{"id":4107,"date":"2020-10-02T23:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-03T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefilipinochronicle.com\/backup\/?p=4107"},"modified":"2020-10-17T04:57:15","modified_gmt":"2020-10-17T14:57:15","slug":"will-trump-overstay-his-welcome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefilipinochronicle.com\/backup\/2020\/10\/02\/will-trump-overstay-his-welcome\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Trump Overstay His Welcome?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Emil Guillermo
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(AP Photo\/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Existential worries abound for America.

COVID-19, SCOTUS, and the concomitant worries of living under a president who just doesn\u2019t care about anything other than his own preservation of power, weigh heavily.\u00a0

Trump\u2019s way is to employ the arithmetic of the autocrat, mastered by the likes of Ferdinand Marcos. (Did you celebrate Sept. 21, 1972?) Trump\u2019s getting good at it.

He just asks, \u201cWhat can we do that benefits me most?\u201d All others be damned. We are now to the point where Trump can\u2019t even pledge to the nation a peaceful transition of power. And why should he, if he has no intention of leaving because he will do what he can to assure victory.

Now doesn\u2019t that just sound like Marcos. Or like Saddam Hussein (although Saddam was a real military man, not just a master of bad feet and draft dodging). Somehow, we should all see what\u2019s wrong with the inability to commit to a peaceful transition. To not do so is clearly the mentality of a dictator. That\u2019s why Trump saying he\u2019d \u201cget rid of ballots\u201d is like throwing the Constitution into a fire pit.

It does give Trump an appalling distinction. No U.S. president has ever been so emboldened as to suggest he was above our democracy. Richard Nixon? No, Nixon was smart enough to know when to get out.

Trump? He\u2019s his own brand of visa overstay. We may need a presidential form of ICE to get him out. Just look at his record. He was impeached and he survived. We\u2019ve demanded to see his tax return, and he\u2019s shielded it from us.\u00a0 He\u2019s been implicated or caught in scandal after scandal, from the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape, to the women who have accused him of all sorts of sexual misconduct.\u00a0

His survival shouldn\u2019t be seen as a plus. But it\u2019s this kind of resilience amid the confluence of existential events that could bring our democracy to the brink.

And we\u2019re not even talking about the more than 200,000 dead from COVID-19 with no national testing plan (to which Trump gave himself an A-Plus).

We haven\u2019t even mentioned Trump\u2019s replacement for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amy Coney Barret. She may please some Catholic Filipinos for her pro-life stand on abortion, but she replaces our leading protective shield from Trump, our stop-gap Ginsburg. If Barret\u2019s rushed through, it means hang on to your hats for rollbacks of anything progressive that benefitted people of color. Or women. 1940\u2019s here we come. You just can\u2019t use the word \u201cexistential\u201d enough. Everything that happens threatens to impact us for a generation at least. That\u2019s not even debatable.

THE BIT OF GOOD NEWS ON THE CENSUS<\/strong>
But Trump hasn\u2019t changed all the courts yet. And it is the source of one bit of good news: the stopping of the rush job Census 2020 deadlines which would have assured an inaccurate count.

Talk about our existential crisis. I am not counted therefore I don\u2019t exist.

But now, thanks to Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District in California, you may have more time to get counted in the 2020 Census, if you haven\u2019t done so already.

On Friday, Judge Koh issued a\u00a0preliminary injunction<\/a>\u00a0that bars the Trump administration from accelerating the Census deadlines.

The order prevents the Census count from ending early on Sept. 30 and allow data collection to continue until Oct. 31. The court also stopped the Census Bureau from delivering apportionment data on Dec. 31.

Given the pandemic, natural disasters like the California wildfires, and a Census workforce that was just 38 percent of what it had been in years past, accelerating the Census deadlines made no sense at all.

The fear of an undercount was just too real.

The court\u2019s opinion cites Associate Field Director for field operations Timothy Olson, who said this in an email thread on July 27 of this year:

\u201cWe need to sound the alarm to the realities of the ground\u2014people are afraid to work for us and it is reflected in the number of enumerators working in the (Area Census Offices). And this means it is ludicrous to think we can complete 100% of the nation\u2019s data collection earlier than 10\/31 and any thinking person who would believe we can deliver apportionment by 12\/31 has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.\u201d

If I were on that thread, I would say both, considering how the Trump administration has been casting doubt and dissension about the Census at every turn. There never seemed to be a desire to get a true count of the population of the New America, with its more diverse hues that would make a white supremacist cry.

