Trump 2.0 was our topic of commiseration at the neighborhood book club last night. It’s a good group, managed by the librarian from our public library, who prints out questions for discussion and brings wine to every meeting. We are eight women and a couple men, our ages ranging across 50 years or so, and we typically get into some fascinating discussions about whatever book we’ve been reading. Last night it was Deacon King Kong, which we all adored for its holy fool hero and his ragged New York housing project escapades, but the first month of this new Trump thing kept seeping into the conversation.
By evening’s end, it was clear that each of us has already been affected in some way by it all, but the club’s co-leader most of all. A brilliant disability activist and researcher – I’ve worked with her on projects in the past – she gave up a promising career at VCU in December to take a federal job with a granting agency in DC. Even though the change meant she’d need to train up and back three days a week, she was excited. A young mom with two kids, she was going to make it work. She and seven other new project directors were let go by email from DOGE on Valentine’s Day. They’re all trying to figure out how to go about appealing these dismissals and desperately reconfiguring home budgets. She’s not panicked, yet, but it’s been ugly.
The PTA leader at our local elementary school and a woman whose daughter teaches third grade there shared that kids have been “disappearing” since Inauguration Day. It’s a beloved school, where our boys enjoyed the ethnically diverse environment. A lot of Hispanic kids. They’re the ones disappearing, their parents afraid to send them to school in case something happens.
Another member said her sister manages a popular local restaurant, and that she’s set up an emergency plan in case ICE barges in, a locked closet for staff and a chef’s jacket she keeps on her chair, in case she has to suddenly substitute for a line cook. She said that every restaurant in Richmond has similar contingency plans.
An elderly couple noted that they had spent the morning attending our GOP Congressman Rob Wittman’s mobile office hours, where a beleaguered staffer faced at least a hundred sign-waving constituents, who were angrily asking where Wittman has been hiding (I can’t remember him ever doing a town hall in our district). This just hours after he voted to approve the “Big Beautiful Budget” designed to sacrifice Medicaid so billionaires can get a tax break.
The lesbian couple in the club noted that bills are being proposed in state houses (not in Virginia, yet) to outlaw gay marriage, and we all shook our heads in dismay at the ridiculous and hateful rulings around there only being two sexes. We fretted over the anti-DEI initiatives, too, which seem aimed at people of color, the non-CIS, women and those with disabilities (basically everybody but physically healthy white men), and which also seem focused on defunding our universities.
The young realtor in the group said that nobody was buying houses, that everyone seems to be holding their breath and their pocketbooks just now, because who knows what else might happen to the markets and interest rates.
I shared how so far 30 employees have been fired at the Richmond VA where my wife works and how everyone wasted an hour on Monday figuring out how to respond to Musk’s demand for an accounting of the past week’s productivity, despite the fact that the whole rehab staff there already records every treatment they do. The new VA head is a Trump appointee, of course, so he insisted that everyone respond to that email.
The evening eventually felt like a current events panel discussion, all of us worried and at wit’s end. One mom, whose two-month old baby slept at her breast, neatly summed up our situation. She said, “Did any of us ever imagine that this day would come, that in the United States of America all this would come down?” No we didn’t, but here we are.
They say the next big election will be for Governor of Virginia in November. People in our book club are friends with Abigail Spanberger. They know her sister, too, who lives in the neighborhood. Spanberger was our best Congress-person and we’re all behind her, but we can be sure that Musk and his oligarch cronies will dump millions of dollars and thousands of social media posts onto the race to defeat her. We agreed that this must be our focus now, to fight back in whatever ways we know how, to look after each other. And to do what we can to get Abigail elected.
One other note that dawned on me after writing this little essay, while walking our dog this morning. Our neighborhood in Bon Air, VA, a suburb of Richmond, is a sort of middle class/working class paradise. Single family homes, most built back in the 20th Century, quarter-acre yards with little garden plots in the sunny places, cars bought used. We're multi-racial and multi-ethnic and politically diverse, too. No gate in or out. We're teachers and nurses and police and firemen and truckers and IT guys and florists. We chat at the school bus stop, volunteer at the school, shovel each others' snowy driveways, walk each others' wayward pups back home. In all these ways, we're the American Dream come true. You wouldn't think Trump and the GOP would target us, but his moves so far will hurt us, if not now, then soon. So like I said, our main job is to look after each other, like we always have, whatever fresh hell rains down.
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