I spent 2019 in two different worlds, writing about two different topics: climate change and the Trump presidency. Here are excerpts from 10 stories, five in his world and five in the real world.
The Trump presidency
Donald Trump leads a nation in prayer. Does Donald Trump believe in God? Should that matter? He certainly believes in himself. He believes in the economy. Golf is like a religion, though it accommodates cheats. Twitter seems like a kind of prayer, for Donald Trump. Repeat “WITCH HUNT” like a decade of the rosary, and eventually it starts to echo around your brain like a belief. You start to believe. Everyone starts to believe. America prays more than any other wealthy country, according to the Pew Research Center. We are a nation of believers.
Evening in America: Trump’s Fourth of July. The United States has turned 243 years old, which is adolescent for an empire (at least when compared with Rome). This might explain the national mood swings and infatuations, the cliques and the clumsiness, the tendency to bully or be bullied. It might explain why the 45th president wanted to fly a series of loud machines over the Mall, and why his haters wanted to fly a blimp of him as an infant, diapered and cranky. The blimp was inflated but never flew.
Fear and gloating in Cincinnati. Oh, people had fun here! They were gleeful. They chanted "LOCK HER UP," and turned to each other and smiled, moving and clapping as if they were at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. ("Free Bird" had played multiple times outside the arena to entertain the epic queue in the hot sun.) Pubescent boys wearing the Infowars logo, soccer moms in pink tops emblazoned with "Women for Trump," a couple of rows of black supporters with T-shirts that said "TRUMP & Republicans ARE NOT RACIST," a group of friends from Middletown (setting of the memoir "Hillbilly Elegy") who'd chartered a limousine to make a night of it - they were so happy to spend hours here, in this hot hockey venue across the river from Kentucky, as the leader of the free world gave a sermon of digressive demagoguery and tell-it-like-it-isms. The president wasn't racist, his people believed; he was an equal-opportunity counterpuncher. Some said they weren't even here for the counterpunching. They were here for the sheer camaraderie, the energy, the excitement. It was validating for people. It was inspiring.
Don’t sleep on Wilbur Ross. The secretary of commerce is 10th in line for the presidency, which is close enough to be important and far away enough to be complacent. Wilbur Ross, the current secretary, is nearly 82, which is old enough to get away with a nap during business hours and young enough to throw on beach khakis, grab a glass of white wine and observe naked people cocooned in plastic wrap at an arts benefit in the Hamptons. He is a quiet man, smart and generous, but he seems detached from reality: too rich to remember how the real world works, too uninterested in his role as commerce secretary to enact much beyond stasis, mortification or bafflement, according to his critics.
THIS IS AN ASSAULT. It was crisp and cloudless in Washington after days of gloomy rain. On one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress began performing its constitutional role with thick solemnity. On the other end, the president was ensconced in the White House, windows decked with red-ribboned wreaths. White Christmas lights twinkled. The televisions were on. Hysterical punctuation and capital letters were the logs on the fire of his persecution.
Top left illustration by Barry Falls. Top right and bottom left photos by Jabin Botsford. Bottom right photos by Elijah Nouvelage. All for The Washington Post.
Climate change
Everything is not going to be okay. Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don't put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor. “It is an immense privilege to be alive at this time,” the poet Alice Major says from Edmonton. “We owe it to ourselves to try as hard as we can to understand what's going on. And to give meaning to it. . . . Only by understanding our lives as meaningful can we hope to create meaningful change.”
Inherit the Earth. When Albert Gore Jr. reaches his 80s, Nina Simone Barrett will be midway through her 30s, and there will be more than 8 billion people on Earth. When she is in her 40s, a flooding event like Hurricane Sandy could threaten New York once every five years. When she is in her 50s, Charleston, S.C., will be experiencing 16 times more tidal floods. This century, her century, the American Southeast is expected to warm up by 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
A prophet of climate change. You might say that the climate problem, while understood through science, can be solved only through faith. Faith in one another. Faith in our ability to do something bold, together. Faith that the pain of change, that the sacrifices required, will lead to a promised land. Does this sound believable? Maybe in some places, to certain people. In Washington, at the climate conference, Katharine Hayhoe was preaching to the choir. But the prophet wasn’t just in town to talk to believers. She was here to talk to Congress.
Words fail. The climate problem is not just scientific. It’s linguistic. If we can agree how to talk and write about an issue that affects us all, maybe we can understand and fix it together. But words can be clumsy tools. They can be too dull to puncture ignorance, or so sharp that people flinch and turn away. Is “change” appropriately neutral, or unjustly neutered? Is an “emergency” still an “emergency” after months or years? Does “catastrophe” motivate people, or make them hide under the bed? How long before words such as “breakdown” and “extinction” lose their bite? And if we keep returning to the dictionary for new words to replace them, will there eventually be any left?
California will never stop burning. You smell it, or think you do. Like a bonfire on a beach. Then you see it in your headlights. Ash. Or maybe insects? The signs are coy at first, on the westbound 118 Freeway, cleaving through sandstone crags that are 70 million years old. The thunderhead of smoke, a purple lesion on the orange twilight, is mysterious but not alarming. But you round a bend near the Santa Susana Pass and the fire is suddenly before you: ruby-red ribbons of flame coiled around dark hills of sagebrush and sumac, accented by the snaking brake lights of Simi Valley traffic. It is unnatural and natural, simultaneously.
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