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The Inauguration Speech Trump Should Give (But Won’t)
I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway.
Nov 22, 2024
My inbox is full of lament (and encouragement).
My Instagram feed is full of anger and “the arc of the moral universe bends slow but…”
My Facebook brims with exhortations to focus on the positive, on what we can control, on the next fight.
I live in a poor Democratic stronghold in southeastern Connecticut. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris won our state by more than 200,000 votes. Our seven paltry electoral votes went blue. Here, Jill Stein got a lot more votes than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but nowhere near enough to swing the Nutmeg State red.
43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy.
I didn’t plant a Harris/Walz sign on my front walk. I didn’t knock on doors in Pennsylvania. I didn’t give any money in response to the desperate and constant text messages I received from Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and dozens of other Democratic pen pals. I also never figured out how to stop those texts from crowding onto my phone.
Now that the election—the longest for Donald Trump (he started campaigning and fomenting insurrection even before the White House door whacked him on the bottom in 2021) and the shortest (just 107 days) for Kamala Harris—is over, there’s a small voice in my head asking why I didn’t go in hard for Kamala’s politics of JOY.
I love joy! I love her laugh! But I also know the answer: 43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy. Continued shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel didn’t make me happy. For all their good vibes alchemy, the Harris/Walz campaign failed to depart from the Biden administration’s blank check for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s version of saturation bombing.
There’s a lot her campaign should have/could have/might have done differently (if they had more time, if they had listened to different strategists) in terms of their ground game, how they spent their money, and who they focused on. There’s already a cottage industry of podcasters, pundits, and policy wonks at work figuring out just how and where the Harris/Walz campaign went wrong. But at the end of the day, of course, she lost because Trump won, because white men, atheist men, born-again men, Catholic men, rich men, poor men, men of all colors voted for him. They embraced his misogyny; his nativism; his racism; his Teflon-Don persona; his tall walls and barbed wire; his hatred of trans kids and gender as a spectrum; and his well-financed, loudly declared, legislatively-wired hatred of just about anyone who isn’t like him. Or maybe, just maybe, they held their noses against that foul hate-fest and voted for him because of some small, single, shining promise that rang out for them amid the cacophony of his raucous, roadshowing campaign. Who knows?
I’m not a pundit, a podcaster, or a policy wonk. I’m not a Democratic Party insider. In fact, I’ve often (but not in 2024) voted Green. I’m a mother of three bright, opinionated kids, two of whom don’t fit neatly into the rigid gender-presentation box now mandated by the Republican leadership. All three of those gorgeous human beings love peace and kindness. They’re friendly and trusting, as well as sharp and capable of sniffing out hypocrisy and equivocation. The day after the election, I sent them off to school with a warm lecture on staying true to our values of kindness and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person—even those who voted for Trump. “No one we know would vote for him,” my son asserted with the confidence of the young. He is incorrect. More than 75 million people in this country voted for him. We certainly know some of them… Some of them are our friends.
I have to keep explaining to my kids why Donald Trump won and what having him at the helm of our government (again) will mean—for the next four years (or forever). It’s not an easy task. But I have to try because I’ve got three reasons not to luxuriate in despair and nihilism. Instead, I have to tap into the power of my imagination to get me through the rough days ahead.
Imagining Our Way Through the Nightmare
They say that we have to imagine a thing before we can make it a reality. The moon shot, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (first imagined almost 20 years before it took place in 1963), robots, nuclear weapons and the anti-nuclear movement (both imagined, however inadequately, before they became realities), solar panels: all were ideas, dreams, or even nightmares first.
Amid my own fracturing in this post-election moment, all the shards of sadness and disappointment, I’ve been seeking out friends and strangers in a structured but informal way. In one community conversation, someone suggested we hold an inauguration un-watch party where we would share our vision for the next four years. I immediately latched onto that bit of wisdom, hoping we might indeed organize such an event with a booming sound system, poetry, pomp, and a podium.
