Adding and Subtracting
By Janet Marshall Watkins
On the Harris-Trump debate night I was in a hotel near my workplace, getting ready for an early morning in the office. I showered, stretched, listened to my meditation app. Got nice and chill before the big event—and my group text-chat with a handful of close women friends.
Everyone in the chat has devoted a significant part of their lives to helping others. Two volunteer in prisons. One cooks each night for an elderly relative. We have fed the poor and saved lives, served in the military and raised kids, advocated for children and led religious education programs. And yet here’s what 90 minutes of watching Trump on TV brought out in us:
“I want a brawl.”
“He’s such a disgusting person.”
“It took less than two minutes for him to blame everything on immigrants.”
“Isn’t a viable strategy for her to walk across the stage and slap his smug face?”
“I wish she’d go a little lower.”
“If he says again that ending Roe v. Wade is what ‘everyone’ wanted, I’m going to leap into the TV and strangle him.”
***
Trump sets off every bell on my creeper alarm, and if he doesn’t set off yours, you should get it checked out. He is a rapist with 34 felony convictions who says it’s OK to grab women by the pussy. He once said, in a way no father ever should, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
Along with the creepiness, he is clearly determined to insult as many people and tenets of American democracy as possible. He’s called veterans “suckers and losers.” He egged on insurrectionists who threatened to hang the vice president and kill Nancy Pelosi. He spews dangerous nonsense about immigrants eating cats. It’s mind-boggling how many millions of people hear all this and yet still say, “Yeah, but I like his policies.” As if he’s ever been clear, or consistent, about what those might be.
Harris, on the other hand, is a conventional president candidate—except for being Black, Asian, and female. She’s the current vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general. So naturally some people are picking her apart in all the usual contradictory ways. They say she’s too progressive but also too moderate; too soft but also too hawkish. Too wishy-washy. She laughs too much.
The reality is that if anything she’s overqualified, especially given the competition. She asks tough questions, speaks in complete, diagrammable sentences, and doesn’t riff on Hannibal Lecter or sharks. She meets with heads of state, champions abortion rights, and knows AR-15s and high-capacity gun magazines should be banned. She’ll protect access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, which millions of Americans rely on. And she picked a good guy, with working-class roots, as her running mate. I kinda love her.
What I will always hate, and will never accept, are rapists. You’d think all Americans would agree, but tens of millions will still be voting for one in the upcoming election. They already have. Trump was found liable for sexual assault last year and ordered to pay millions to his victim. The judge, in explaining the jury’s ruling, was unequivocal: “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
We all do our own math before we vote, and here’s mine:
Trump is
a rapist +
an immigrant basher +
an insurrectionist +
responsible for ending Roe v. Wade +
the guy who said neo-Nazis are “fine people” +
the guy who said school shooting victims need to “get over it” +
the guy who keeps calling strong women “nasty” +
the guy who says if he’s reelected, he’ll jail many of his opponents +
the guy who would eliminate gun safety laws +
get rid of the Affordable Care Act +
replace it with “concepts of a plan” +
let the Jan. 6 rioters off the hook +
“Drill, baby, drill.”
All of that and then some =
Trump will never get my vote, and he shouldn’t get yours, either.
***
In my old job, as director of a nonprofit, I interviewed people who wanted to volunteer as advocates for abused and neglected children. We’d sit in a private room for an hour or two, me asking questions, them talking about their lives. I had to see if they could communicate reasonably well, get along with others, and be trusted to follow our organization’s rules. If I thought they might go rogue, hurt a child, or undermine our organization’s credibility, I had to turn them away. I didn’t need to know, nor did I ask, if they were Democrats or Republicans. I just needed to know they were decent people who were in it for the right reasons.
One candidate told me she’d gotten a degree from Princeton University’s Dumfries campus. She didn’t make the cut. Another said children turned gay because their mothers were confused about what kind of child they wanted. She didn’t make it either. Another candidate, years before I joined the program, told the then-director that she was friends with Gandhi. Only when pressed did she eventually acknowledge she didn’t mean that Gandhi. Lying got you the boot at our organization.
Trump wouldn’t have been fit to be one of our volunteers. Why does anyone think he’s fit to lead our country?
***
We’ve all got our hot-button issues, and abortion rights and gun safety are two of mine.
For a couple of years in the late ’90s, I spent time every week helping domestic violence victims write statements about the abuse they were suffering. The statements were given to judges who decided whether to grant protective orders. People nearly always started these statements the same way: By describing things that had nothing to do with abuse. They’d write about the dinner they’d cooked, the shopping they’d done, how they’d vacuumed the house. They’d get to the bottom of the one-page form and turn it over, adding more details about banal things that didn’t add up to describing the violence incidents that had brought them to the courthouse that day. I’d gently explain that as hard as it was to write about the abuse, the judge needed to know. Almost always, the details would then tumble out: “He punched me in the face so hard my nose bled.” “He held me down and raped me.” “He pointed a gun to my head and said he’d shoot.”
One morning a woman came in wearing a fringed jacket, boots with laces, and a flowery blouse. She had a black eye and took up as little space on a chair as humanly possible. She told me that her boyfriend timed her trips to the grocery store. If she didn’t get home before his timer went off, he’d beat her. If she didn’t get everything on the list, he’d beat her. He gave her enough cash to shop with and expected change. She didn’t have a phone. She’d lost touch with her family. And he had a gun. I helped her draft her petition and urged her to stay at a women’s shelter. She got her protective order, and I hope she’s still alive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t.
