Blessed Are The Truth Tellers
Watching Trump operate is like watching my child abuse unfold all over again in slow motion and on a massive scale.
Wow! What a difference a couple of years makes!
In the before times — when Donald Trump was in a lull from making headlines by constantly exemplifying and exploiting the worst tendencies of human nature, and I still hadn’t acknowledged my neurodivergence — I didn’t feel like the world was going to end. Joe Biden was a revered statesman with a handle on the problems facing this country, particularly the Trump situation, and he was going to win the 2024 presidential election on the issues that people care about, right?
So I began focusing inward after COVID and my second divorce, the latter of which is a tale for not just another post, but probably a series of posts if I’m being honest with myself. Suffice it to say, I was focusing on growth. In that period of deep contemplation, I discovered and addressed my autism and ADHD which had made an already terrifying and confusing childhood exponentially worse, though I had lacked a name for it.
It took a lot of work, including relearning some skills I had previously mastered, particularly my memory recall and communication skills, but I was finally coming into my power again after a few other cathartic events that got me there. However, the momentum wouldn’t last.
“You’re telling me that I just spent the last two years rebuilding myself and now it’s an election year in which bodily autonomy and democracy itself are on the ballot? Why should I even plan a life beyond January 2025? I never even thought I would get this far!”
Because, let’s face it, where you begin is an indication of where you’ll end up.
Yet, somehow I exceeded expectations. Despite years of physical, emotional, psychological and even institutional abuse, I’m still here, I still care, and I’ve learned from my experiences. Because they mirror that of both the proposed GOP plan in Project 2025 and the tactics of its authoritarian “strongman,” I can’t stay silent in the face of a potential second Trump term.
For the rest of this election season, I will be writing in support of Kamala Harris who represents a breath of fresh air in the Democratic Party. This will be my first campaign back since Obama’s in 2008, and it already has the same energy, so this weekend I did my first radio interview in many, many years as I continue to also move back into the political punditry space.
I’d like to thank Greg of Inner Journey with Greg Friedman for having me on his show on KXFM radio in Laguna Beach, CA. Even though it’s about exploring the paths people take to self-improvement and ultimately self-realization, I was there to discuss the manipulations of Trump and the GOP, the dangers of Project 2025 et. al, and the increasingly positive tone of the campaign through the lens of my own abusive childhood, as well as my experience as a political campaigner and activist over the last 30+ years.
My intention was not to tell one singular, detailed story about what started me on my journey because there truly isn’t one. Instead, I attempted to weave a tapestry of circumstances surrounding the abuse and injustice that I have suffered and witnessed being committed against others to tie them to the machinations of Trump and The Heritage Foundation. Or put more simply, I wanted to discuss how I learned how power works.
Well, I think I may have failed. Greg wanted me to stay on one story regarding the institutional abuse I suffered at the hands of my father, and the first one that came to mind was entirely underwhelming. My second example was a lot better, but still not the big gun.
AND THIS IS ADHD IN A NUTSHELL. We can freeze up when put on the spot, especially when talking about ourselves.
Allow me to freeform monologue or argue about a vague topic, and I can do so at length. I’m known as knowledgeable and articulate on a wide range of subjects and a ruthless, fearless, but open-minded debater.
But ask me a specific question about my upbringing or history, and between my ability to block out a lot of painful details as a self-protective measure and ADHD issues with certain types of memory recall, my brain simply goes potato.
I basically called my father a psychopath; I just used the clinical term Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). And he absolutely was, but I still don’t feel like I made the case, so I will now.
Other than his propensity for violence as a tool of control, the most important thing to know about my father is that he absolutely never took responsibility for the consequences of his actions, and all of his other beliefs and behaviors were in the service of maintaining that façade. These are also Trump’s primary personality traits.
My father was superficially charming, a good liar in terms of both creation and persuasion, from an affluent family, and he made powerful “friends” easily. They were mostly politicians and others with power. He was How to Win Friends and Influence People at its most corrupt. He was Machiavellian. He was just like Trump.
My parents were both more intensely interested in the 1980’s era ideal of keeping up with the Joneses and torturing each other like in The War of The Roses than they were in caring about the people in their lives, even (maybe especially) their children. Donald Trump’s name has been synonymous with gross opulence since that time, and he’s on his third marriage.
