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Recently, I’ve encountered people who have bought into the big lie. You know: that Trump won the election, that the Covid vaccines will kill you, maim you, turn you into a zombie, that Biden isn’t really president, that trump will be reinstated on some day in August or September or whenever My Pillow Guy declares that it’ll happen.

The news is a circus of absurdity, a shit show that illustrates just how toxic trump was as president – and still is, as the alleged head of the republican party.

Trump and his minions keep talking about the stolen election, the Cyber Ninjas have been conducting an audit of Arizona’s ballots for – what? Six months now? And honestly, the Cyber Ninjas? It’s all like some insane video game. Never mind that there were multiple audits in Arizona and other states where Trump has brought lawsuits, where Republican legislatures are passing laws that make it more difficult to vote.

My Dad was a Republican for years. Ike was his guy. Reagan, not so much. Bush? Not at all. He was living with us in 2000 and voted for Gore. He died in 2005, so he wasn’t around to vote for Obama or Clinton or Biden. He wasn’t around to witness the years under trump when Democracy started crumbling bit by bit. Or when social media existed. Facebook was born the year before he passed. For the most part, he missed the big tech advances.

I wonder, though, what he thinks now, in spirit, about all this. The divisiveness and polarization, the lies and the thrust under trump and now by the republican party toward authoritarianism. In 1937, at the age of 24, he left post-Depression Oklahoma for a job overseas with Standard Oil in Lagunillas, Venezuela. He lived in the country for 26 years. My sister and I were born there.

In the 1950s, Perez Jimenez became president of Venezuela through a coup d’eta that spelled the beginning of his authoritarian regime. It was the classic playbook – take over the media, lie and lie again and again until the people believe the lie, rig the books, the electors, rig everything in your favor. But. Give something to the people – trump’s tax breaks for the one percent, Jimenez’s financial help to the poor, his infrastructure money for roads, bridges, trump’s border cruelties for his base.

When Jimenez fled the country, he had $13 million that he’d stolen from the country’s treasury. He settled in Miami Beach and lived there until 1963, when he was extradited to Venezuela on charges of embezzling $200 million during his presidential tenure.

Upon arrival in Venezuela he was imprisoned until his trial, which did not take place for another five years. Convicted of the charges, his sentence was commuted as he had already spent more time in jail while he awaited trial. He was then exiled to Spain.

In 1968, he was elected to the senate of Venezuela for the Nationalist Civic Crusade, but his election was contested, and he was kept from taking office. A quick law was passed that excluded former prisoners from participating in the governmental process.

On September 20, 2001, he died in Spain at the age of 87. He was never prosecuted for his crimes.

Some of the women I grew up with in Venezuela don’t see trump as a wannabe despot. They see him as a hero who made it okay to be a racist or a white nationalist or a misogynist. They say he did a great job as prez, but when you press them for details, they refuse to engage – I don’t want to argue with you, we’ll never agree – and walk away. I also run into this in other ways.

One morning while I was shopping at Publix, the power went out. I had to use the flashlight on my phone to see goods on the shelves. A young guy, an employee, was shelving stuff, and I asked him what had happened. He had a kind of wild look in his eyes.

“Don’t you know? We’re at the brink of war.”

Huh? We are?

Months later, I was in a line at a convenience store, waiting my turn to buy a Loteria scratch-off. The guy in front of me, a beefy dude who had roared into the the parking lot in a big truck, waa chatting with the clerk and I heard him say, “He’s not my president. Trump is.”

If I were six four and armed, I might have tapped him on the shoulder and set him straight about his facts. But I stood there waiting for him to leave and then bought my scratch-off – which won 30 bucks.

We are a country that lives with at least two sets of facts.

Trump won the 2020 election. Biden won the 2020 election.

Both can’t be true.

We deal with this same problem when it comes to vaccines. They work – or they don’t. They contain microchips developed by Bill Gates and have chips that track us – or  don’t. The vaccine causes you to grow another limb or head – or it doesn’t. It protects you from dying – or it doesn’t. I’m done listening and reading about these conspiracy theories.

Biden is president, the events of January 6 were an insurrection – not some group of rowdy tourists – and vaccines save lives.