Since that idea was shared, I’ve also been crafting the 47th president’s inauguration speech in my head—not the one he’ll give, of course, but the speech I wish he would make. I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway. Maybe getting them out into the world will give me the energy I need to do my part in bringing such words to life in spite of him. So, here goes:
A Speech for the Ages (All of Them)
My fellow Americans, and all those of you who still look to the United States as a land of opportunity, I, Donald J. Trump, am inaugurating a new era today. I’m stepping down from this post, which I barely won. My whole political career started out as a gag, a gig, a side project in my vast empire of hustle and hucksterism, and here I stand again on Inauguration Day. How wild is that?
Even crazier, this very day, the nation also honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And maybe it’s the ghost of that great justice-seeker that’s led me to make a very different speech than I planned or you expected.
I wanted to drain the swamp, but I’m the one who feels drained right now. Ditch diggers the world over will tell you that it’s hard work. I’m exhausted and so, later today, I’m headed home to Mar-a-Lago (or to jail). Before I go, I want to share a few thoughts—one last weave—with all of you. So here are some of the mistakes and missteps I’ve made and the new thoughts I’ve recently been having.
The Environment: I’m a city guy, a golf-course guy. Nature makes me uncomfortable. It’s too big and I don’t understand it. Once in office, I wanted to smash it, drill it for its riches, and make it smaller. But I’ve rethought that. We should, I now think, protect nature. The United States is such a big country, and we’re lucky to still have any nature at all, or maybe it’s less luck and more the hard work of environmentalists, but that’s a story for another day.
I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible.
Racism: How loud can a dog whistle be and still be a dog whistle? Kamala Harris had a little more than 107 days to run against me. The missteps, delays, and infighting in the Democratic Party establishment were delightful to watch, but my campaign made it all about misogynoir—that’s a new word for me and one I had to practice saying for this speech. Throughout my career as a real-estate developer, a man about New York, a TV personality, and a politician, I have been a racist. I still am a racist.
I only have a short time to unlearn a lifetime of prejudice, and I might not get all the way there. Of course, this is a fantasy speech, but even in such a situation people don’t transform overnight. I have a lot to atone for, but Black women deserve a special apology from me. I am sorry. If I have any money after this election campaign and all my lawsuits, I will gift some of it to Howard University in Kamala Harris’ name and more to support whatever Stacey Abrams is up to right now.
Women: There’s no excuse, no apology I can make for how I’ve treated you. So, I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to make this suggestion to other men: Don’t follow my lead. Don’t become a Trump. Being a man shouldn’t mean using your strength to hurt or denigrate others. I’m a misogynist and don’t deserve to be president.
This election demonstrated that, as issues, reproductive rights cut deep. I’ve stood on both sides of that chasm (even in the same speech or at least on the same day), promising the Christian right abortion bans, telling awful lies about late-term abortions, and then backing away from all of that in a word salad of vagueness.
About babies, uteruses, fetuses, and choice, I have nothing to say. I have no authority when it comes to them and should do nothing but listen.
War: I tapped into something fundamental in my speeches on the campaign trail, didn’t I? Besides surfacing the hatred, homophobia, and misogyny that so many Americans have, I also struck an odd note about militarism. As you know, I’m no pacifist, but I did pick up just how dismayed and angry so many Americans are by the money this country spends globally fighting wars, donating weapons, and offering military aid. I then turned that discomfort into a gross nativism to serve my ego, fitting it into my narrative of American exceptionalism—keeping people out, while keeping our money and weaponry in, and leaving the otherwise shut border door slightly ajar for the cheap goods of the world. It hardly matters that none of that will work, since it played so well in Peoria.
This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd.
I will say, though, that the United States should not be supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, a war that’s killing so many civilians, destroying so much infrastructure, and seeding future grievances and conflicts you’ll be dealing with for generations. Good luck with all that. I’ll be over here working on my golf handicap (and it honestly does need work).
Beyond the Middle East, the United States clearly needs to rethink its relationship with the rest of the world and, believe you me, I’m not the guy to do that kind of hard work.
Immigrants: I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible. Did you know that your lifestyles wouldn’t last 20 minutes without all those illegally employed at low wages doing dangerous, difficult jobs for major corporations? When was the last time you slaughtered and dressed a chicken, changed the sheets on king-sized beds and cleaned rooms in a big hotel, took care of a whole nursing home full of elderly people, or worked in an industrial laundry? Everyone loves going apple-picking in the fall, but have you ever picked apples for a 12-hour shift? Of course, I should talk, given that I employed lots of undocumented workers across my many businesses.
