The Worst Trump Crime is Stealing Our Hope for Our Future to Line His Pockets

A Tale of Two Space Programs

The Apollo Moon Landing

On 16 July 1969, I begged my grandmother to watch the first crewed moon landing blastoff from Cape Canaveral. The idea of putting people on the moon was electrifying. It fired my imagination like nothing else did. I was so proud to be an American, to have won the space race. I didn’t get all of the economic and political points, but I understood it was momentous. That summer morning in Appalachia, Kennedy’s proclomation on 1962, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” — unknown to me at the time — rang true and seemed to animate the country in one of our darkest moments.

And dark it was. In 1968, everything seemed to come to a head: student protests against Vietnam spurred by the Tet Offensive, the riots after MLK’s assassination, the murder of RFK filling the country with hopelessness and despair. But behind it all was the Apollo program, a slow drumbeat of we can do this against the chaos. By 1969, the Apollo 9 through 12 missions went off in rapid succession, two of them landing on the moon. Even the near-disaster of Apollo 13 couldn’t fully dim the glow. We were tearing ourselves apart over the war and civil rights, but we were also doing the impossible. That pride — that belief in ourselves as a nation — was not incidental to surviving the chaos. It was essential to it.

The Taikonauts on the Tianhe Space Station

On 18 September 2021, I wrote to some of my friends in China congratulating them on the successful mission of taikonauts to the Tianhe core module. I had seen the video of the crew’s activities — the weightlessness demonstrations, the cute personal items they’d brought, the sweet messages they sent back to earth. It recalled for me the immense pride I’d taken in America’s space accomplishments. I thought of my Chinese friends and the joy they must be feeling.

Much to my surprise, their response was a shrug in email form. “Yeah, that happened.” They seemed to take no joy or pride in the accomplishment whatsoever. I couldn’t help but wonder why.

The answer arrived quickly and uncomfortably. We could only communicate via email and Chinese social media apps, which I knew were monitored for keywords and phrases used to root out dissent. Suddenly, I feared that I had put them in danger by carelessly asking them to comment on a government accomplishment. While I had felt genuinely part of the Apollo missions — a citizen of a democracy that voted for the people who chose to fund them — my friends had no such connection to their space program. The Chinese space program was something the government did for the government’s reasons. It did not reflect the will of the people, and the people knew it. There was a huge, chilling disconnect between citizens and state.

This was even more telling because it came in the middle of #COVID-19 pandemic, which China struggled mightily with. A prolonged period of hardship and turmoil — exactly when a population should be hungry for a feel-good, rally-around-the-flag, unifying moment. Instead: had a cautious, muted meh.

In many ways this is the difference between a democratic nation expressing our policy priorities through our votes, our collective decision making about what the nation would do and authoritarianism in which the government is something that is done to its citizenry, should be avoided and contact with minimized, and, otherwise, is wholly unaffected by the desires and priorities of its citizens. They aren’t participants. They’re subjects.

The Artemis Moon Missions

The Artemis mission rekindled some of that same excitement that the Apollo missions had, only it was much more muted. We seemed more to be going through the motions rather than feel some genuine pride of accomplishment. I was struck by how much of a sideshow the entire mission was until it was underway, but even then it all seemed performative. Then, there was that infamous Oval Office meeting with Astronaut Bone Spurs braying loudly and annoyingly at the crew, “To get in there, you have to be very smart, have to do a lot of things physically good. So I would have had no trouble making it, I’m physically very, very good.” The glum, visibly pained expressions of the crew told us everything we needed about that particular meeting of great mind.

I began to wonder how far down the slippery slope to authoritarianism we had slid. Did that moment represent the transition from this is something hard we did together because it was necessary to something that the government did over there, without us, even in spite of us?

Trump is Stealing our Hope

When Kennedy spoke about our space program and going to the moon, it was always in the collective we. It was inclusive. It took all of us. It used resources that we provided if only through taxes and good will. But, Trump makes everything about him. “I did it.” “I could doi t better.” And, by making it about him, it diminishes the rest of us, dividing us into performer and audience, star and fans. The space program gave us hope in our future. Now, it is hope in his future. He’s stolen our hope and made it his.

