On Ashli's Birthday

The oddest of bookends to the worst of presidencies.

Today I learned that former Divider-In-Chief Trump recorded a video for Ashli Babbitt’s family as they marked the anniversary of her death. It’s hard to know where to start with the wrong on this. Do I begin with my own liberal Tweet-thumbs piping out a bit of snark about how the Orange One would record a message for Ashli’s family, but never for Heather Heyer’s? The weird orange fuzz-haze of Trump’s video message, landing somewhere in tone between the Horst Wessel Lied and an episode of All In The Family? The cold reptilian sympathy of a nihilistic, narcissistic, autocratic ex-president forever grasping for the windpipes of his adversaries, real or imagined-seeking to find purchase on the grief of a family for his next lunge?

Whatever else I was doing when I replied to that tweet about Trump’s video, the snark’s intended target was Trump. If Ashli was a deluded QAnoner, she is also, whatever her struggles, a human being and loved. She is missed. I have the sharpest of differences with the political, social and cultural views of her family, but I respect their grief. We are all, in the end, unified by death.

But I can’t help thinking about Heather Heyer tonight, who is a human being, and loved, and missed-and utterly unmentioned and unmourned by Trump. Ashli was part of a mob intent, with the incitement of the Orange One, on violently overturning the results of a free and fair election. Heather marched against racism and for justice. The two couldn’t be farther apart, yet they form odd bookends to Trump’s first (please God only) presidency. The deaths of both of them, to a significant degree, tied to the barking or tacit encouragement of authoritarian followers’ darkest impulses, by a man who can only care about himself.