We are young enough to have most of our lives ahead of us, and already we are tired of what Donald Trump has done to the way we look at one another.
He entered our lives before most of us could vote. We have grown up watching people become enemies over things that ought to summon some ordinary human concern. Someone is hurt, and before we can grieve, we are expected to establish whose side they were on. We find this exhausting. More than that, we find it heartbreaking.
Renee Good was an American citizen killed by an ICE officer. Alex Pretti was an American citizen killed by federal immigration officers. Officials portrayed them as dangerous aggressors, offering accounts that video evidence contradicted. Reuters verified footage showing Pretti holding a phone and an agent removing his holstered gun before he was shot.
These people had lives that were important to them. They expected to have more time. Their families deserved answers, yet Minnesota investigators waited months for federal authorities to turn over previously withheld evidence. We cannot understand the demand that we speak about this with greater restraint than the government exercised toward the people who died.
Then we are asked to make room for another exception. A civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll; the judgment was upheld on appeal. The Epstein disclosures brought further questions about accountability: the Justice Department initially omitted interview records containing an allegation against Trump, later attributing the omission to a coding error. That allegation remains unverified and was denied by the White House. The omission warrants scrutiny; it does not itself prove a deliberate cover-up.
We want the truth established honestly. We want powerful people subjected to the seriousness they demand from everyone else. It is difficult to grow up being taught about consent and responsibility while watching both become negotiable around a president.
We are trying to afford ordinary lives. Meanwhile, Reuters estimated that Trump and his family gained at least $2.3 billion from their principal cryptocurrency ventures after his return to office, raising conflicts between private enrichment and the administration’s power over the industry. We wonder how much more they need, and why public service so often seems to leave the public watching somebody else’s family prosper.
We watched him try to overturn an election he lost. We have watched him take control of the Kennedy Center’s leadership and direct efforts to purge the Smithsonian of what his administration calls improper ideology. Even the places where a country might examine itself, encounter beauty, or learn something uncomfortable must apparently answer to his preferences.
But what hurts most is how far this reaches into our relationships.
Some of the people who support him are people we love. We know their kindness in other circumstances. We remember when talking to them did not require deciding which subjects we could survive discussing. We do not want to reduce them to their vote. We want to understand how the people we know can excuse things we cannot bear.
Their frustrations may be real. Our institutions have failed people. We can acknowledge that without accepting cruelty as a remedy, or believing that every grievance becomes justified when Trump gives it a target.
We want a future in which disagreement leaves something intact between us. We want to fall in love, make things, find work that matters, and know our neighbors without being continually instructed whom to fear. We want another person’s suffering to reach us while there is still something we can do.
That is what lies beneath our anger. We still care about the possibility of a shared life. We hate watching him divide it into smaller and more hostile pieces, then ask to be thanked for protecting us from one another.
We have a long time left to live together.
Fuck Trump.
