To mark President Donald Trump’s first one hundred days in office, Buzzfeed asked ten writers to sum up their emotions in one hundred words. Four long years later, I would like you to remember, some folks saw the future.
100 Words for Trump’s Presidency by Ibram X. Kendi
Kellyanne Conway birthed the term that has largely defined the 45th presidency. Donald Trump is the alternative fact of America. He is the alternative reality. He is the alternative to democracy, to freedom, to equality. He is the alternative to peace and prosperity for the many. He is the sustainer of so many alternative facts that maintained so many bigotries that defended so many tyrants and discriminators and exploiters and war hawks during all those yesterdays.
All those yesterdays are today. But they do not have to be tomorrow.
There is an alternative to the alternative that is Donald Trump.
When I see those red hats, still worn with audacity, I want to shout, “You cut your nose to spite your own face!” Instead, I read about Trump greenlighting the polluting of waterways, and nominating secretaries who denigrate the departments they lead. I think about the young and poor who will die in conflicts he escalates on a whim. I learn about his proposed tax breaks, which won’t benefit most red hat–wearers. There is a preponderance of evidence that he’s already broken his promises to them. I think to myself, They have to see now — but what if they don’t?
still we laughed, still drank too much & danced
body to body to body, still fucked & paid the rent
still side-eyed dumb white boys at work
& threw our children towards the sun, still we worked
the meat tender & smiled with rice in our teeth
& still america kept on being america. I feel sorry
for those of you who just realized how evil a thing
a nation is. ban the president. ban the men ending
the world between rounds of golf. give me a country
governed by mothers. I want a whole new promise,
a blood-soaked hope.
Inauguration Crowdsize National Parks Twitter Paid Protesters Pussy Hats Alternative Facts Safety Pin Resist Flippable Nazi Russian Ambassador Ukraine Security Clearance Electoral College Landslide Perjury Recusal Muslim Ban Refugees Immigrants First Lady Bath Robe Intelligence Community President Bannon Emoluments School Choice Repeal Replace Dossier Piss Tape Foreign Agent Bomb Threat Antifa Gas-lighting 9th Circuit Sanctuary Cities ICE Laptop Password Bathroom Laws Executive Orders Impeachment Witch Hunt Religious Freedom Filibuster Nuclear Option Mother Of All Bombs Border Wall Private Prisons Private Member Golf Course Injunction Nationalist Coal Miner Globalist Nepotism Rallies Winter White House Missiles Dreamer Trade Agreement Booing 39 Stars
his last name means to win
& so he drops bombs that flatten
children to prove he can.
my friends write ‘not my president’
on twitter & I am the farthest
from home I’ve been in a long time.
I write ‘I pledge no allegiance’
in my poems but the children stay
dead, buried by cement & america
goes on eating, drinking, dancing
all night while the children never grow
up. he’s not my president but I live
in a country whose sun is war
& we keep rotating around its warmth
our faces, sun kissed, each & every morning.
“Barack Obama, // look at you, you’re a pussy. // You’re fired. // This year has been the most successful year I’ve had in business. // Leverage is an amazing phenomenon. // See what I do? All this bullshit. // When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. // I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters. // I thought it would be easier. // Russia, if you’re listening // I think you understand. // After shaking five thousand hands, I think I’ll go wash mine.”
I don’t need my president good-looking but I do cringe at the pain that radiates from this unhappy swollen man. I imagine his father demanding he be a right-brained dominant venal money maker like himself. Instead the kid was a comedian who wanted to be loved. Who couldn’t try out for theater, or do standup at the college pub. Trump’s self-hate, his contempt for vulnerability, for women, and national parks brands him unerringly as the next great failed artist after Hitler. Can’t dance or play — Donald must rule. It’s hard to watch his masculine failure to become.
North Dakota produces more oil than any state
and has one of the highest rates of violence
against women including human trafficking
and rape.
Non-native workers hired for Dakota oil extraction
live near native reservations in isolated areas
called Man Camps
IN THE BAKKEN
Native women are 2.5 times more likely
to be sexually assaulted, 86% by non-natives.
Water is woman.
.
THE DESIRE
to wreck a brown female body
IS AMERICAN
is no different from how we wreck
the earth and water.
In 100 days, how much oil has been exported —
how many native women destroyed?
We see you. We know you intend to drag our bodies back to dirt so that we are again objects for male power and agency. We know you will legislate right over our flesh and rights like driving over road kill. We did not survive all this way to let it ride. A wave is coming, a wave bigger than a march and bigger than your bank accounts, a wave emerging from the birth canals of millions of women. When we come, we’re not coming to debate you. We are coming for everything. Our bodies the word for it.
