'Radical course of treatment': Cancer survivor warns MAGA that Trump isn't their cure
A foreign correspondent who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 29 while covering West Africa for the New York Times says it takes a lot to make her panic — and Donald Trump has her panicking.
Lydia Polgreen admitted in a New York Times editorial Wednesday that she is frightened for herself, her elderly mother and a divided nation that sees Trump as either the cancer or its cure.
"When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic," wrote Polgreen.
"This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic."
Polgreen details her career as a journalist and the impact her diagnosis had on the youthful optimism that told her she was prepared to face any crisis the world could throw her way.
Returning to West Africa after receiving treatment, Polgreen discovered the optimism was gone.
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"I had once been able to say, when boarding rickety commercial airplanes in impoverished countries, what are the odds of this plane crashing?" Polgreen wrote. "Cancer demolished this equanimity. If that random, extremely unlikely diagnosis could happen to me, then anything could."
Polgreen said she experienced that fear again on Nov. 6 when she woke up unsure her 73-year-old mother would be able to prove her citizenship to an incoming Trump administration bent on mass deportations.
Her mother had hoped Vice President Kamala Harris might provide protections from her corporate landlord, who had suddenly raised the rent by 10 percent, and with grocery prices hard to pay on Social Security and her late husbands' veteran’s benefits, Polgreen wrote.
Instead, Polgreen is now desperately hoping her mother's lost expired passport will turn up, and that America survives a Trump victory she likened to a diagnosis of cancer.
"America is about to undergo a radical course of treatment," Polgreen wrote. "He seems determined to take his slender victory and treat it like a historic mandate to reshape American life in profound ways. No matter how you voted, we are all about to find out precisely how vulnerable we really are."