In truth, for all the storm and fury I created over illegal immigrants, our economy needs workers. That same economy creates enduring inequities and spews out enough climate-changing greenhouse gasses to propel people in the Global South off their lands and out of their communities, searching for better prospects here in the U.S. The last time I was in office, I separated kids from their families and made a traumatizing mess that people still haven’t recovered from. I don’t want to do it again!
Trans People’s Rights: If you haven’t watched the ads that my campaign put out about trans people, you’re lucky. They’re unconscionable and show that I’ll stop at nothing to get elected, not even demonizing a small, vulnerable group of Americans. It was like scapegoating Shakers or Zoroastrians! Instead of spending $400 million on ads that vilified trans people, I literally could have given each trans person more than $1,000, because they represent about under 2% of the U.S. population. So, here’s what I’m going to say now from this huge platform you’ve given me: Trans people are people. They deserve freedom, have the right to make a living, stay personally safe, play sports, go to the bathroom, and be left alone. The Republican Party writ large should stop being so transphobic, a word I just learned that feels weird in my mouth.
Electoral Reform: This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd. We worked harder and spoke louder to fewer people on more divisive and fear-pitched issues. Some were literally drowning in text ads, mailbox stuffers, emails, and phone calls. Others barely knew there was an election coming. This has to change. Our electoral system is broken, not because of phantom ballot-box stuffers or other gross lies I told, but because of the Electoral College and the outsized influence of corporate interests. There are smart people out there with reasonable ideas about how to change that. We should listen to them—and I should stop talking!
The Economy: They say, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and they’re right. I flogged that horse hard on the campaign trail. What does it say about us that cheap gas, cheap eggs, and cheap consumer goods all come at the expense of the damage I’ve promised to do to this world? Imagine for a moment the real expense, environmental and otherwise, of cheap and plentiful gas and groceries, and the havoc my economic policies will wreak internationally.
Being an American is expensive. Being a Hegemon is climate destroying. Living a First World lifestyle exacts a huge toll on the environment. Nationally and individually, we should be paying massive reparations, indemnities, and fines for the damage our domestic and foreign economic policies have caused. That money could buy a heck of a lot of sea walls, windmills, and electric mass transit systems as we make meaningful changes to mitigate the coming climate disaster and build resiliency. Of course, I’m too old to do anything except to get out of the way so that the work that I held at bay for too long can start in earnest.
And One Last Thing, America: I am the Great Disrupter and I almost broke America. There are those who would say it’s been broken for a long time. Those who would say that it was broken from day one. You can debate that to your heart’s content. For me, this all started as a big scam, an ego-boosting game, another hustle. Still, as you can see, I learned a thing or two along the way. Now, I plan to get out of the way and only hope that all of you who voted for me can learn something, too.
(If only!)
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The Democratic Party Is Toast If It Doesn’t Earn Back the Trust of the Working Class
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner by consistently naming and picking visible fights with powerful culprits.
Nov 22, 2024
A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former U.S. President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.
“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”
Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports.
“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”
At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.
My father would never dehumanize and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites—the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party.
Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for—and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership.
He doesn’t feel like they give a damn about people like him. I’m disinclined to try to persuade him otherwise. Because it’s clear as day that if Democratic Party leaders could swap the party’s historic base of working-class voters for more affluent voters and still win elections, they would.
This is not hyperbole. This is what they have shown us and told us over and over again—in their policy priorities, messaging choices, and electoral campaigns. They say it out loud. In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024.
And even when it appeared to work in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when Democrats won over sufficient numbers of suburban defectors, harnessing a momentous backlash against Trump, the risks were apparent.
In a little-noticed April 2018 post on the election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, analyst Nathaniel Rakich showed how, at that time, “on average (and relative to partisan lean), Democrats [were] doing better in working-class areas than in suburban ones.”
Rakich showed that Democrats had roughly similar odds of winning over working-class voters as they did affluent voters and that they would likely see some positive results no matter which set of voters they invested resources into reaching.
