A Six Year Old Girl With A Belt

by Debrianna Mansini

My mother heard voices.

I am not certain anyone outside of our immediate family even knew that about her. But we did.

“Who said that? Who said that about me?” She demanded, breathing fire as she stormed into our bedroom.

We knew she meant it, but the three of us, still in pigtails quietly and intently coloring in our Cinderella coloring books, had not said a word. Stunned, none of us spoke, we just blinked.

“Tell me right now or you will ALL get it.” She had that look of manic panic in her eyes that we would come to know so well as the precursor to the chaos that would come for the next several hours. A whirlwind of anger and retribution for having had babies way too soon, she spit it out into every crevice of our beings.

“Tell me who said it??” she shrieked.

Still, no one spoke, the fear choked in our tender throats.

“Stand up, all three of you and pull your pants down. Whoever it is, better admit it and fast. Denice, go get the belt.”

This was one of her regular moves—demanding we choose the implement of our torture.

The three of us, now shivering and crying, knowing we had said nothing, was eventually more than I could bear. At the delicate age of six, I deduced there was a way out. I held some power. So, I said it. I ended the nightmare.

“Ok, mom. I did it. Hit me.”

This was the kind of gaslighting and chaos I grew up in and survived. The good news is that it gave me a blueprint embedded in my childhood soul that would serve me much later. A profound type of radar that detected the same stench of malignant narcissism that bled out of every pore in the scourge that is and was Trump.

So, when I was twenty-two and living in New York City, and Donald Trump was calling in to radio stations, posing as a public relations man named John Baron to promote his sick, sexual prowess and fake his wealth, acting as if it wasn’t he, and people just went along with it as if it were normal, something in my psyche twisted.

He heard voices, too.

Just wait. This won’t be fun, I thought. And all the while, his signature “white male fails up” went on and on. Through the Exonerated Five, through parading around Marla Maples AT CHURCH while he was still married to Ivana, to stiffing his own construction workers out of their negotiated pay, to saying he would preserve the historic exterior art of the building that would become the golden calf Trump Tower, then “accidentally” dropping the museum worthy pieces to the ground, to the rape of E. Jean Carroll and god knows how many Epstein babies, to “grab them by the pussy,” to chiding the disabled, to trashing our military and its heroes, to ‘her emails’ while having his own secret server in the basement….to the presidency. These are the stories—OUR stories—that tell us where we are and where we are heading.

My mom never “got well.” She never felt remorse or sorrow for the torture of her own children. She never backed down, not even at the moment of her death, which is another story. Sound familiar? THAT story is now OUR story—we are all living through “get the belt." Who is going to get the belt now? Who will stand up?

I recently had a conversation with my dad, a man who idolized Trump since those early, sick NY days, and still does. It is a fraught relationship that I keep at arm's length except for mostly holidays and birthdays. I told him in our most recent conversation that I would be driving to San Francisco instead of flying, because I need to see my eye specialist there and I wanted to go before Medicare gets trashed. “Oh, that won’t happen,” he said in his best patronizing voice. “Dad, it’s in the bill,” I said. “Nothing is going to happen to Medicare,” he said in a staccato sing song of poking fun. “Dad, it’s in the bill,” I staccatoed back. And then…I dropped it. I dropped it because I know, that even though he lived through the nightmare we both know as my mother Marcelle, he had not come out of the coma, he had not heeded the lesson. He is well indoctrinated by FOX news.

Well, I thought, when Betty, his wife who is now in the mad throws of violent dementia, gets wheeled out of whatever nursing home they might find, he will have that moment when reality overtakes the propaganda. He is going to have to have THAT moment. He is not his daughter. The one who stands up to bullies. The one who won’t let other people get the belt. The one who wishes that even Betty, another Trumper woman for whom I have no love lost, could just be taken care of without worry. The one who says ok, mom, I did it.

We can end the chaos. In a world of Columbia Universities, be a Harvard. Or at least, be a six year old girl with a belt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-responsetrump-demands.html

https://fortune.com/2016/05/18/donald-trump-fake-names/

Organizations to join:

DemCast: demcastusa.com

Swing Left: swingleft.org

Women’s March: womensmarch.com

Indivisible: indivisible.org

5 calls app: 5calls.org

For Volunteer opportunities, rallies, etc.: mobilize.us