When broken trust is hard to fix

It was August. My house was sweltering and the humidity made me feel like I was almost underwater. Normally not sensitive to heat, I was five months pregnant and already felt like a beluga whale. As I drove home from school with my daughter, then 5, just as I was thinking, “My car is air-conditioned but my house isn’t – how did this happen?” a sign on a tree caught my eye.

“Air Conditioner, For Sale, $200,” it said. I stopped, turned down a driveway, and knocked on the door.

A couple in their 70s answered. They explained they had only used the air conditioner a few times, and they preferred fans after all. I told them I only had a few dollars with me for a cash deposit so they could hold the air conditioner and not sell it to anyone else, but I promised to send my husband with money to pick it up after work that very day.

Deposit? They said, bewildered. Why do you think we need that?

“You gave us your word,” the woman said. “We trust you,” the man said. “We wouldn’t think of taking a deposit. We will hold it for whenever your husband can pick it up.” They took the sign down from the tree.

Trust. From time to time I’ve thought how moved I was over that nice couple to whom the word of a total stranger was good enough. There was something so lovely and old-fashioned about their willingness to believe me, to accept my promise as ironclad. It was a little thing, but a big thing all the same.

Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

Which brings me to the latest revelations over how top Democrats and White House staff covered up the decline of Joe Biden. Despite his stumbles and mumbles and aging before their eyes, they enabled his outrageous decision to break his promise that he would be a “bridge” – i.e., stick to one term. Instead, he opted to run for a second term, at least until his disastrous June 2024 debate with Donald Trump made his decay obvious. The recent announcement that Biden has 4^th-stage prostate cancer compounded suspicions that he may have had the disease for years but hid it from the public, although his office said his last test for prostate cancer was in 2014. Really? If he were still in office, would he and his people have hidden that, too?

Which brings me back, once again, to trust. I’m a Democrat and I am as angry as I have ever been at the party.

Yes, I know, Trump is a lunatic who is taking a sledgehammer to government, firing employees with no regard to what they do, tearing apart anything that helps ordinary people – health care for the poor and elderly in nursing homes, food for the poor, here and overseas, even staffing for the weather service, for God’s sake. Yes, he wants to do away with due process and send undocumented immigrants, and anyone he doesn’t like, to overseas prisons. Yes, he is using the presidency to enrich himself with his personal cryptocurrency and enhance his family’s deals in the Middle East while he destroys our traditional alliances around the world. Nothing Biden ever did could come close to the obscene abuse of power we witness every day.

Still, the idea that nobody in power -- in the White House or inner circles of the Democratic Party -- put us, the American people, ahead of their desire to cling to power and their own ambitions has left me utterly appalled.

I am reading the book about all this, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, but my opinion was formed last year. That’s when I had lunch with a high-level Democratic elected official after Biden’s debate and she asked me, “So, what did you think?” After I expressed my horror, she said, “Gee, I thought Biden looked great … compared to a fundraising dinner I attended with him a month before the debate. He needed a teleprompter to greet attendees and didn’t recognize people he has known for decades.”

So. Trust, again. Democrats who knew, and said nothing, need to apologize. Hell, somebody needs to. What feels impossible right now for our democracy is that we need to figure out how to keep this from happening again, even as it probably is happening again, with Trump acting like the vindictive, crazy uncle in the attic. And Democrats need to make the case that voters can trust the party to put their interests first, which is no small thing. It’s a lot bigger than buying an air conditioner, but still involves giving -- and standing by – one’s word.

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Book news: Washington, D.C.-area peeps, I will do a book reading/author signing at Busboys and Poets Takoma at 235 Carroll Street NW July 17, 6-8, and I would love to see you! Please RSVP here. It’s free, of course. But if 25 kind souls don’t RSVP by a week before the reading, the bookstore will postpone the whole thing. Sooo… sign up, and I will mow your lawn!

Buffalo, NY, friends, I will do a book reading/author signing at the West Side Rowing Club, where my sister Ellen was a coach, June 12, 8-9 pm, no RSVP necessary.

For those interested, the redoubtable Julie Gammack (of Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck on Substack) recorded this podcast with me this week. I’ve done about eight podcasts about my book so far, but honestly, Julie could be an FBI interrogator. Thank God we only had an hour; she got so much information out of me that heaven only knows what I would have told her if we had more time! She is also the founding mother of the Okoboji Writers and Songwriters Retreat in Iowa, which attracts hundreds of writers to the shores of Lake Okoboji in September for writing workshops on everything you can think of. It’s fabulous. This year’s retreat is Sept. 28-Oct. 1. Early bird rates are still available and it always sells out. I’ll me there, waxing eloquent on opinion writing and memoir. Join us!