Holly Whitaker

Because Trump as president would be catastrophic

One thing about me that I don’t tell many people is that, in 2016, I had a fleeting, secret, dark wish that Trump would win. 2016 me was a few years into building an addiction recovery program and knee-deep in research on American addiction treatment, the war on drugs, and the criminal legal system that had become our de facto addiction treatment.

The overdose rate jumped that year by 21 percent to 63,600; a number that was starting to get collective attention, but did not warrant much mention by any candidate during that election cycle.

At the time I lived in Downtown Los Angeles, right next to Skid Row, a well-known epicenter of our nation’s housing and mental health crisis. Before that I’d lived on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood and worked in the Financial District—areas stuffed with the unhoused, mentally unwell, and addicted.

Every day for a decade—on our way to work or yoga or drinks—we stepped over bodies. Notice how I am not saying I stepped over bodies. It was never a lone, individual action, but a choreographed move those of us on the visible and living side of society made together in a conspiratorial effort to not see, acknowledge, or deal with the inhabitants on the shadow side. I could only step over an unmoving body lying prostrate on the sidewalk if we all agreed that’s just what we had to do.

To 2016 me, a vote for Hillary was a vote for that existing order, a vote for palliatives, and a vote to pretend we didn’t see the bodies. I was furious I wanted something to break that system open and expose all its gore.

The reason I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 (aside from the fact that I never planned to), or sit out, or vote third-party was because, while I wanted someone to burn it all down and he seemed like he’d excel at that, he’d made some pretty serious threats, and I took him at his word. My radical views didn’t matter because it wouldn’t be me who suffered the most. It would be immigrants, Muslims, the poor and working poor, queer people, Black and Brown people, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the unhoused who would pay the price if I applied my ideologies purely.

I am voting for Kamala Harris for many reasons, some of them hopeful and admiring, but primarily because her opponent, Donald Trump, is a reckless, dangerous man with authoritarian tendencies and increasing calls for violence. The consequences of him holding the most powerful office in the world are real, immediate, severe, and catastrophic on a level we cannot comprehend.

That I’m telling you my reason is “not authoritarianism” is perhaps the ultimate indication that the system is indeed broken. In America, we throw everything away; we have a disposable mindset, we think we can always just replace everything, that the answer is just “burn it.” Democracy, even one as flawed as ours, isn’t replaceable.

Holly Whitaker is the author of Quit Like a Woman.