By Sarah Kendzior | June 10, 2024
I was at the pool when Donald Trump became a convicted felon. I was excited: it was nice to be back at the pool after a series of Biblical plagues shut it down.
In 2020, the plague was covid. In 2021, it was still covid, until the pool reopened in late summer, and then it was Canadian wildfires that produced smoke so toxic I swam laps underwater for relief. In 2022, the pool was destroyed by a record flood caused by a once-in-a-millennium storm. In 2023, they were still fixing it.
I figured 2024’s plague would be the billions of underground cicadas that emerge in dual broods every two hundred years. I envisioned their bodies filling the pool as the world circled the drain.
But the cicadas didn’t show. Folks think they died in the 2022 flood. Luck these days is when two catastrophes cancel each other out.
I was lying in the sun when the Trump verdict came. I didn’t know it happened because I left my phone at home. I was listening to Guns N’ Roses on my Walkman and reading a Stephen King novel. It could have been 1991. It should have been 1991.
* * *
In 1991, I was twelve and spent the summer reading my mom’s SPY magazines by the YMCA pool. I wondered if Donald Trump would be indicted like Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley and the Iran-Contra creeps. It seemed strange that Trump was left out while the rest of the SPY roster went down. He’ll have his turn, I figured. I picked up my Stephen King book and my Walkman and my Sun-In hairspray and let the sun hit me with its ozone-free rays.
In 1991, I did not feel threatened by the fact that Trump, a career mobster, had avoided prosecution. He lived in a golden tower, and I went to middle school. The Jeffrey Epstein case wasn’t public, so I didn’t know I was the same age as the trafficked girls Trump allegedly raped.
Aside from SPY, my childhood knowledge of Trump came through TV shows and movies portraying him as a criminal asshole. Trump’s unpaid taxes were the premise of an entire episode of the 1991 children’s series Eerie, Indiana, which also depicted him as The Devil. Kids were expected to know Trump was evil. All Americans knew, until the American media forgot 25 years later.
In 2024, I do not feel safer now that Trump, a career mobster, has finally been convicted of a felony. He can still be president, his criminal cohort walks free, and his conviction came too late. Eight years too late; 33 years too late; my whole life too late.
Trump was first investigated by the Department of Justice in 1973, and they let him go with a slap on the wrist. His criminal activity grew bolder the longer officials let him do it. Trump committed crimes my entire life, cocooned in impunity, until hatching like a butterfly effect in 2016. Transnational autocratic alliances strengthened during his presidency.
His conviction came a half century into his crime spree: long enough time for him to become a template.
Trump is part of an American criminal elite that does not run from the law, but runs for office in order to become the law. They exonerate themselves by changing the definition of crime. A crime ceases being a crime when they are the ones committing it.
They can do this only because controlled opposition lets them. Controlled opposition issues “strong statements” of condemnation but, in reality, countenances sedition, ignores confessions, and blames the American people for anything going wrong. They tweet that America is in danger like they are passive spectators, instead of the few people with the legal power to investigate state crimes.
Sometimes they take breaks from streamlining elite criminal impunity to fund genocide. It’s how Congress likes to bond across the aisle.
My son was with me when Trump became a convicted felon. He’s the same age I was in 1991, reading those SPY magazines by the pool. I thought of the cyclical cicadas, coming and going into a worsening world, creating a new generation before retreating underground.
My son didn’t have his phone at the pool either, because I’m teaching him how to be free. We heard the news when we got home.
“Is this going to change anything?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. He shrugged and picked up his Stephen King book. He’s reading The Stand to see what the end of the world feels like in fictional form.