From the citizenship question, which spread fear in immigrant communities, to the Trump memo expressing a desire to not have \u201cillegal aliens\u201d participate, the administration has done all it could to make sure the Census would be anything but smooth, let alone accurate.

I started hearing about it from field offices around the final push in the field count in August.

ASIAN AMERICAN UNDERCOUNT?<\/strong>
The number of Asian Americans is somewhere north of 23 million in the U.S., according to the latest Census numbers.

But when the official 2020 Census results are unveiled, will all of us be counted?

If you haven\u2019t done so yet, go to\u00a0my2020census.gov<\/a>\u00a0right now.

Get counted now. Or else.

Asian Americans, we have an existential crisis. We could be the most undercounted group in the 2020 Census.

Census insiders weren\u2019t counting on an extension and were already resigned to an imperfect count.

Now, we have a little more time. Get counted.\u201cI\u2019m not getting counted, Emil. I\u2019m undocumented,\u201d you say.

Yes. I know.

The citizenship question debate did not help. Enumerators were telling me that people in their homes really believed the Census was an arm of Donald Trump\u2019s ICE.

Forget that. Earlier, the Supreme Court affirmed there will be no citizenship question. The Census isn\u2019t out to deport to you.

It was just another monkey wrench thrown in by the Trump administration to create even more distrust and division.

Rest assured, the count has nothing to do with citizenship. It\u2019s not about having papers. It\u2019s just about who is living in this country\u2014for whatever reason\u2014for at least six months out of the year.

It\u2019s all about counting the people of the U.S., not citizens.

All the people. We the people. (Just like it says in the Constitution.) You\u2019re one of them. Now, get counted.

Even the Philippine Consul General Henry Bensurto, Jr., recently reached out to the broad Filipino American community\u2014especially his Filipino nationals working at the consulate. \u201cIt\u2019s not about the brown (Philippine) passport or the blue (U.S.) passport,\u201d Bensurto said.

If you\u2019re living in the U.S. the majority of the year, get counted.

Money is at stake. Resources. Funds for your community and region. Funds for your particular ethnic group. And, of course, the Census is the basis for drawing new political districts.

If you\u2019re in Philadelphia and don\u2019t mark \u201cFILIPINO\u201d if you\u2019re Filipino, then no one will know there are any Flips in Philly.

They\u2019ll only know if you mark it down. And if you don\u2019t, you\u2019ll fall through a crack bigger than the one on the Liberty Bell.

Every ten years, the Census is done. Over time, the form has become easier to fill out. It takes less than five minutes to fill it out online.

I had it sitting on my pile of unopened mail for weeks. I even had two enumerators knock on my door.

Finally, I stopped playing hard to get and just filled it out online. Another set of Guillermos present and accounted for.

Now how about the rest of you?

THE HARD TO FIND ASIANS AND FILIPINOS
<\/strong>Census insiders tell me the problem isn\u2019t a procrastinator like me who has filled out the form and participated in the Census for decades. They know where I am in the data trove of 350 million Americans somewhere.

The question is what about the new people since 2010. For Asian Americans that means the Nepalese, the Burmese, and other fast-growing groups in our national community.

Where are they?COVID-19 makes it even harder to find certain people. Many have been forced to move because of COVID economic distress. Some people move in with family. The multigenerational households. Or they move in with friends in unconventional housing situations where there are people of mixed-status.

Some documented. Some undocumented. Add in the fear factor, and people remain uncounted.

That\u2019s why some I talked to at the Census Bureau worry that Asian Americans will be the most undercounted group.

Sign up in the final days. Time\u2019s running out. Don\u2019t fear the Census.

Fear what will happen to our community if you don\u2019t fill out that form.

It\u2019s easier than voting. And the administration thought it was easier to muck up. But then Judge Koh stepped in and saved the day to make sure the Census had a shot to be as accurate as possible. The government will likely appeal this ruling, creating more confusion. And wouldn\u2019t that be just like 2020.

But for now, there\u2019s time. The census matters because you do.

Don\u2019t be invisible. Be counted.

EMIL GUILLERMO is a journalist and commentator. He wrote a column for the Star-Bulletin and was a member of the Advertiser editorial board.\u00a0 Follow on Twitter @emilamok. Listen to his podcasts on www.amok.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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