Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
“Don’t get me wrong, I still love our president.” For many in America, Donald Trump, despite being Donald Trump, is still loved.
The man who said it, the man standing in Hokas by the cookie display at New York Bagel Cafe in Tulsa, Oklahoma, smiled at me.
We’re not close, he and I, but have known each other for years.
I asked how he was doing.
That was his answer.
He was upset because Donald Trump, HIS president — let’s get the pronoun right — signed an executive order expediting the reclassification of marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance, a move initiated by the Biden administration. The move would lessen the penalties and restrictions for possession and use, acknowledge that cannabis may be helpful in treating some medical conditions, might make things easier to conduct medical research on its effects, and, because marijuana would no longer run afoul of federal interstate commerce, allow customers to buy weed and THC-laced gummies and vapes with credit cards.
That’s all the proposed change will do, and this, THIS, is why the man in front of the cookies, the Donald Trump lover, is upset. Not because HIS president is co-opting America media, trying to hold higher education hostage, belittling the medical community, usurping the Justice Department, bombing Nigeria, invading Venezuela, and … and … and …
We’re kidnapping heads of state, but an Oklahoma State University sophomore will soon be able to use his Cash App card to buy a pre-roll from This Budd’s for You and tend to his pot plants on the duplex porch.
I was back in America.
For the previous 10 months, as I have written here on a number of occasions, I have been in central Portugal.
I had planned since the spring to return to America to return for a visit
Since moving, Ariana Drehsler of The New York Times was stopped three times at the border trying to return to the U.S.; Ed Ou, a Canadian journalist, was barred from entering. Trump has called other journalists out by name; Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, is turning the place into Trump’s version of Putin’s Channel One.
This had nothing to do with me, though. Surely the government wasn’t compiling a list of ne’er-do-wells, and even if it were, surely I wasn’t on it. I have been critical of Trump, satirically having written about him paying for abortions, his abject loneliness and fear he’s unloved, his admiration for Hitler, his predilection for young girls, but the authorities don’t know or care who I am.
I’m small potatoes, to quote Hyman Roth.
Nevertheless, I joked online and to friends about the prospects of being unceremoniously dumped in a cement cell in South Sudan if I attempted to return to the States.
As my paranoia and the Trump stranglehold on the media increased, I called a friend, a civil-rights attorney, who said I was not, in fact, crazy for worrying. Of Indian descent, he said he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave the country for fear of not being allowed back in. He told me there were things that could and could not be asked and done by government officials at customs and immigration.
“What if they’re asked and done anyway?” I asked.
He laughed.
But he wasn’t laughing.
“You have rights,” he said, “but who knows what that means anymore.”
He, too, wondered if he was on the list.
Others advised me to scrub my phone, remove links to my blog, get off Facebook. Others me told that doing so would call even more attention to myself.
What happened in this country that we need to worry about this?
As it turned out, I sailed through customs, immigration, TSA, except when I tried to smuggle in three cans of Coke Zero that a Portuguese flight attendant had given me.
I had to surrender them,
At New York Bagel Cafe, years earlier, when Biden was president, the owner was complaining about the cost of cream cheese.
It was post-Jan. 6, 2021, after the photos of national-security documents in Trump’s bathroom had been discovered, after the indictment for election interference, after dozens of women came forth and claimed Trump had molested them.
After the storming of the Capitol.
He was upset about cream cheese.
Trump won re-election, even after screaming about Haitians eating dogs and cats. Trump won re-election, even after he told Christians at Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” that we’d never have to vote again if he was re-elected.
Trump won re-election.
In the college town of Coimbra, where I live, I didn’t hear his name much these past 10 months. On the European television stations I watched, even as he was being dubbed into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Greek, German, I could make out his folly, his terror, his dissembling, his mendacity, his rhetorical laziness.
The first year of Trump 2.0 was worse than expected — and how is that possible?
Coimbra, Portugal, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, are 4,570 miles apart.
I have Portuguese residency, but America’s DNA.
The angst crosses the Atlantic easily.
There are reports the Trump administration is considering doing away with dual citizenship.
What would I do if I had to choose?
Until 1939, even though there was violence against them, confiscation of their property and wealth, not to mention that few countries would accept them, Jews were encouraged by Nazis to leave Germany.
Many left, many didn’t.
Many couldn’t.
It’s not 1939 in the U.S. It’s — what do you think? — 1933 … ’34 … ’35?
I returned to Portugal, coincidentally (or maybe it was Freudian), a few weeks back — on Jan. 6th.
Once again, there were no problems at customs or immigration.
I still wasn’t on the list, if there is a list.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love my America.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, comedian and Iberian correspondent for The Progressive Populist. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t 3: I’m the Father, is the third installment of a 4-part trilogy, following “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman.” and “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color,” available in paperback and Kindle. He is also author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.