Around that time, on assignment for the newspaper where I was then working as a reporter, I met a teenage boy who’d watched his mother’s boyfriend shoot her in the head the night before. He went back to their house the next day to pack up some clothes, and I went with him. When he saw her blood on the carpet, he vomited. This was long before Sandy Hook. Long before Parkland. Long before 300,000+ children were exposed to gun violence in schools. Long before I watched a young gun violence survivor throw up onstage during the March for Our Lives.
Long before Republicans started wearing AR-15 pins on their ties.
I never vote for candidates who reject common-sense gun laws, and I never vote for candidates who restrict abortion rights, either.
I’ve never had an abortion, though I chipped in to help pay for one once, and I’ve lost track of how many women I know who’ve had one. I might’ve had one in 2001 if all the little balls of fetal cells implanted in my uterus during IVF had kept growing. When our doctor implanted them, he said it’d be hard for my body to carry them all to term, so if they all kept growing, we might have to “selectively reduce” a couple to let one live and to keep me healthy. I never faced the choice; only one survived. But I’m glad I had the option. And I’m glad I went through all this before Roe v. Wade got overturned and IVF became a political issue.
As you may have read, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled this year that embryos stored in fertility clinics are the same as full-fledged children. They don’t breathe or need diaper changes or throw tantrums, but nevertheless. The ruling—related to the accidental destruction of some embryos at a fertility clinic—gave people the right to sue over the deaths of their “children.” The chief justice said in his opinion that, “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
No shock, but Alabama clinics shut down IVF services after the ruling, dashing the hopes of many prospective parents. Clinic workers couldn’t risk effacing God’s glory or, more to the point, being sued for wrongful death—or worse, charged with murder. Just recently, the U.S. Senate had the chance to pass nationwide IVF protections, but Republican senators killed that effort. They’re committed to this fetal personhood idea and to limiting women’s choices.
I’ve thought about abortion since I was a teenager. I remember arguing with a Catholic friend about it when the March for Life came to D.C. years ago. 17-year-old me didn’t understand why one group of people—mostly Catholics, evangelicals, and Republicans—should presume to make decisions for everybody else. 53-year-old me feels the same way.
I’ve never believed life starts at conception. If you do, fine. Let’s all think for ourselves and act accordingly. And let’s be honest: This sanctity of life thing has caveats. If all life is sacred, and fetal cells are really humans, the IRS would have given me a tax break for the bundles of cells implanted in me that died before taking a breath, right? And I’d probably have a stack of old sympathy cards stashed in a closet. But nobody mourned those embryos, not even me.
I don’t say that flippantly. If my fertility clinic had ruined the cells that grew from my eggs and my husband’s sperm before implantation day, I’d have been devastated. They carried my hopes and dreams. But I wouldn’t want any part in any lawsuit that could limit women’s reproductive choices.
Life is sacred. But choices matter. We don’t force people to donate kidneys to save the lives of people on transplant lists, and lots of those people die. Are their lives not sacred? If forced organ donation is unethical, unfathomable, and anti-freedom—and it is—then so is forced birth.
**
Freedom is the theme of the Harris-Walz campaign, and I love it. Growing up, freedom meant: Thank you, soldiers, for protecting our freedoms. We’d be speaking German if not for you. But I like the broader definition: Freedom to control what happens to your body. To marry who you love. To change jobs without losing your health insurance. Freedom, I hope, from four more years of Trump bringing us low.
Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons
I’ve tried to understand people who vote for Trump. I think about what we have in common: Shared history, shared education, shared neighborhood. But if they were OK with Jan. 6, my alarm goes off. And I can’t help but think that their votes pose a threat to my children. My husband and I have four daughters. One’s an immigrant. One, if she chooses to marry, will surely marry a woman. Trump voters might give my kids the proverbial shirt off their backs. But what good is a shirt if a pregnancy goes wrong or the immigrant- and LGBTQ+-bashing hits home?
I look at these numbers and think: Who could vote for this man?
- 45: Number, in millions, of people insured through the Affordable Care Act, which Trump says he’ll gut and replace with “concepts of a plan” if he’s reelected.
- 100+: Number of Republican former national security officials who have endorsed Harris, saying Trump lacks the “essential qualities” needed to be president.
- 162: Number of times Trump lied, exaggerated, or misstated something during a 64-minute press conference in August 2024, according to NPR.
- 1: Number of countries Trump said he will invade if he’s reelected. (Mexico)
- 26: Number of women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.
- 2: Number of times Trump said recently, about one of his accusers, that “she would not have been the chosen one.”
- 1: Number of times thousands of Americans egged on by Trump attacked the Capitol building and threatened to hang the vice president.
- 21: Number of people who died in a school shooting a month before Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years—a law Trump says he’ll undo.
- 3: Number of animals Trump says immigrants are stealing and eating. (cats, dogs, geese)
- 3: Number of Supreme Court justices Trump appointed who voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
- 2: Number of Cheneys who have said they will vote for Kamala Harris.
- 0: Number of times before this election that the Cheneys and I voted for the same candidate.
When Dick Cheney and I are pulling for the same candidate, you know America’s on the verge of something. For now, my group text chat has backed away from the angry energy. We’re talking about the usual stuff: Who’s tired, whose kid is banging on the drums, who listens to Pitbull, whose boss just quit. But if Trump somehow wins this election, anger will reenter the chat, and we’ll be brought low again. All of us.
***
Janet Marshall Watkins is a writer, mother, optimist, and pragmatist who will be taking a lot of deep breaths and walks in the woods over the coming weeks.
