July 19: Remembering My Mother Amid Political Turmoil

Afternoon, Saturday, July 19, 2025 – Miami, Florida

It’s a quintessential summer day in South Florida—sunny skies, no thunderstorms looming, and a heavy, palpable heat that clings to everything. At 91°F (33°C) with humidity hovering at 64%, the “feels like” temperature is a sweltering 101°F (38°C). For anyone who doubts the effects of climate change, I recall summers from the ’70s and ’80s, when this level of heat didn’t typically arrive until late August—and even then, the near-daily afternoon rains offered some relief. Not so today.

But for me, it’s not just another summer scorcher. July 19 marks ten years since my mother passed. Some have kindly suggested that I keep this to myself, but grief doesn’t follow polite conventions—it inhabits you, surfaces when it wants, and today, it’s here. My mother’s death wasn’t sudden; it unfolded slowly and painfully over time due to dementia. That particular road is a long, cruel one—for both those afflicted and the ones who care for them. With rare exceptions, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. There’s a reason they call it “the long goodbye.”

Alongside my personal grief, I find myself wrestling with something broader: the state of this country. Since Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016, I’ve watched a significant portion of America embrace a toxic cocktail of populism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and an All-American strain of fascism. The MAGA movement isn’t merely political—it’s cultural, emotional, historical. It clings to a mythologized post-WWII America where white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men held most of the power, women were expected to support and remain silent, and minorities were told—explicitly or implicitly—to “stay in their lane.” Dissent was punished. Law enforcement was often the weapon of choice.

Trump didn’t invent this ideology, nor did his 2016 victory singlehandedly transform American democracy into the brittle, distorted version we see today. That evolution—or devolution—was decades in the making. Reagan, Nixon, even Eisenhower all made their marks, for better or worse, and laid stepping stones on the path to MAGA’s rise. The threads run deep: civil rights battles, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War’s end, and the dog-whistle politics of “welfare queens” and anti-government rhetoric.

What Trump did—largely thanks to Mark Burnett and The Apprentice—was rebrand himself as the embodiment of the American Dream. A gilded illusion propped up by camera angles and bravado, sold to millions. He didn’t create the slogan “Make America Great Again”—that belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. What he did was exploit a well of resentment and fear among white Americans who saw their dominance waning. He weaponized nostalgia.

Here in Florida, where MAGA thrives like mold in humidity, many supporters openly dream of one-party rule. They cheer on policies rooted in authoritarianism—mass deportations, tariffs, suppression of dissent, even fantastical ambitions to annex parts of Canada and Greenland. The rhetoric is no longer coded. It’s loud, proud, and often hateful.

So yes, this afternoon weighs heavily. Not just because of my mother and the long trail of memories that July 19 evokes, but because I grieve for a country I once believed in—and fear for what it’s becoming. The heat may be stifling, but it’s the political and moral climate that truly suffocates.