Portside

Anatomy of an execution

Let’s return for a moment to those three excruciating stories from recent days that aren’t primarily about Donald Trump. First, the lethal injection of Christa Pike, who has been in solitary confinement for three decades, was botched by the state of Tennessee last week. Pike wound up on death row after a violent murder she committed as a teenager—the murder and torture of a classmate.

Whatever you think of the death penalty as an abstract concept (I, for one, am against a state having a legal system that the government uses to execute offenders), last week’s events were horrific. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.^”

It’s hard to picture how two attempts to do a lethal injection, which involved multiple needles, at least one of them bent, and a report by the condemned that her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and which left her unconscious and on a ventilator would not count as torture. The defense attorneys claim they had specifically warned that Pike’s veins were compromised and that administering the lethal injection would not go smoothly.

This was the first attempted execution of a woman in the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years. She’s been in the hospital since the ordeal and has apparently now regained consciousness. It isn’t yet clear how the state will respond, beyond pausing executions for the time being.

In the midst of the outcry over the gruesome results, some politicians have been calling for bringing back machine-gun executions and hangings. An already punitive state is becoming more brutal, to the cheers of those elected to represent the people.

While Pike’s ordeal was unusual to the degree that she’s a white woman in a penal system more prone to demonizing people of color, it nonetheless offers a snapshot of the extraordinary cruelty and fetishization of punishment of the convicted. When the state has the power to kill those it detains, there is no way for it not to become an arbitrary practice, one that reflects the conditions of the larger society outside.

And while the Trump era has seen an surge in death penalty executions, Trump has been encouraging what was already an ingrained phenomenon. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state of Florida alone conducted about 40% of the executions carried out in 2025. What the torture of Pike reveals is a country that has rejected a basic level of humanity.

The Cornell Seven

Women are often deliberately targeted for malevolent actions by government these days—and this tendency has likewise worsened considerably under Donald Trump. But it’s important to remember that plenty of harm has taken place in periods when Trump was not president.

The investigation into the alleged rape at Cornell University in 2024 seems to have been handled badly by the local district attorney there. And the decisions made by Cornell’s administration seem aimed at protecting the men involved far more than finding out what happened or holding people accountable in any serious way.

I spent several years teaching self defense in the D.C. area for a living, from physical tactics to verbal skills of escalation, de-escalation, and negotiation. Part of that job involved teaching regularly on campus at Georgetown University under the auspices of the Women’s Center there. I was also adjunct faculty in the exercise science program at George Washington University, in addition to doing more sporadic instruction at other local colleges and dozens of area organizations and companies.

Many of the women I taught on campus, it turned out, were already survivors of sexual assault. A number of them who had been through the experience had for some time tried to convince themselves that everything was fine, and that they were overreacting to events.

They often did so because they didn’t want to see themselves as a person who couldn’t stop or hadn’t stopped the person who had assaulted them. They didn’t want to think that some friendly guy at a party or in one of their classes, or the guy they were dating, would actually rape someone. It was preferable for many of them for a time to create a delusion in which nothing truly bad had happened, because what had happened was too devastating at a deeper level, even if they managed to keep moving day to day.

Sexual violence is so endemic in our society that it’s a challenge to create a formal process to address it. You can make things criminal, you can work to add protections in various settings, but without a more comprehensive approach, you’re may just wind up putting band-aids on gaping wounds.

One larger attempt to take on the bigger issues was Title IX, a revolutionary civil rights law that went into effect in the 1972. Title IX is what made possible most of the girls’ sports team in U.S. schools; it’s the basis under which demands to deal with sexual assault on college and university campuses have been brought. It started as a set of ideas that have been made real in various ways—some breathtakingly transformational and some more problematic.

But the idea of it—which did not just pop into existence in 1972 but has had to be litigated again and again in the decades since—gave girls and women a beachhead on which to demand rights. Having gone through elementary school in the 1970s as Title IX was implemented, I can attest to the fact that had a huge effect on the way that girls were viewed by boys in school, and even more how girls viewed themselves.

Yet these beachheads established in my lifetime have always been under attack and are now being dismantled. This is a problem in which Trump and his allies are taking an active role in compounding the harm underway today, yet simultaneously a fight that has been going on much longer.

Sued by their doctor

The third story I mentioned at the top of the post was that of U.S. Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas, who worked as an obstetrician in that state for more than a decade. As the New York Times reported, before his entry into national politics, Marshall or his medical practice filed lawsuits against 700 of his patients for nonpayment. Eighty-one of them wound up arrested, in some cases after missing court dates related to the lawsuits. All the debts were on accounts for less than $5,000; one debtor owed just $114.

