The other day, the United States in this Trumpian time denied visas so that the Venezuelan team couldn’t play here in the Little League World Series.
That’s right.
We’re now supposed to be terrified at the idea of 12-year-old kids coming to this country to play baseball. The possibility that these preteens might do something nefarious while they’re chasing down fly balls and scooping up grounders is supposed to scare us right down to our socks.
The mortal threat that is children playing baseball joins a lengthy list of other things that Trump and MAGA think should scare us into stupidity.
We’re supposed to be paralyzed with fright by transgender Americans, who account for just slightly more than one-half of one percent of the U.S. population. Before that, we were supposed to quake in our boots at the sight of rainbow-colored beer cans.
And all along we have been meant to tremble at the thought that Hispanic people were coming to this country for the same reasons most of our ancestors did—to build better lives for themselves, their children and their grandchildren. We were supposed to remain so incapacitated by fear that not even the facts that these immigrants committed crimes at half the rate of U.S. citizens and paid twice as much in taxes as they consume in services would stir us to thought or reevaluation.
That’s because, in Trump’s America, facts don’t matter.
It’s the fear that counts. It’s the fear that’s supposed to drive us to do dumb, even self-destructive things. It’s the fear that gives us permission to do things that would seem inconceivable and unpardonable in any other context.
Such as telling a bunch of 12-year-olds that they can’t play the national pastime here.
Trump and MAGA need us to be afraid because that makes us willing, even eager, to turn to a strong man. Fear makes us willing to set aside cherished principles and to embrace notions that would be abhorrent to us in other circumstances.
Frightened people not only don’t think straight, they also don’t ask questions. Fear makes us so much easier to manipulate.
That’s why this president wants to keep us terrified all the time, so frightened that we jump at the sight of multi-colored beer cans or the notion that someone who was born in another country came here to do jobs we don’t want to do ourselves.
He wants us to hyperventilate so much that we accept whatever he says, even when what he says makes no sense.
We swallow it because he promises to save us from the fears he and our own fevered imaginations have conjured up.
I don’t blame Donald Trump alone for this mass panic.
He’s a con man—a great con man.
And like all great con men, he saw something in this national crowd of marks that he could use and take advantage of. He smelled the fear in much of the American public earlier and understood how to manipulate it better than any other demagogue of this jittery age.
It wasn’t always this way.
Once upon a time, Americans weren’t afraid to face the future or to embrace change. We vaulted from being a colony to becoming a superpower in both economic and military terms by investing more heavily in education in the 19th and early 20th centuries than our rivals in Europe and Asia did.
We knew we’d need people willing to work hard to meet the challenges posed by the industrial age and opened our doors and shores to immigrants, transforming the lives and destinies of hundreds of thousands of families.
Including mine.
And including Donald Trump’s.
But that was in another America, one that wasn’t terrified to dream big dreams.
An America that built schools rather than tried to keep them from teaching anything.
An America that welcomed anyone with a strong back and a strong will to work.
That America is, for the moment, gone.
In its place, we have an America that looks for a fresh reason to be frightened with every new dawn and turns, shivering, to a self-proclaimed strong man for protection.
He’s doing his job.
Donald Trump is keeping us safe from the Little League.
Lord, I miss an America that didn’t scare so easily.
