If you still support Donald Trump, there’s only one place you’re going
I surely do miss Elijah Cummings. My own voice will suffice for a pedestrian indignation, but for what I’m feeling right now only his will do. I mourn the passing of Elijah Cummings, especially at this hour, and I hope you will forgive me for taking up with my inadequate voice a cause that would be far more powerfully served with his. But, just now, I am all I’ve got.
I must begin by reminding those among you who go by the name of Christian what your own holy book declares. Those of you who go by that name and who sold your souls for a child rapist might be surprised to learn that abortion isn’t mentioned in the Bible – but widows are. Widows are mentioned more than 75 times in the Bible, in fact.
So I need to ask you, when your child rapist stood before a seething mob of mouth-breathing cretins in Michigan and mocked the name of a recently widowed woman, a woman in deep mourning for her lost beloved husband, a woman too full of pain to contemplate a first Christmas without him, a woman too full of heartache to acknowledge anger for the hurt the child rapist had done her – how did that make you feel? Were you proud of your child rapist? Were you proud to have your name associated with his? Was he making America great again? Look at me when I speak to you! The woman your cager of children was mocking is named Debbie Dingell, wife of John, a hero of World War II! Look me in the eye and tell me how proud you are of this cager of children!
Did you stand proud and salute the flag when he mocked her gratitude for placing that same flag at half staff, when in fact he had nothing to do with it? Did it fill you with pride to know that he lied when he said she called him on the phone after her husband died and begged him to lower the flag, when in fact he called her? Are you standing taller and straighter as Americans right now to know that he told you he arranged to have her husband lie in state in the Capitol rotunda, even though that was a lie, even though John Dingell never lay in state in the rotunda, even though if it were true that is up to Congress and not your separator of children and families? Did that fill your eyes with the red, white and blue tears of patriotism?
Did your hearts swell with the music of a stirring, patriotic song when your destroyer of family businesses, when your cheater of charities, when your deceiver of defrauded students, when your draft-dodging pig-god suggested that a man who served his nation with courage and valor in World War II is in hell, that he’s not looking down on us but looking up? Did you laugh at his little joke? Did that give you something to proudly hang your MAGA hat on? Are you a better person today than you were yesterday because your wife-cheating payer of hookers tore up the dignity of a mourning widow and cast it like filthy meat to his braying pack of slavering idolaters to snarl and fight over? Answer me! Look me in the eye and tell me that is your idea of a leader of a righteous nation, you God-forsaken cowards!
I need to know how it is with you, how you can believe that the majestic seat of George Washington’s “deeds and not words” is so well served by this creature of lies, how the chair of Lincoln, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is improved and made whole by this tweeter of division and insults, how Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit is so blindly surrendered to this pulpit for a bully. Was there ever a time when you were sufficiently sane that you would have hated what you have become? For some of you, I believe there was such a time.
I do not know if your heaven and your hell are real, but I can promise you one thing. If you’re right and I’m wrong, then I don’t know which one I am going to, but I do know which one you’re going to. And I can promise you this: it won’t be to the place from which Elijah Cummings and John Dingell are both looking down on us all right now.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.