"A Day of Love"

Seeking the support of Latino voters, Donald Trump proved once again he is a malignant, uneducated man who is untethered from reality

What? The Jan. 6 Capitol attack was not “a day of love?” (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)

Two of the gravest existential threats facing our world are the potential demise of democracy and the climate crisis. The need for serious leaders, capable of addressing these dangers, could not be more obvious. Yet, once again, the man that the Republican Party has chosen as its nominee for the highest office in our land displayed his utter abandonment of factual reality, his refusal to address real issues with seriousness and his complete self-absorption.

Two answers by Donald Trump in an hour-long “town hall” for Latino voters Wednesday, hosted by Univision in Miami, were particularly appalling. Honestly, I felt less outrage than I did embarrassment for my country that a man this unfit and this ill-prepared could be standing on the stage as one of two candidates for president of the United States.

And I’m not even referring to Donald Trump’s continuing refusal to admit—when directly asked by one voter—that the story of pet-eating Haitian immigrants spread by him and his running mate is an ugly lie. “All I do is report,” Trump pathetically insisted before adding that migrants are “eating other things too that they’re not supposed to be.”

One remarkable question was asked by a voter who described himself as a no-longer-registered Republican who wanted to give Trump “the opportunity to try to win back my vote.” He said he was disturbed by Trump’s action and inaction on Jan. 6—“the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.” He said he thought Trump “misled” the public during COVID and many more people would be alive if they were better informed. And he expressed curiosity about why so many people in his administration don’t support him now, including his former vice president. “So why would I want to support you?” he asked.

In response, Trump lied with a fabricated number that those who don’t support him “are a very small portion” and 97 percent do. Then he talked about the hundreds of thousands of people who came to Washington on Jan. 6, that those who traveled to the Capitol went “peacefully and patriotically” with “nothing done wrong at all.” He lied that “nobody was killed” except Ashli Babbitt. He minimized his own role by claiming he was there because “they asked me to speak.” And he summarized Jan. 6 like this: “That was a day of love.”

A day of love. That is, a day when he had the opportunity to relish hours of violence committed in response to his lie that the election was stolen. A day when 140 police officers were injured and at least five people died, including several suicides as a result of the trauma. A day when we all could see the violence with our own eyes—the head blows and bone-crunching with flagpoles, baseball bats, crutches, metal pipes, skateboards and a fire extinguisher, as well as the use of lasers, stun guns and toxic sprays. A day when Trump’s followers chanted to hang Mike Pence and erected a makeshift gallows. This is what Donald Trump describes as a day of love. Oh, and he also used this answer as an opportunity to say how terrible Kamala Harris is and her candidacy happened because she “turned on” Biden and “they had a coup.”

The second remarkable question was from a man who has worked in the construction industry building water plants. “I’ve seen with my own eyes the devastating impacts of climate change,” he said, “things that include sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion in our drinking water supply, frequent flooding of our coastal communities. Given the mounting evidence of climate change, do you still believe it’s a hoax?”

Unsurprisingly, Trump used the question to complain about the Green New Deal as a “hoax,” then insisted his administration had “the cleanest water, the cleanest air,” while also lying that “I had the most jobs of any administration ever,” even though his administration lost jobs. Bu then he described himself as “an environmentalist” who has been given “many awards” for his environmental building—for “the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”

And what of the voter’s serious question about an existential threat to the human species that America and the world must confront? Permit me to share some detail of what Trump had to offer:

I will say this though. I hear a lot about climate and they talk about global warming, et cetera, et cetera, because they used to call it global warming, now they call it climate change because that covers everything but global warming. The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water’s coming up an eighth of an inch, over 300 years, the ocean is going to rise. And nobody knows if that’s true or not, but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years.

And his conclusion? We should be worried about nuclear weapons, and if the “grossly incompetent” Kamala Harris “gets in, we will end up in a third world war.” And if he wins, “you’ll never end up in even a war. So we have to be very careful. Thank you very much.”

I wish these comments could be chalked up to increasingly evident cognitive decline, but that would be to assume he was once more focused on learning the issues and developing real solutions. Yes, answers like this—followed by a previous night of dancing and playing DJ for 40 minutes rather than answering voters’ questions—make clear why his staff is canceling scheduled interviews.

But it will never not be tragic that, in a nation of over 345 million people, this is one of the two options America has to be the next president. I remain optimistic that, in less than three weeks, American voters will make the right choice, the only real choice—that is, to save us from the terrible fate of a seriously shallow man who despises democracy and the truth and who lacks the most basic interest in learning what it takes to do the job.

But even with a Kamala Harris win, we will have much work ahead to repair a deeply broken political system riven by violence, hate and the lure of authoritarianism and lies. That better future includes ensuring that a man this incompetent and cruel can never again succeed by pretending he’s the answer to what ails us.

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