When it was reported that Donald Tr*mp had been diagnosed with COVID, I thought that was it. He had all the risk factors to become a coronavirus fatality. I had read the stories of people on ventilators, getting all the medical help, but they died anyway. I assumed Tr*mp would share their fate. And beyond that, the story held together. As a writer, it fit the trope of the disaster movie: the authority figure who underestimates the threat, who callously puts people in harm’s way, who has thousands of deaths on his hands, who assumes his money and power will keep him safe. It was like a cliche come to life.

The stakes were high in this election year. A second Tr*mp term would likely mean the end of democracy, and four more years of his environmental policies would torpedo our chance to stop the climate crisis. I had said that we needed to get Tr*mp out of office by any means necessary.  If the universe used COVID as the means, who was I to question? There were many people who feared his death from COVID. They were afraid his base would see him as a martyr. But I didn’t buy it. A martyr killed by what? The disease he said was a hoax? It didn’t make a coherent story.

I watched the news closely for the next 48 hours.

And then…he didn’t die.

It threw me into a state of despair. According to Eric Ward, one of every 875 Black people in the US has died from COVID. How could this man–the very one who had sentenced my people to this tragedy–be the one to live? It was unfair. Unjust. Unacceptable. But there he was. Smiling smugly in the media. Undefeated. Like the Terminator, continuing his cyborg mission to ruin us all.

But after a few days raging and crying about how unfair it all was, I had a revelation. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe we needed him to live. Maybe we needed him to live because we needed to defeat him in the election. Deep inside, part of me was afraid that we couldn’t do it. I was afraid that he and the GOP had already eroded our democracy too much. That we needed Divine Intervention to oust him.

The people of the US were like a butterfly who struggles to get out of a chrysalis. If you help the butterfly, if you tear the chrysalis open, the butterfly doesn’t develop the strength needed at that developmental stage, and will die. We needed to strengthen ourselves, our movements, our ideologies of power on this election. We needed to fight and win.

It was a revelation that I didn’t dare say aloud before Tr*mp was officially declared the loser. My internal superstitious girl felt like I would jinx it. But I can say it now: we needed him to live so that we, the people, could see that we do have the power. If this were a movie, the election would be the final showdown. We needed that climactic moment. Not so much for this movie, but for all the sequels.

We are going to need this sense of our own power as we fight voter suppression in these Georgia runoff elections. We need this sense of our power as we push Biden to combat COVID in a way that is transformative and not just austerity. We need to challenge him to change his stand on fossil fuels for the Green New Deal. We need this sense of our power as we push for policies that address structural racism and sexism. As we push for true democracy in this nation and on this planet. We, the people, need to be the ones to decide. And we will not stop fighting until we win.

Epilogue: Georgia on My Mind

We don’t have much time. I am organizing with the Working Families Party to flip the senate in Georgia. Join me!