My Father Could Not Have Survived Trump’s America

In this first horrific year of the second Trump regime, friends keep making the same observation that I’ve had: that our late parents couldn’t have survived this.

Trump’s devastation of our country, our constitution, and the world order would have upset them so deeply, they could not have tempered their outrage and disappointment. Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” cynicism would have swept them away.

That would certainly be true for my father. Had Don Trimble been alive today, the election and reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency would have killed him.

Don died in 2011, one month short of his 95th birthday, after living through the tumult of the 20th century. Although Dad evolved with a changing America, Trump’s United States of Cruelty would have been too much for him. Don’s undependable heart would have detonated.

My father believed in a politics of compassion. Trump’s narcissism leads only to callousness and spite.

Dad grew up in 3,000-person Toppenish, Washington, surrounded by family—solid, kind, church-going Republicans. Early on, Don began to look outward. With a scientist’s brain, he worked his way through college as a hard-rock miner, graduating with a geology degree in 1939.

The two Dons—

my father,

Donald Eldon Trimble, and his father,

Donald Enoch Trimble.

After Don’s World War II service, he heard that the US Geological Survey was hiring in Denver at the magnificent salary of $2300 a year. He moved, within two years married the office clerk-typist—my mother—and spent more than thirty years as a USGS field geologist.

Don spent World War II in the South Pacific, commanding an anti-aircraft battery, waiting on beaches in Australia and New Guinea for a Japanese invasion that never came.

Dad and his fellow scientists pored over wild country across the West, then returned home to make meaning of their notes and maps. Their reports verged on exploration; a younger geologist summed up my father as “a latter-day John Wesley Powell.”

Don and a sturgeon, washed up along the shore of the Columbia River, where he was doing fieldwork in the Portland, Oregon area in the early 1950s.

I grew up believing that civil servants do visionary work.

Trump sees them as “rogue bureaucrats.”

Like any good scientist ready to challenge assumptions, Dad’s politics evolved with new data. This landed him far from his conservative roots. He attributed this shift to my brother, whose life sparked my father’s evolution from small-town Republican to passionate believer in the Democrats’ societal safety-net.

Don had adopted my mother’s five-year-old son, Michael, when my parents married. Mike was labeled “retarded” as a kid, then “paranoid schizophrenic” in adolescence. He was committed to the Colorado State Hospital when I was six and never lived at home again. He died in tragic circumstances many years ago.

As Dad later explained to anyone who would listen, he learned from Mike that we can’t all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. His tutorial went like this. Mike was born needing help from his community, while society was ready to brand him a failure and sideline him as a threat. I was born eight years later with the jackpot luck of a stable emotional baseline and conventional intelligence.

This chasm between possibilities and the need to compassionately address that gap turned Dad into a social liberal. He maintained remarkable empathy for the likes of his troubled stepson throughout the turmoil of America’s next fifty-five years and grew ever more disgusted with our abandonment of those in need. In the 1960s, Don said he would have been protesting in the streets if he had been a young Black man. In his nineties, he emphatically described himself as a “radical Democrat.”

The Trumpian anti-intellectual stereotype of masculinity veers in another direction—that of the cowboy glorified in 1950s westerns and the scripted faux-billionaire of The Apprentice. This “ideal” man is driven to possess and dominate—quick to defend his property and suspicious of government officials and educated experts. Americans repeatedly elect to the presidency men who play to this role.

Trump’s MAGA movement takes this distortion of American values to a new extreme. When you demonize everyone but straight white male Christian capitalists, meanness is inevitable and bullying acceptable. And so: shift ever more wealth to the top, leaving the poor and middle class to fend for themselves; deport the brown-skinned people; fire climate scientists; defund human rights advocates; deny the very existence of trans kids; ban books.

I know how my father would react to the Trump administration’s brutal policies built on “alternative facts.” This deeply empathetic and moral man’s disgust at the greed and graft we now see daily would have left him heartbroken. Each capitulation to the regime—as members of Congress, prestigious law firms, premier universities, and the wealthiest CEOs all groveled and caved—would have fanned my father’s anger. Trump’s lies and misogyny and racism would have so enraged and depressed my elderly father, I’m sure his body would have simply given out.

Don Trimble is not here for Trump to kill.

In this new year, I can only hope to use the model of my father’s passion and integrity to fight for a kinder future for our beloved community.

Don and Steve Trimble, 2003