A newspaper editor dying of cancer has already survived past the year or so that doctors gave her to live -- and now she's hoping to outlast Trump's presidency.
Melinda Welsh, former editor of the Sacramento News & Review, considers herself lucky to be alive after chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments -- but she's finding herself much less optimistic than before, she wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
"When I learned that I could expect to die within a year, I was at least comforted by the belief that humanity was slowly evolving toward the better," Welsh wrote. "This may sound naïve — I knew we hadn’t vanquished poverty, war, racism or inequality. But millions of people around the globe no longer lived in extreme poverty or died of preventable causes. And we seemed to have made steady advances in important realms; e.g., we humans had finally begun to understand our precious status as caretakers of the one Earth we possess."
But that's all changed since "Trump and his tribe" took power this year, and Welsh worries the damage they've done could take decades to undo.
"The president represents the flip side of everything I love about America," she wrote. "He traffics in fear and has divided us into warring camps on issues of race, gender, football — you name it. He builds walls, figuratively if not yet literally."
Cancer has given Welsh a new perspective on mortality, and the unrelenting awfulness of the Trump presidency has instilled a new reason to live.
"I no longer fear my own death," Welsh wrote. "But that’s less solace than it used to be because Trump has made me fear for future generations.
"I’ve never been a bucket-list person," she added, "but I do now have one wish before I die: That Trump be banished from office, our country’s ideals upheld and America set back on its imperfect but still exceptional trajectory toward the light."