Aiming for the top | Tom Camfield

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“BUT THAT’S ULTIMATELY WHY the beginning of the Biden Era is a moment of a relief. We haven’t turned the page on an awful chapter of American history. But finally, together, we can. For the first time in four years, America’s most powerful institutions are run almost entirely by people who care about our democracy and want to see it survive. They must make the most of this moment, not just to clear the low bar set by the previous administration, but to raise the bar for future ones before it’s too late.”

So concluded former Obama speech-writer David Litt Jan. 25 in a piece for The Guardian.

I’ll try, but I may not be around for the next mid-term election on Nov. 8, 2022, when Republicans make a big push to regain control of the U.S. Senate — and also to gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

It’s a bit of a stretch, as I will/would be closing in on my 94th birthday.

But for the moment, I’m curious as hell how Donald — if he’s not in the courtroom trying to stay out from behind bars — will be trying to muck up the first 100 days of the Biden-Harris administration . . . and the months thereafter.

That’s Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill at the beginning of this blog — and hopefully she will remain there in place of Donald’s hero Andrew Jackson as we rid ourselves of the self-centered racist society of Trump.

Andrew, like Donald, was no champion of American Freedom. Harriet Tubman was.

At noon on Jan. 20, newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden wasted no time making the country’s leaders looking more as if it were run by people who actually live here — as he had promised. (Actually he had begun this much earlier with his choice of vice president.)

In addition to his flagrant white supremacy and personal narcissism, Trump gradually axed the nation’s successful 138-year-old Civil Service system in favor of the spoils system that flourished under Jackson. Less than two weeks prior to the last Election Day, Donald signed an executive order threatening to officially return the U.S. to a spoils system in which a large share of the federal government’s workforce could be fired for little or no reason — including a perceived lack of loyalty to the president.

Andrew Jackson, seventh U.S. president, was a slave-owner and populist who played a key role in sending some 5,000 Cherokee and others on the “Trail of Tears” from the southeastern U.S. to “Indian Territory” west of Arkansas and the Mississippi River. Thus, some 4.000 indigenous Americans died in the early 1830s of illness and starvation. He generally opposed policies that would have outlawed slavery in western territories as the U.S. expanded over time.

Harriet Tubman, ca. 1822-1913, was an American abolitionist and political activist born into slavery. She made 13 missions to rescue some 70 enslaved people, using the Underground Railroad network of anti-slavery safe houses before the Civil War. During the war, she was an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. Later she was active in the Women’s Suffrage movement.

But supporters of Donald Trump prefer a photo of Andrew Jackson on their money. Tell me again about racism, misogyny and other forms of imagined supremacy — and why they should be championed by our government.

The proposed new $20 bill is one of the major symbols of difference between Biden and Trump. The change was first proposed during the Obama administration in 2016 and the change was announced after a viral on-line campaign to feature a woman on U.S. currency.

In 2020, however, Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the new $20 bill would not be released until 2030 (with or without Tubman) and the next administration’s secretary (presumably post-Trump) would make the decision on the change. Mnuchin demurred on whether he personally believed Tubman should ever be added to the $20.

Trump has expressed his opposition to removing monuments or renaming military facilities that honor the United States’ history of racism. As a 2016 candidate, he said that he did not believe that Tubman should replace Jackson, who was a slave owner, and called the idea “pure political correctness.”

“It says everything you need to know about President Trump’s values that he can’t even do the lightest of lifts to honor Harriet Tubman,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “He’s refusing to put her portrait on the $20 bill, but he’s continuing to honor Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery,” Schumer said in a June New York Times article.