Part 90: American Politics in the Wasteland of Donald Trump – Why I Still Support Barack Obama

Published March 23, 2024. Updated March 26, 2024.

Screenshot from the website of then Presidential candidate Barack Obama when I became “Our One Millionth Donor” from 2008.

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

People have asked me about the time I was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor, in fact, I probably lose some readership over the political identification, establishing myself firmly in the moderate, center-left, a “liberal” as one poster once scorned at me with disgust. Usually, if I say anything about this online, I’ll be instantly branded as someone who must want to kill people with drone-strikes and cage children. American imperialism at its finest, the global empire, but really I still wonder if Barack Obama wasn’t something different. The promise of hope and change, the stability of two contiguous terms as President, the first African-American to do so in the history of this country.

To many he undoubtedly remains a hero, but it’s hard to pretend that the so-called “birtherism” launched by Donald Trump wasn’t the evil reflection of the worst tendencies of racist paranoid politics in the country. When I start to go through the story about how I donated $25 dollars in 2008 at just the right moment, people don’t believe it, and of course I did get two calls from Sam Graham-Feldstein, the former Obama aide who rang with the news that my late night donation from my grocery store paycheck was the one that put Obama’s essentially small donor count over the 1 million dollar mark. I was featured on the website of a Presidential Candidate for nearly a week back then, it was the strangest development.

I had to quickly take a picture with what was then a flip phone of myself by Diamond Head State Park in Honolulu and send it in along with some writing to the campaign. I never talked to Barack Obama or received anything in honorarium, and to be honest, I was perfectly fine with that, as I’ve never been one completely for Great Expectations. That’s the title of a new novel by Vinson Cunningham reviewed in the Los Angeles Times by journalist Lauren LeBlanc, who writes that, “Regardless of the immediate reference to Dickens’ classic coming-of-age novel, you’re establishing high stakes for yourself. That said, go bold or go home?” I haven’t read the book, but the context LeBlanc provides is useful for understanding the shift that’s happened in this country: “It’s funny to look back and say that 2007 was a simpler time, but 17 ragged years later, it’s easy to recognize that we live in a more cynical world.”

Where did the cynicism come from though? How did a resurgent America coming off the Great Recession of 2008 in no small part due to the Federal spending initiated by Obama, as well as health insurance and student loan reform get so dark? In writing a fairly Dickensian investigative journalism series about Los Angeles you quickly discover two essential themes, danger and corruption. It’s dangerous to be an honest person in this city, much less a journalist, which is full of people seeking to escape the eye of public scrutiny and who spend billions undoubtedly to maintain their image and influence public perception. If you ask me, the rise of Donald Trump is in some ways an inversion of that, a supposed white knight, who in actuality brings nothing more than vituperative rhetoric full of lies, and that started of course with the “birtherism” of Trump, false allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, the homeland of his father, rather than in Honolulu, and that somehow the American public was being deceived.

That Donald Trump was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and initiate a sequence of events that would end in perhaps the ugliest chapter in American history, the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol by his followers is an embarrassment. Trump might be the most anti-Dickensian figure anyone could imagine, an unrestrained billionaire scion who can’t keep his hands to himself and literally threw ketchup on the walls of the White House. That so many people remain pre-occupied by a man who shows so little respect is astonishing. The media clearly bears responsibility, covering his every word, and excusing his excesses. Quite simply in seeking to be objective with someone who is fundamentally subjective, they have failed to understand that is in fact necessary to counter this threat with any consistency by largely ignoring him for a change. If you ask me how Trump should be dealt with, it’s by banishing him from the airwaves and then getting some justice and accountability for a change.

Let’s be honest though, the likelihood that Donald Trump will be put in a prison cell is exceedingly low. So we’re left with Joseph Biden, Obama’s Vice President, who apparently once again with the deceitful lies of Donald Trump is being widely perceived as somehow mentally impaired, too old to understand what he needs to do to Make America Great Again. MAGA, the most dangerous cult of personality in American history is not simple politics. It’s deeper than that and it goes to the core of American racism and politics, how power is used, and who has it in the media space. Even if Barack Obama were to stand up and denounce Trump for his birtherism, it simply wouldn’t be as widely covered as Donald Trump calling Biden a geriatric. The corporate media doesn’t want to make this move though, they are afraid of being told that it's censorship.

