We Will Not Be Pawns for the Prince of Darkness

Any longer

“My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark,” wrote Emily Saliers in “Prince of Darkness,” the fourth song on the Indigo Girls’ 1989 self-titled album.

The duo - whose song “Closer to Fine” from the same album was the centerpiece of last year’s blockbuster “Barbie” movie - were singing about bad romance, but also the desperate choices that life gives us.

Someone’s on the telephone, desperate in his pain

Someone’s on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine

I was thinking of this song on Thursday when I watched part of Donald Trump’s live press conference from his (classified documents-free) ballroom at Mar-A-Lago.

Since President Biden stepped aside from the campaign on July 21, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris an hour later, I have been shocked as Americans of all stripes have expressed something that I haven’t seen since I was a child: pure, unadulterated joy.

A joy that at first felt like disbelief, then relief, as we were all slowly coming out of the darkness. A joy that increased by polynomial proportions when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz - aka, America’s Dad - was added to the ticket.

A joy - a light - which diminished the Prince of Darkness on Thursday as he stood at a podium not only spewing lies, but presenting scenarios of carnage that only he can fix.

Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room

Legitimizing the Dark

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell castigated the networks - including his own - for airing Trump’s hour-long meandering word salad live, at least without real-time fact-checking.

I agree that the presser should never have been run live. As O’Donnell noted, it was the free TV time Trump was allotted in 2016 that legitimized him.

But I don’t think the fact-checking O’Donnell suggests would work. People in the room could not listen and fact-check at the same time. And in-studio producers wouldn’t be able to keep up. Trump would be onto the next lie before the audience could read the written screen correction of the last one.

I was half the naked distance between hell and heaven’s ceiling

And he almost pulled me under

Unlike O’Donnell, though, I am no longer under the impression that airing Trump’s dark ramblings will legitimize him. Like your standard blood sucking vampire, the darkness Trump thrives in cannot stand the light.

And the U.S. had been in the dark for so long, we had forgotten that light even existed.

As of this Thursday, hundreds of thousands of people now know, or were reminded, that 250,000 people were at the 1963 March on Washington. We also know that there were about 2,500 people at Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021. Yet Trump says he had more people watching his speech than Martin Luther King had watching his “I Have a Dream” speech.

People all over social media were laughing at this obvious falsehood, including in their derision other falsehoods, like “we’re very close to a depression” and there are “gangs on the street” or “we have a very sick country right now.”

We now recognize Trump as we would recognize an abusive father after we’ve moved out of our childhood home. He will try to tell you every time you see him that you are a failure without him, but with distance comes perspective, and we know better who we are.

Many more political writers noted Trump’s lies in his unhinged rant on Thursday than they did all of his unhinged rants in 2016. Remember when Trump insisted that he saw thousands of Muslims cheering after the September 11 attacks? Yeah, that didn’t happen. But the people who pointed that out did so tepidly, as if they weren’t sure of their footing. There was no groundswell of derision on social media.

To be fair, most of the reporters in the room on Thursday did not call out Trump’s lies or his incoherence. They found the one nugget of news - that Trump proposed three debates with Harris - and ran with that.

They did not note that Trump even got that wrong, erroneously saying twice that the September 10 debate was on NBC. It’s on ABC.

That relentless search for the singular news nugget amid the incoherence, more than airing him live, is what gave Trump legitimacy.

As Tom Nichols wrote this week in the Atlantic newsletter: 

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party, so journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.

Are White Women the Light Switch?

The coming out of the darkness theme is not just about Harris and Walz turning on the iridescent joy. It’s about millions of people coming to the realization that they have been tolerating abusive politics, in both personal and public spaces. Those people - many of them women - seemed to have found a way to turn on their own inner lights.

I was on the Mom’s Demand zoom call on July 23, before Harris started stumping, but after it had become clear that she was the nominee.

It felt like the theme of the Zoom was, “I was a stupid, white liberal woman in 2016 but I’ve learned. And we all need to step up and help the current stupid white liberal women figure it out. Our nation depends on us.”

Shannon Watts, who Runs Mom’s Demand Action, put it succinctly:

“Too many times we vote against our own best interests, and against the interests of Black women, because we think white supremacy is within our interests.”

On the one hand, it felt good to hear people call out what organizer Erin Gallagher calls “toxic white women.”

On the other hand, it was frustrating watching women cry over how duped they had been by the acceptance of the social hierarchy all their lives.

No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom

There are many of us who always understood. There have been many of us who have been calling out white women who uphold the sexism in this country (as women of standing do in every culture).

But I guess this communal realization is better late than never. That’s what the Indigo Girls sang about 35 years ago. We are all on the same side. I welcome more people turning toward the light.

By grace my sight… is growing stronger… I will not be a pawn… for the Prince of Darkness any longer.

Here’s the video, if you’ve never heard the song or have it stuck in your head right now.

Next week, we will take another look at Project 2025. As we bask in the joy, we can’t forget those who are still fighting for darkness.

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