My father treated his family like property. He stalked my mother and tried to kill her after she finally put her foot down, and yet she still took him back again, essentially rewarding him for scaring her enough. She didn’t think she could make it on her own. So while there may not be any abuse allegations, I see a lot of similar co-dependence based on wealth and patriarchy and not a lot of love in the Trump family.
I was viciously gaslighted about my struggles due to autism and ADHD for over two decades, told that my behavior was a choice and thus my own fault. I just needed to try harder. But I was mentally ill.
Bootstraps, anyone? The way he infantalizes people who are different from him and blames the victims of patriarchy, transphobia, and white supremacy for their cirumstances, anyone? Sounds like Trumpism. And Calvinism.
Like the Republicans, my father created a family unit that needed to keep his secrets, so I became the family scapegoat, just like the minority groups the GOP targets. I was a social pariah and bullied relentlessly until high school like many in those same groups. Kids can be cruel and often intolerant of people’s differences, especially social differences, and they can smell and exploit trauma. Trump is a schoolyard bully who never outgrew this mentality.
I was nearly always the victim in a conflict, yet subject to false moral equivalence at best and total responsibility at worst when adults would intervene at all. This is indeed what keeps the country from political progress: the blame game of continuing to punish oppressed people for their misfortune and using their existence as a political wedge, shifting the entire electorate to the right.
In response to all of this, I overachieved. The more I achieved and defied the scapegoat label forced upon me, the more my father hated me. And the more he punished me for it. Sounds exactly like the way Trump views Kamala Harris.
And the sad thing is that these circumstances are only scratching the surface of the familial and political dysfunction.
And herein lies the truly best example of my father’s institutional abuse:
When I was 15, I had finally had enough and ran away from home. I didn’t get far, and I spent the next few years in foster care.
Despite clearly beating me, he successfully argued that I was the problem. Miraculously, it made no difference that the police officer who took my report had personally served him with a restraining order on my mother’s behalf the year before.
He then convinced my social worker — who eventually was very publicly fired for corruption — to punish me with a placement in an illegal substandard foster home. I was dumbfounded. How did he turn things around so fast?
I was young and it was the early 90’s, but I was already online and had finally made some friends. Some of them were teachers and social workers who I am still in contact with today, and he was worried that they reported the situation.
If you think the state of Massachusetts did anything to correct the issue or improve conditions, you’d be wrong. Instead, they once again blamed me and sent me to an intensive psychological assessment unit. Unsurprising to everybody but my father, I did very well in a stable environment.
The placement was incredibly expensive. If memory serves, it cost the state nearly $100,000 in 1994. Their job was to recommend my next placement, and they recommended I move into an independent living facility.
This was widely considered the best possible placement in the system, but instead of the state accepting the recommendation, I somehow ended up in a more expensive foster home 45 minutes from my life with foster parents of which one was the child of two ministers and the other was a religious studies major who despite not physically abusing me, were not much less manipulative and controlling than my biological parents.
At one point, they offered to adopt me, but then they found me too independent and left me behind. As it stands, I no longer have contact with any of them.
The only explanation that makes sense is interference, especially since they were all in contact with one another, and I only knew one person powerful and spiteful enough to pull it off.
And though I was supposed to be the only foster child in the home, two more were allowed to join me: one who was a special needs child (otherwise known as my polar opposite) and one who later committed a separate incident of institutional abuse against me to help cover up a rape ring that I reported to the police.
Despite all of this, I’ve had successful businesses. I’ve raised a child. I earned a B.S. while I fought and beat a cancer my doctors were sure would kill me, as well as the resulting poverty and homelessness, all after experiencing everything I just described and more. I didn’t break the cycle with my first spouse, but I did with my second.
Nobody should ever have to experience the living nightmare that was my childhood. Institutional abuse is real, and it is wildly white supremacist and patriarchal and thus invariably blames its victims for its oppression, making it the foundation of force against anyone who does not abide.
Remember: domestic violence — including spousal rape — was still legal as recently as 1993 — the year before I finally left home.
Like any other narcissist that refuses to grow up, The GOP has proven that it hasn’t progressed past 19-fifty-3, and we cannot go back for it.