But Rakich warned that such positive results could be self-reinforcing: If Democrats invested only in winning affluent suburban voters, those efforts would produce some results, and this would bolster Democrats’ resolve that they had chosen wisely. Schumer’s strategy would seem to be validated. But what about the working-class voters who weren’t prioritised?
Three years later, in March 2021, Republican Representative Jim Banks sent a strategy memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, arguing that the Republican Party had become “the party supported by most working-class voters.” Banks advocated that the GOP should explicitly embrace this realignment to “permanently become the Party of the Working Class.”
Banks wasn’t using “working class” as a euphemism for white working class. The memo pointed to movement of lower-income Black and Latino voters to Trump from 2016 to 2020 at numbers that should have seriously alarmed Democrats.
A striking feature of the memo is the thinness of its proposed policy solutions to attract working-class voters. While it suggests calling out “economic elitism,” it identifies the villains supposedly responsible for working-class grievances as immigrants, China, and “woke college professors.” Big Tech is called out only because of its “egregious suppression of conservative speech.”
The GOP’s actual policy agenda—from weakening unions to deregulation to lowering taxes on the wealthy to further gutting of public education and more—is a disaster for working-class people.
But a head-to-head comparison of policy agendas is not how most voters make up their minds about which candidate to back. Most Americans are struggling, with a large majority living paycheck to paycheck. In such a context, Trump’s core competency is his intuitive read of popular discontent. His central message boils down to: “I will wreak havoc on the elites who have wreaked havoc on our country.”
While Trump and Republicans are diametrically opposed to progressive economic policies, Trump excels at naming culprits. He’s adept at consistently tapping into generalized “anti-elite” anger and resentment, typically weaving it together with racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, and—especially in 2024—transphobia.
Ambiguous anti-elitism—again, focused primarily on cultural elites—is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians.
It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.
And let’s be honest, affluent liberals can be incredibly condescending. Vulnerable groups are targeted in part to tell a story that “Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbour prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.”
Before you go throwing trans people or immigrants or anyone else under the bus (because MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said we should), consider the possibility that these attacks are weak sauce when compared with the popular appeal Democrats could have if they decided to consistently name more compelling villains.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports. Trump’s manoeuvre to misdirect resentment only works when Democrats refuse to tell a compelling story that makes sense of working-class voters’ real grievances.
But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that [Bernie Sanders’] reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate.
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket.
Even as President Joe Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust.
The reality is that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish—and what more they attempted to do—primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way.
Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal.
Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.
Banks’ strategy memo told Democrats exactly how Trump and the GOP would win in 2024, and then they proceeded to do it.
So when can we read the strategy memo for how Democrats intend to stop the bleed of working-class voters and win them back?
We’ve had the framework in our hands for as long as we’ve had Trump. It’s easy to find. Google: “Bernie Sanders.”
By circling the wagons to defeat Sanders (twice), the Democratic Party establishment imagined it was making itself more palatable to highly prized affluent swing voters. But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that this reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate. Even The New York Times’ “moderate” columnist David Brooks finally gets it now.
It should now be abundantly clear that if Democrats do not learn to speak to and earn the trust of working-class people like my father—and people who are far more alienated than him—the party is toast. That means standing up visibly and vocally for working people and picking open fights with powerful culprits. Ultimately, it means confronting and reversing the central crisis underlying the “populist moment” we live in—runaway inequality—by delivering big for America’s working class.
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The Disabled Community’s Election-Season Message to America: Don’t Box Us Out
We deserve to not just survive, but to thrive. And we’ll fight like hell, and vote like hell, until we get everything we deserve.
Oct 26, 2024
It’s been a hell of a year for everyone. Record-breaking natural disasters have decimated entire cities, gun violence continues to plague our schools and public spaces with little-to-nothing done to stop it. Grocery and rent prices are high, wages are low, the U.S. war machine rages across the globe while we have no choice but to foot the bill, and yet another major election looms.
For disabled folks across the country, these issues and more have never been more amplified. The reality for our community is that disabled people are exhausted because we’re being left behind with no choice but to fight for our survival in a world that isn’t designed for it. We’re being forced to grieve because our friends and family are dying—deaths that are often avoidable. We’re still being misrepresented in the media, still without adequate access both in physical spaces and in the digital realm, and all the while our needs aren’t being heard. 2024 has proven, once again, that we as a community are being cast aside. But what those in power don’t realize is that while they ignore us, we’re organizing. We are making it known that we’re tired of being forgotten, and we’re ready to fight.
