Donald Trump Is Not An American. I Am.

An open letter to my potentially expatriate friends.

by Rich Herschlag

I know. You did four years and you’re not doing another four. On the (outside?) chance Trump wins or appears to win reelection, you’ve declared you’re moving to Italy, Costa Rica, or some other reasonably democratic, picturesque country where you have friends to set you up and your 401(k) dollars go a long, long way. There, you can live out your remaining days in peace among diverse, well meaning people without constant fear, recriminations, or forced TikTok sales. There, you can more easily tune out both the long arm of creeping authoritarianism and the 5G static of 24/7 political turmoil.

I have just one thing to say: Don’t.

I make no pretensions of knowing precisely what you’re thinking or feeling. Instead, I’ll share with you my approach to the same frightening prospect and hope to hell I pluck a few resonant strings.

I am not going anywhere. By not going anywhere I mean even should Donald J. Trump “win” reelection by a fake landslide and carry both the House and Senate, I am planting my feet more firmly on American soil than ever before. By more firmly, I mean I’m ready to die here. By ready to die here, I mean I was always planning to, but under these particular circumstances much sooner and much more violently than I would have preferred.

Not that I’m so special, but I already have blood in the soil. Back in 1980, my college roommate and I broke up a rape on the Princeton University soccer fields. I disrupted another one solo in front of my Queens, New York apartment building in the middle of one night in 1985. While serving as Borough Engineer in 1993, I was shot at by a sniper in a courtyard while inspecting a sinking building in northern Manhattan. During that same era I took the 1 train up to West Harlem every week to speak to concerned citizens about airborne pollution from the nearby sewage treatment plant and to help organize a science-based mitigation campaign harnessing political power from both the community and local government. Not long after, as an ex-official I fought both Trump and eventually the city itself in court and lost.

Ever since then I’ve used my private consulting practice wherever I could to take on greedy developers seeking to eschew quaint things like safety codes and environmental regulations. My own development work, performed mostly as a moonlighting activity during these same stressful years, has been limited to renovating old crack houses, where the mission of doing the impossible on a shoestring has left me with mangled fingers, scratched corneas, smashed toes, and enough scar tissue to volunteer as a guinea pig at a reconstructive surgery clinic.

I’ve loved every minute of it, especially if you include the minutes I’ve hated. If you’ve given a lot over many years, the fine line between love and disgust for your country not only blurs but disappears. My country is me, and I’m not leaving it for Donald, Bill, Betsy, Mitch, Rudy and their vulturous ilk to finish the job by sucking the remaining plasma from its necrotic limbs. I’m not going to watch the Sergeant at Arms handcuff Nancy Pelosi via WiFi on my iPad from the beaches of Curacao. I have no intention of watching via YouTube from halfway around the world while progressives in Seattle are being gassed. I refuse to read Facebook posts about the Kushner Real Estate Group buying Yosemite National Park for a dollar. Instead, I’m going to be right here ready to take a bullet or a taser or an anthrax package in the only war that matters from this moment forth. Because Donald Trump is not an American. I am.

If this maniacal 5-hour Energy-fueled diatribe hasn’t yet inspired you to consider your own past sacrifices for this nation and ditch the liquidation of the SEP-IRA into Euros, how about this? My ancestors and yours both made sacrifices—ranging from clearing land with their bare hands to taking lead on the shores of Iwo Jima. Sacrifices that make our Boomer-Gen X deprivations look like swallowing a blotter of acid at Yasgur’s Farm. The notion of cashing out the Schwab to get pedicures from little Dominican boys at the very moment your country needs you most would have made my dad’s cousin Joey (Omaha Beach) upchuck his beef jerky.

It’s time to be a Marine and leave no one behind. Who will fight for those with nothing if not those of us with vacation homes and hot tubs? I beseech you not to look at a second Trump term as a last straw but rather as the only chance you and I will ever have to earn a Purple Heart. Trust me—we’ll thank ourselves as we lay dying on Pennsylvania Avenue one frigid day in January 2021. A hero’s death on one’s home turf is far better than a long life of internalized guilt on a veranda overlooking the hills of Tuscany.

So unpack the damn blow dryer, the MacBook Pro, and the diamond brooch heirloom. I will mark the date of our rendezvous with destiny on my iPhone calendar and pack a lunch, a mask, and a can of Mace. At Woodstock, Joni Mitchell sang we were half a million strong. In January we will be 50 million strong and meet our Maker in Dockers and Ray-Bans. We will meld with the earth to the fading sounds of CSN and the Grateful Dead. Or, with any luck at all Biden win and we’ll meet for a latte.

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