A reminder about Donald Trump

On the day Saddam Hussein was found, the media ran a photo of his capture. He looked like a pitiful old man with a crazy beard and sawdust in his hair, rousted early out of bed by cruel invaders. A friend of mine rang me the following day and said she felt so sorry for him she wanted to make him dinner. I knew exactly what she meant.

As human beings we bring our humanity to the table of judgement. Sometimes our humanity blinds us. Like Hamlet unable to kill Claudius while he’s praying, the instantaneous images of the moment sometimes make us forget the monsters we are dealing with. That’s a good thing, in a way. It distinguishes us from the bad guys.

That’s one reason I’m glad there are no images of Donald Trump nodding off in court. It might make some of us forget, temporarily anyway, the evil before us. Don’t let the sleepy old man at the defence table fool you, Trump recently praised Al Capone for his ability to murder people he didn’t like.

Donald Trump is the closest thing we have in the United States to pure evil. He is America’s Vladimir Putin. We know what every Republican who supports him doesn’t know, that Trump would happily sacrifice the lives of their daughters, sons, spouses and parents to save himself. He wouldn’t give it a second thought. He is that kind of monster.

Trump is in favour of a nationwide abortion ban and punishment for women who get them. I was recently reminded of how insidious Trump is, and how indifferent to the sufferings of others all so-called “pro-life” Republicans are, by an essay penned on abortion by the late science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin.

I know, like the Pope, I’m an old white guy who never fathered children. I agree, I’m far from qualified on the subject. And that’s precisely why I choose to broach it today. I’m weighing in on abortion for the simple expediency that if I can “get it,” anybody can.

Ursula K Le Guin wrote about what it was like to be a young and pregnant 20-year-old in 1950. Whatever life you dreamed of having, whatever education you longed to get, whatever freedom you hoped to savour every day of your young life, that was all over.

Abortion was illegal. It was out of the question. You were expected to have the child in your parents’ house and care for it in the shadow of public shame and ignominy. The child would forever be labelled illegitimate at best and a bastard at worse. You would forever be labelled a whore. The father of the child could laugh it off and invent a story that he and his friends had all “had” the whore, so nobody really knew who the actual father was anyway.

It would have also meant she would have never had the children she ultimately did have, the ones she wanted, the ones that came later in life when she’d had a chance to live her own life, the children she later cherished and loved, the ones she was eager for. “The life of that fetus,” Le Guin wrote, “would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses.”

To stop this nightmare life from being thrust upon her, she had to go alone and put her life in the hands of a professional criminal who worked in a back alley. Otherwise, “I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have borne a child for them, their child.”

The authorities and theorists and fundamentalist don’t care. They hate and want to punish women for doing what they want to do, or for doing what they secretly do and are ashamed of, having sex out of wedlock.

Ah yes, 1950, the year MAGA Republicans like Trump want to return to, the year they want to resurrect. All this in the name of a blob of protoplasm that has no history, no feelings, no friends, no family, no memory, no self-awareness. Its removal is not a tragedy. “Pro-life” isn’t about babies. It’s about protoplasm. It’s about control of women. It isn’t an old man asleep at the defence table, it’s a slavering monster who would murder you and your whole family, in the manner of Al Capone, in the name of might, misogyny and money.

Donald Trump’s pro-life masquerade is just that, a counterfeit outrage to get votes. It is just one aspect of his hideousness. It betrays his Capone-like urge to destroy lives that stand in his way. Just a reminder. That’s the sleepy old man at the defence table. That’s the banal face of evil. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.