My phone rang at 4 AM. This was during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when most Americans with good sense were hiding from the poison air. I was watching television and reading. When the phone rings at 4 AM, it rarely means anything good. The call was from my aunt. I held my breath to calm down, exhaled, and then I asked her, “Is everything OK? Are you alright? Did you get sick or something?” My aunt is in her 80s. She is a bit of a trickster. With age, she has only become more of her true self in that way. She giggled and told me, “Papa Trump just paid off. I got my COVID money!” I was annoyed that she called me at such an obscenely early hour to tell me that she got her Trump money.
My aunt does not like Donald Trump. Like many other Black working-class folks that I know, she thinks that Trump can be “a bit off” at times and does bad things. But, she admits, he is very funny. She also likes that “Donald Trump says what everyone is thinking, but most politicians don’t have the nerve to say publicly.” She was amazed by how Trump got up from the ground so quickly and pumped his fist in the air after being shot at in Pennsylvania during the 2024 campaign by that “crazy man who should never have been allowed to get that close to the president” and how “the whole thing was like a scene in an action movie or comic book!”
