking immigrants as people instead of addressing the real problems that sometime accompany open borders?
Maybe – if he weren’t so darn weird, angry, and bigoted all the time – this guy could have done something when he was President to secure the border better and reduce the flow of fentanyl into our country.
Or even this year, if he weren’t so self-centered he might not have killed the bipartisan border bill that aimed to address many of these problems. But I don’t think he cares one bit about people like my son.
Instead, he wallows in weirdness. His memorable border promise back at the start of his presidency was a “beautiful wall,” paid for by Mexico. In hindsight, everyone can see that made no sense.
I’ve been to the Texas/Mexico border in the city of Laredo, and even if there weren’t three bridges between them, you could wade across the shallow Rio Grande as it runs between Laredo (a city of 250,000) and its Mexican counterpart, Nuevo Laredo (a city of 350,000). They comprise the same metropolitan area. How was he going to wall the river there?
Also, unstaffed walls in more remote areas only invite tunnels. As Harris pointed out in her speech, these tunnels are often very well built, complete with air-conditioning.
Meanwhile, Trump still says essentially nothing about the 75,000 fentanyl deaths each year and what he could have done about them when he had the chance. Instead, he spends his time crowing about imagined pet-eating legal Haitian immigrants in a city (Springfield OH) 1,500 miles from the Mexican border. And how he wants to deport them back to Haiti – as if legal Haitian immigrants – who are 850 miles from Florida – all use the roundabout route through Mexico (2,000 miles across a lot of ocean water) to come to the United States.
That feels more than weird.
Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH remind me of the stories my father used to tell me about the way Italian and Sicilian immigrants in Middletown CT were treated a century ago. Although they were praised for their work ethic, their willingness to take factory jobs that others didn’t want, and their Mediterranean culture, they were also called greasy guineas, wops, and dagos – and even on occasion the “n” word – by people just like Trump.
I wasn’t even considered white when I started elementary school in the 1950s. “Italian” was its own special category, just like Hispanic or Latino/a is today.
I don’t want to go back there. But it feels like Trump is elevating the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again in the face of facts to the contrary – to a new political level.
If he just kept quiet, his own mental deficits wouldn’t be quite so apparent. But instead, this past weekend he invited new questions about his mental wellness by attacking President Biden’s and Vice-President Harris’s. What purpose does it serve – when he is clearly so intellectually outgunned by Harris – to call more attention to that?
I don’t get it. Does he want us to think he’s insane?
Whether or not you ever liked Donald Trump’s economy or his anti-government “drain the swamp” rhetoric, he was responsible for a lot of premature death during his presidency. He lost hundreds of thousands of lives to COVID, and many more to fentanyl.
Sorry, Donald, but my son’s life was one of them. He and others like him were worth more than your neglect and disdain. And I’ve come to believe that he might still be here if only you’d had a level head about you and done your job right the first time around.
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