Donald Trump is insignificant

I’m Gordon Chaffin, a dog-walking community volunteer and advocate who nerds out on infrastructure. This is my newsletter with local news and researched opinions.

Back to Basics on Perspective and Political Struggle

My first nephew was born on November 1st this year while I was staying with my parents in a rental within walking distance of my brother’s home. This was a heart-filling experience, especially because I don’t have children. A few days later, I was disappointed that my fellow Americans gave Donald Trump a second presidential term. The future my nephew was born into took on a foreboding haze. At the same time, however, I felt chastened by the need to fight for his future.

In addition to my nephew’s birth, my trip to his home in Seattle’s Key Peninsula featured perspective-setting sights. I visited just a small portion of Washington’s Olympic National Park. We had time to see Lake Crescent, a 600-foot-deep lake originally carved between mountain peaks by glaciers millions of years ago and then separated from its sister lake by a landslide 7,000 years ago. Native Americans in the area speculated that gods became angry and tossed the earth down, creating the division. Donald Trump and his sycophants have ideas and motivations I find immoral, ignorant, and insultingly shortsighted. Still, his motley crew is nothing compared to the glaciers and earthen ecosystems that re-create human landscapes.

I didn’t get to visit the park itself, but Mount Rainier was visible from a long distance during the 2 days in 2 weeks that it wasn’t raining or cloudy. What an insanely tall place, not even that grand compared to global leaders on height and scale.

This is not the first time Trump ascended during a perspective-granting trip with family. In early November 2016, I visited the sights of Arizona with my parents. During the daylight hours of that year’s General Election Day, we visited Petrified Forest National Park. Centrally located in that state’s high desert, Petrified Forest is a barren landscape of rock formations created by flash-flooding 200 million years ago when rain forests populated present-day Arizona. The smothering happened quickly, and time’s passage created subsequent sediment compression. Weathering and natural climate changes followed, exposing 200-million-year-old tree rocks strewn across a windy desert. The tree rocks are preserved uncannily, and lasting human impacts are limited to Native American dwellings preserved or restored by the National Park Service. Later that week, we visited the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. While the shock of Donald Trump’s first election win that evening was real, I was less alarmed by the perspective that his Suicide Squad is meaningless on these geological timescales.

Despair and nihilism are possible reactions to these old-ass tree rocks and the deep-ass lakes glaciers carved — the imperceptible machinations of hundreds of millions of years of Mother Nature. Trump and company may be insignificant on that timescale, but so are we! And people with bad ideas will not be inconsequential in the timeframe relevant to us in our day! Especially those of us who reside in and love Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans have terrible ideas and misinformed bigotry for our neighbors. We could be stripped of local self-government and enjoy reduced autonomy to do things as basic as collecting residential trash. Speaker Mike Johnson, Leader John Thune, and Captain Catastrophe down Pennsylvania Avenue NW threaten the Civil Rights victories of three-plus generations of Washingtonians who’ve made progress with Home Rule. What is to say for us who love this place? Should we move across Eastern, Southern, or Western Avenues — or across the Potomac?!? Should those who can afford to pack up their things to preserve self-government and win Congressional representation with a U-Haul?

I’ve chosen to use the perspective of the old-ass rocks, the big-ass earth seemingly indifferent to human endeavor to source resilience and wonder rather than hopelessness. We may be insignificant compared to something like the Grand Canyon, but we are not inconsequential. Human knowledge has unleashed incredibly good things, and, unfortunately, science has proven that our activities can harm what appears to be invulnerable flora and fauna. We destroy habitats that force extinction upon linchpin species and emit pollutants that drastically re-orient climate changes in ways that harm fellow humans and threaten our prosperity.

We are both powerful today and nearly impotent in the long run, but I believe the sum of our short, little lives is a force of change capable of anything. That’s our story. We have to work together, we have to become more understanding of each other, and we have to take solace that this is a generational relay race. Our job is to do the best we can and pass on to our children — nephews, and nieces — marginally fewer challenges to deal with and more tools to do so than we possess.

Let’s go back to basics. Trump’s “I alone can fix it” is empirically false and morally vacuous, and his “America First” mentalities are folly. I have more anxiety and urgency than I would’ve with a Harris-Walz victory in November 2024 and split power on Capitol Hill. But, we all got nothing on the rocks the gods throw down to split million-year-old lakes. I’ve chosen to use as much of my time, energy, and money as possible to try to improve the world in the ways I believe are moral and just. I try to practice self-care and constant learning to chart my course more precisely. I hope you will do the same. See you all out there on the picket lines, polling booths, and community meetings.

DISCLAIMER: All opinions and analyses in this newsletter are those solely of Gordon Chaffin and do not represent his employer or community groups with which he’s affiliated.