every anti-Trump Substack post

satire as a means of resistance

THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION, I couldn’t get out of bed. My blood was curdled with vomit and my heart was a pool of ice. My joints screamed the screams of a million screaming screams.

Frightened, my daughter entered the room. “They won,” I croaked, and collapsed — collapsed in a puddle of pain. My daughter froze. She had tears in her eyes. And then she did the Wakanda pose and said, “Resistikanda forever.”¹

She disappeared from my room and I gazed up at the fan. “This is it,” I thought. “This is what

Jeff Tiedrich

and

The Bulwark

tried to warn us about.” Half an hour later, still shell-shocked, my daughter returned and slid a scrap of paper across my nightstand. It was one of her resistance poems, scribbled in orange marker. As soon as I picked it up, my eyes pricked afresh with tears:

You’ve got Michael Knowles, and Twitter trolls,

You have your rigid gender rolls.

But we have one thing, Divider in Chief,

The Petrarchan verse of resistant souls.

You’ve got your little elves of Silicon Valley,

Your citadels, your Unite the Right Rally.

But from dawn to dusk, you and Elon Musk,

Will quake as our villanelles carry.

You’ve got your trade war with Eastern Asia,

Your genocide of trans erasure,

But from dusk till dawn, our words will form,

A space of safety; a Queer embrasure.

You’ve got your gawking supporters, your silenced reporters,

Your tariffed importers and built-up borders.

But we have one thing, Divider in Chief,

Free verse poems split up into quarters.

My five year old daughter wrote this. Wrote this because she’s terrified for her friends, for herself, for marginalized people all across our country.

We must not let the Toddler in Chief or his broligarchs erase us. We must resist them every step of the way, posting tooth and nail for our lives and for our futures.

Democracy dies in a rubble of darkness beneath the ruins of a brighter future…

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1. If you aren’t from Twitter: