My most recently published book review, of Patrick Strickland’s The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House, 2022), brought into focus once again the damage former president Donald Trump has done to the U.S. and even to refugees arriving here. The book details the efforts by White supremacist vigilantes at our southern border to harry those attempting to escape poverty and threats from criminals by finding safety in the U.S. Egging them on throughout his presidency and still today, Trump labelled the refugees as murderers, drug smugglers, and rapists and did his best, which, admittedly, was grossly ineffective, to halt their entry into the U.S.
It is becoming unavoidably obvious to me that we Americans will, for the foreseeable future, continue discovering previously unsuspected harm done to our country by Trump. So much presidential action, particularly on the diplomatic front, is classified, and the citizenry knows nothing of it. We are shocked by Trump’s disruption of the Supreme Court. We suffer the ongoing impairment of the U.S. Postal Service deliberately inflicted by Trump. We watched in horror as Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election by inciting the January 6 2020 attack on the on the Capitol. What other disasters still lie hidden from us?
We must gird our loins. The worst could very well be yet to come.
Tom Glenn, Writer 