This is not just about NASA. This theft of hope has metastasized into every corner of civic life.

The Firehose of Explosive Diarrhea

Earlier this year, we had real momentum. Millions showed up for the No Kings rallies. Thousands rallied against the ICE deportation atrocities. Democrats were over-performing by double digits in special elections and had won nearly all of them. Democratic states were out-gerrymandering Republican ones with voter approval, and only temporarily. There was genuine, grounded reason to believe the midterms would be a corrective.

Now that focus has diffused. Because Trump floods the zone with his explosive diarrhea of frenetic chaos, and it does more than obfuscate and distract — it demoralizes. When we contemplate a task, we size it up first. If it seems too large, too rigged, too impossible, we disengage. We stop before we start, or we start and don’t finish. That is precisely what he is manufacturing.

SCOTUS Aiding and Abetting the Theft of Hope

The SCOTUS decision gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — released, not coincidentally, well before the end of the term so states would have maximum time to gerrymander — has blunted the hope we had for the midterms. The governor of Louisiana literally paused an election that had already begun early voting so districts could be further carved up. Projections suggest every minority-majority district in the Deep South could be eliminated, turning over nineteen seats and producing the whitest Congress since 1964. The Supreme Court has revealed itself as a nakedly political institution. The system seems well and truly rigged. Our hope for our future has been stolen.

The psychological calculus of resistance seems to have been turned on its head. It no longer seems a winnable fight, but one that no matter what we do, we cannot win. It isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter. It seems true hollow out the will to fight, to vote, by enough of us to throw the election.

We Lack Political Vision

The opposition, the Democratic Party, seems always to be playing catch up and reacting to the latest offense committed by the Republicans and Trump. When once the mid-terms could’ve been won by the prices are too high, so Republican voters will stay home and we’re not Trump strategy, that now seems like unworkable solution — if it were every one to begin with.

What we are missing — what someone needs to provide, urgently — is not just opposition to Trump but a vision. FDR didn’t rally the country by listing Republican failures; he gave people specific things their hands would build. Obama didn’t inspire a historic turnout by promising to be less bad; he gave people a specific, achievable, historic thing to do. The task has to be hard enough to matter and achievable enough to attempt.

Right now, nobody is offering that. The Democratic Party is playing permanent catch-up, reacting to the latest Republican atrocity, running a we’re not Trump and prices are too high strategy that was always thin and is now threadbare. We need a reason to vote for something, not just against everything. We need a New Deal for Democracy. A Marshall Plan for a More Perfect Union. A reason to believe that hope and change are still possible.

It cannot be the small ball of policy checklists — Medicare for All, universal pre-K, the rest. Those are the tools that get us there. What we need is the soaring rhetoric of why — the audacious claim that we are still capable of doing hard things together because they are necessary, and because they are ours.

Trump has stolen our hope in the future and lined his pockets with it. The worst crime isn’t the corruption or gutting our institutions — it’s the theft of the belief that we can attain our democratic ideals. It’s the slow conversion of American citizens into what my Chinese friends are: cautious, muted, careful, with no real stake in what the government does and no real power to change it.

Reclaiming our Hope by Renewing our Democracy

Until someone gives us a Kennedy moment — a credible, full-throated “we choose to do this hard thing, not because it is easy, but because it is hard, and because it is ours” — we are going to keep feeling exactly like my friends in China felt that September afternoon.

What we need is a reason to vote Democratic. We need a reason to hope again. Trump has stolen our hope for the future to line his pockets, we need a way to claw it back. We need a message of belief in a positive vision of America. The vision that the Apollo missions gave us and that the Artemis mission could be. We need New Deal for Democracy. A Marshall Plan for creating a More Perfect Union. A reason to believe that Hope and Change are possible again.

We need a bold vision not just of vanquishing the corruption and sadism of Trumpism, but of building a future that all of us have a stake in. It cannot be the small ball of Medicare for All and universal preschool. Those are the tools that will get us there, it has to be the soaring rhetoric of doing the hard things because they are necessary to improve the lives of us all.

Image Attribution

The image was found on Needpix.com and has a Creative Commons license.