When I recently wrote about Substack and the question of whether Nazi content was permissible, many people argued back that spelling out clear terms of service against violence, much less racism and sexism, would be going too far in drawing a line in the culture wars. I don’t intend to not write about Donald Trump, but as my TikTok followers know I’m not about to spend my time fighting one cult only to watch another one rampage through American society in quietude. MAGA hasn’t come to Los Angeles in a while, even as their more extreme components have made themselves heard on issues ranging from what’s taught in public education in Glendale to opposing the honoring of drag queens at Dodgers Stadium. Rightism, the objection leftist values, has taken hold not because of traditional conservatism but despite it, castigating John McCain and George W. Bush for having turned against Trumpism in horror of its implications.

Many fear that this won’t be a peaceful election season, and sadly I agree, once you cross the line in the sand on political violence, literally turning the Capitol building into an Alamo on national television, the propensity for it increases. The many prosecuted for their involvement in that date now sit quietly in prison, hailed as supposed “hostages” on the political right. What will Trump do next is the question on everyone’s mind? Even as Joe Biden is castigated for having supported the Israeli response to Hamas’s attack on October 7 as “Genocide Joe” you have to wonder if Trump is really going to win, and what will that look like? And what if he loses again? Will there be more violence, more bloodshed, more revolt. Just where and when will this most bizarre Year of Our Lord 2024 end? I’m not sure yet, but having normalized and minimized violence, the core of American society clearly still has an appetite for Trumpian destruction, demolition derby.

Biden’s presidency hasn’t been perfect, hobbled by an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, initiated in no small part undoubtedly by Vladimir Putin because Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump and Putin couldn’t have been cozier, and the lack of a Federal investigation that was conclusive in examining the relationship is a national security failure. Quite simply the Department of Justice didn’t get it done, whether Robert Mueller, Christopher Wray or Merrick Garland, the threat of enemies both foreign and domestic is extreme. Putin isn’t our friend, and stopping funding for the war in Ukraine will only embolden Putin, who recently finished eliminating his only major political opponent Alexei Navalny. A brave man, I was always impressed with his documentaries highlighting Putin’s opulent corruption. Could the same type of videos be made in Los Angeles? The city is broke, the country is broke, and where has all of the wealth in America gone even as our national debt approaches $34.4 trillion dollars.

That T in Trump isn’t so big. Even if we were to seize all of Trump’s wealth it’d barely be a penny against the public debt that’s been racked up in my lifetime, and at 37 I like to think I’m still young and might even have a future in politics. Not that anyone should want to be in such a line of business, because sadly so often it’s become about money as much as power, much less policy, the ability to mobilize only your group of voters rather than having any sort of broad appeal. My $25 dollars to Obama in 2008 wasn’t very much, but damn it meant something. In writing about the accomplishment, Barack wrote on February 28, 2008 that “With each new day, someone who never thought they'd ever get active in the political process participates.” I had gained experience on the Presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004, organizing through Meetup.com and traveling to Arizona to canvas before the primary election.

So many people are out of the political process, convinced that both parties are corrupt, all the politicians are wrong, that there’s simply very little space for people to come off the sidelines. People don’t understand politics, and they don’t care, except for the idea so often that they are getting what they want, a desirable economic or social outcome, but so rarely in the interest of American democracy. Such an idea is dismissed these days as grandiose, this is a factionalized country, exactly the prospect that the Founding Fathers feared would occur. In describing the 2008 political dynamic, Obama wrote, “There is a palpable hunger for something new in this country -- a politics that isn't accountable to K Street, but to Main Street, a politics that prioritizes the concerns of ordinary people over the clout of corporate lobbyists.” Is Donald Trump really just the biggest clout seeker in the world? A corporate real estate developer!