When payment plans were set up for many of these patients, they were charged 18% interest. Charles Gaba wrote on Bluesky about one woman who mentioned in an interview that she had been on a plan paying $50 a month before she fell behind. Gaba did the math and realized that by paying $50 a month on her debt of $3,600 at 18% interest, she would never be able to pay off the original debt. The program was set up in such a way that she would be paying off the debt indefinitely. (Here’s a link to his full post about it.)

I’m mentioning these examples of the Cornell Seven, the attempted execution of Christa Pike, and a sitting U.S. senator and doctor who had previously sued hundreds of his patients as examples because it’s easy sometimes to think that Trump is responsible for all the cruelty and horror happening now. But in reality, he’s been taking everything that’s bad and making it worse.

And just like the $50 payments on a debt of $3600 at 18% interest, if we don’t start addressing the principal—the underlying problem from which the greater harm spirals out, we’re going to sink deeper and deeper and will never be able to put our larger crisis to rest.

These three examples were all about various forms of mistreatment of women by the state, the university, their doctors, and the legal system. But misogyny is just one path that leads back to the same place many other paths will take you when you trace our current problems to their root.

Bolsonaro, again?

Looking at the international arena shows the same kind of damage and costs. As I mentioned, Flávio Bolsonaro, the current leading candidate and winner of the most votes so far in that country’s presidential election, is the son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro. Due to the elder Bolsonaro’s attempts to overthrow the the government and interfere in the 2022 elections, Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2023 barred him from running for national office until 2030.

Conveniently, his son is now running instead. To point this out is not to say that both men are merely figureheads and irrelevant. Jair Bolsonaro’s actions in recent years were stunning crimes, not just theater. But in the bigger picture, these men are primarily a vehicle. While donations from private companies have been banned in Brazil, individual donors have begun to have more influence, not just in determining who wins the presidency, but also in the races for seats in Brazil’s increasingly more powerful Congress.

In the meantime, the younger Bolsonaro, who may well become the next president of Brazil, is already currently under investigation. Unsealed documents from the country’s Supreme Court appear to show issues with alleged corruption and money laundering in relation to his connections with Daniel Vorcaro, the disgraced head of a liquidated bank. Audio exists in which Bolsonaro appears to be asking Vorcaro for large amounts of money.

What is at the root of so many of these stories? Money and power. People with money who want more money. People with power who want more power. Misogyny, racism, fraud, the violence against women, the longstanding brutal justice system, our newer concentration camp system—these are all just tools the powerful use to become more powerful, whether it’s by keeping women down, stoking racial and ethnic hatred, or creating perpetual debt among the poor.

I won’t do a deep dive into Brazil today, but focusing on the domestic front, income inequality and billionaires’ money in politics—not to mention the corruption both are engendering—are the bedrock issues of what ails America. Money is the juice amplifying and directing all the hatred.

What we can do

There is real momentum against Trump and his allies going into the November elections. In the coming weeks, we can door-knock, put up signs, go to No Kings, help make sure your friends and neighbors are voting and have planned how they can get to the polls.

But while we focus on the short term, be looking at what comes after. It won’t be enough to settle for flipping the House and hoping things might improve, only to face anti-incumbent fury when nothing changes for the better even with a Democratic congress.

After November 3, we need to put forth an anti-corruption, pro-accountability platform and act visibly on it. I disagreed profoundly with some Biden policies, but there were also those I thought were important accomplishments for the country. Yet so many Americans never heard about them. Sometimes the performative part of politics is critical.

But now, we’re in a very different place. We’re starting from a point at which much of the Trump administration’s policies are known and loathed. In the coming weeks, it will be especially useful to begin to offer a counterpoint—and where possible, an antidote—to those hated policies, while being clear about what’s still under the control of the administration for the time being.

And when all those local and national officials are elected in November, they should begin do as much as they can to distinguish themselves from Trump and his allies. Substance is important. But if you’re actually doing the substance, and you don’t get the performative part—the visible part—done, too, the credit for whatever you’ve accomplished might simply get claimed by bad actors. Or even worse, the policies might be undone entirely without anyone realizing what was lost. Whatever happens on November 3rd, the next two years should not be about business as usual, but instead about addressing those who are hurting—about creating a meaningful platform for national change and making it heard.