JON ZAL

Listen, I was willing to put it all behind me … the entire four-year-long grift and deadly disaster that has been the Trump presidency. I just wanted Donald Trump gone.

While some debated whether or not Biden’s DOJ should pursue criminal charges against Trump, against his administration, and against his family, I realized that I no longer much cared one way or the other. After four long years of feeling nothing but hatred, disgust and rage for Trump, for his wretched offspring, for his sycophantic enablers, and for his ignorant, brainwashed, racist followers, I was exhausted. I had allowed them all to sap more than their fair share of my energy, and I was willing to give them not one more ounce of it. I just wanted to put this awful chapter in American history behind me, welcome the new beginning that the Biden/Harris Administration represents, and embrace a return to a world in which the president of the United States is not 100% batshit crazy, racist, cruel, incompetent, and a clear-and-present danger to everyone on the planet.

As far as I was concerned, Trump and his entire cult could go spend the rest of their sad lives crying “No fair!” at the clouds while he bilked them out of more money with whatever new scam he could devise. Good riddance.

All of that changed on Wednesday.
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Written November 8, 2020

On election night in 2016, I sent my then-11-year-old daughter to bed with the assurance that, despite her concerns about how things appeared to be unfolding, there was no chance Donald Trump would win, and that she would wake in the morning to learn that America had finally elected a woman to its highest office.

When I rose the next morning, chief among the many gut punches that Donald Trump’s victory delivered was the realization that I now had to tell her that I was wrong … that a vile pig of man whose blatant racism and misogyny are among his most defining characteristics had been elevated to the Oval Office, and that his infinitely more qualified female opponent had been passed over thanks in part to a slavery-era relic that, twice during my lifetime, has awarded the presidency to an unqualified Republican for whom the majority of Americans did not vote.
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You would think that, having spent five decades on this planet, and all of that time as an American citizen, and most of my adult life as a Democrat, I would have, by now, purposely drowned in a bathtub any remaining vestiges of my political optimism and idealism, but here we are.

In the wake of this week’s news that Senator Kamala Harris has restructured her campaign to go all-in on Iowa, I feel compelled to make a case for her candidacy … and even if you’re undecided, or you’ve already made up your mind to support someone else, there are good reasons for all of us to keep her in this race.

It seemed like it was going to be so good, didn’t it? That first “Stupid Watergate” movie? The stolen election, the illegitimate president committing obstruction of justice in public over and over, the Large Adult Son tweeting out evidence of collusion with Russia, the American hero poised to take them all down? Man, I really enjoyed those first two acts.