Barack Obama’s rhetoric is often dismissed as overly optimistic, naïve, even unwelcome in a world of cynics, but it still resonates with me, when he wrote, “One million people with one voice have registered their desire for change -- and that's a voice that can no longer be ignored,” that was really believable. Obama won in a landslide in 2008, that was not a close election. Turnout was up, 61.6%, a 1.5% increase, and Obama’s 52.9% had good distance on John McCain’s 45.7% Besides his running mate Sarah Palin, still the butt of jokes, I always respected the latter candidate, who had taken a brave stance in favor of campaign fundraising reform and had challenged George W. Bush fiercely in the 2000 Republican primaries. Even as Bush prevailed, and led the country through 911 and into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan before the economy collapsed, you at least knew even if a little dumb, he wasn’t treasonously crazy.  

Since leaving office I’ve gained new respect for the younger Bush, who has famously taken up painting and even created a friendship with Michelle Obama, wife to Barack Obama that’s nothing short of inspiring. It’s hard to imagine Jill Biden and Melania Trump ever sitting in the same row of seats, much less publicly admiring each other. The Obamas had a sense of decency that the Trumps could never replicate, and even the Bidens have struggled to match. When I was a little kid, I read every single biography of American presidents that I could borrow from the Hermosa Beach public library, and even as my life has taken its own course, I still think that the idea of the American president is important. People sometimes compare Trump to like Grover Cleveland, who split his two terms in the late 19^th century, but even that one fails to illuminate the danger that Trump poses to American democracy, much less the world order with his tantrums.

So while I hear the criticism of Barack Obama’s policies on fighting terrorism with drone strikes and on the border too, I have to wonder is America just misplacing its political energy? People don’t even talk about hope and change anymore, it’s all about the political conflict, the money, the power, and sadly often said racism. The weaponization of political misinformation is a serious problem in our society, both in local and national politics, it’s a way to use lies and even tangible things to target opponents for confusion. I don’t see Donald Trump taking up any new hobbies, much less new friends. Trump is an aberration, a terrible mistake, and one that I refuse to be intimidated into silence about by anybody. Back in 2008, I was interviewed by the Honolulu Star Bulletin as well as the New York Post sent out by the Associated Press.

The fact that Donald Trump’s followers are intimidating, that they are intolerant, and that they are crass and ugly in their attacks on the order of liberal democracy is not unique. Violence sells. Trump knows this and so that’s why the threats have come, whether it’s hangings or executions, to be for Trump is to embrace the idea of violence. It’s happened before, and it’s going to happen again. I have no need to mock the man endlessly, but it needs to be said, and so having enjoyed the limelight, I hope that his campaign will flounder, will fail, and will stop being the center of attention for our media most especially. Find other stories, find something else to talk about.

Investigate local stories, broaden your horizons, as Obama said in honoring the $25 on top of 999,999 donors is “Let's keep building this movement -- let's go change America and let's go change the world.” Movements are needed, movements happen, but if no one covers them or talks about them in any intelligible ways it’s hard to see how as Obama said about being bullied: "I have to say that with big ears and the name that I have, I wasn't immune. I didn't emerge unscathed.” Obama had a sense of humor about himself, can anyone say the same about Trump? This isn’t to say that this should be reduced to a dualism, but to pretend that there’s a comparison to be made between the two as competitors, it’s that public decency has become less important.

No one would describe Donald Trump as diplomatic, and so even as Obama is seen as yet another imperial President, supporting militarism, somehow Trump has become strangely seen as an effective dealmaker, someone who just somehow might handle Vladimir Putin better and who has more energy for leadership than “Sleepy Joe Biden.” I can only hope that as this drags on all the way to November that America doesn’t take the clickbait and submit to a narrative that normalizes political violence. So dear please media, just stop, because it just might be too late next time to pull the plug. As we watched January 6, 2021 unfold, one thing was clear, that a terrible mistake had been made, and that it had compromised the integrity of the national security of the United States of America. We have to get off this fast-track to a repeat of the shitshow.

Link: An Obama campaign staffer stars in the shimmering autobiographical novel ‘Great Expectations’

Link: U. Hawai'i Student Becomes One Millionth Donor To Obama Campaign

Link: Zachary Ellison - Barack Obama Files

Link: Obama: I was bullied for my big ears

Please support my work with your subscription or for direct aid use Venmo

Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.