Right now in the final days of the election, we’re seeing politicians going about business as usual—touting plans for the country, states, and local communities that sound appealing but often lack substance and detail. That in itself is frustrating and disheartening, but disabled folks aren’t even seeing themselves in the conversation. We aren’t at the table in any way. Candidates aren’t including disabled people in decision-making processes when it comes to policy and campaign platforms. Disability orgs nationwide have approached campaigns to ask candidates about the issues facing our community, and are being met with lackluster responses; in many cases, no response at all. We are being neglected by those in power, even as we continue to raise our voices about what we need.
The disability community is not a monolith, but we are a legitimate voting bloc and one that demands to be taken seriously.
The recent devastating hurricanes across the South have shown us not just the horrific consequences of our inaction on climate change, but also that disabled folks are being boxed out of disaster preparedness measures and training. How can disabled people survive these storms if there’s no plan in place for how to save us? Saving ourselves only goes so far when there’s no consideration for our well-being in the plans that local and state governments make. Emergency resources are often inaccessible, leaving many out of reach of help that they desperately need. Disabled folks are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured during a disaster—that in itself is a crisis, and one that we are being left alone to navigate.
Disabled people are also being forced into poverty at frightening rates. As the cost of living continues to increase across the board, the cost of survival for disabled folks is at an all-time high. People have to choose between full-time employment or government assistance for services they need to live; there is no middle ground here. Thousands of disabled people across the country are being paid subminimum wages, with hundreds of businesses allowed to do so thanks to the legality of 14c certificates. Over 700,000 people across the country are on waiting lists for in-home care Medicaid waivers that in many cases have left them with no choice but to live in nursing homes. All the while, states like Texas, which has over 300,000 people on its waiting list, boast budget surpluses in the tens of billions. Funding of these waivers are given the lowest priority, even while advocates beg lawmakers to do something. Anything.
For multiply marginalized disabled folks, like Black disabled people and trans disabled people, their lives are at greater risk due to law enforcement interactions and dangerous legislation than ever before. Fifty percent of those killed by law enforcement are disabled, and 55% of Black disabled men are likely to be arrested by 28 years old. The killing of Sonya Massey in July shows plainly, as do countless other examples, that Black disabled folks are not safe when interacting with police.
Legislation that targets the LGBTQ+ community has a significant impact on disabled folks as well, with the anti-trans legislation being introduced and enacted in states across the country leaving trans disabled folks at risk of not receiving care that they need. And we know that transgender people are more likely to be disabled than cisgender people.
And let’s not forget about one of the biggest threats to disabled autonomy that there is—voter suppression. Across the country, hundreds of anti-voter laws have been introduced and in many cases passed, which disproportionately affect disabled voters and prevent them from participating in Democracy. In Alabama, SB1 prohibited voters from receiving assistance with absentee ballots, which specifically targeted disabled Alabamians who rely on assistance from care workers to cast their vote in elections. SB1 is just one example of the over 400 anti-voter bills that have been introduced in recent years.
Where does this leave us today? Exhausted. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up. The disability community is not a monolith, but we are a legitimate voting bloc and one that demands to be taken seriously. We are a powerful community of people with a shared identity that has empowered us like never before. The disability justice movement, which centers self-determination and emphasizes that ableism is a form of oppression that is linked to other forms experienced by the most marginalized among us, has grown exponentially in recent years. Activists across the country are fighting on behalf of all of us to be seen and heard. We’re working to shift the lens on disability—to be seen as more than just one thing. We’re running for office and assuming positions of leadership. We’re launching our own organizations, advocacy groups, media companies, and news publications because that’s what we need to do to make sure we’re being counted.
And so, in the last weeks of the election, if there’s one message the disability community has, it’s this: Don’t box us out. Don’t ignore us. Because we might be tired, but we’re here. We’re fed up. And we deserve the autonomy we’ve been fighting for day in and day out. We deserve to not just survive, but to thrive. And we’ll fight like hell, and vote like hell, until we get everything we deserve. 2024 be damned.
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