I am, like so many of you and so many millions of Americans across the country, devastated by Trump’s victory. It seems almost incomprehensible and yet this is the reality we face. Tonight my mom warned me (a gay man) to be careful whenever I’m outside of a big city like D.C. We don’t know what forces this election will bring to bear in this country. And that’s nothing compared to the sheer terror that is being felt by million of Hispanics, Muslim-Americans and African Americans in the days ahead, knowing that so many Americans voted for a candidate who doesn’t view them as full citizens.
Everyone should take some time to process what happened and wallow and cry if they need. But in the days and weeks and months ahead we all have a choice to make: we can give up or we can fight. I have always believed that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. What we discovered in this election is that the arc is a much longer arc than any of us believed.
Yes, the next few years will be hard. Yes, many millions of Americans will be harmed by the actions of Trump and the Republican party. But this is a pyrrhic victory. Trump has cobbled together a set of states losing population and trending R (the upper Midwest) with a set of states gaining population and trending D (the new South) to eek out small victories on the way to losing the popular vote. How will the modern GOP win states like Florida and North Carolina four or eight years from now? Trump’s supporters aren’t getting any younger.
There is no scenario in which a Trump presidency is a success. There are no real plans for anything. There is no coherent Republican party outside of tax cuts for the wealthy. What are they going to do about immigration? No one knows. How are they going to “repeal and replace” Obamacare? No one knows. Do they want to make cuts in Social Security and Medicare? No one knows. The Trump recession is already on its way and Republicans will soon remember how a midterm with an unpopular president goes in 2018.
The Supreme Court is lost? Well progressive forces have spent most of America’s history fighting the Supreme Court and we’ll keep doing it as long as it’s needed. We can still make this country a better place, even in the face of these obstacles, we can still move toward the kind of country we all want to live in. It will be much harder and take much longer than anyone thought possible. And that is awful and I feel that pain like all of you. But we are still the future, and Donald Trump is still the last gasp of those who fear the new America that we are going to create.
We have only just begun to fight.
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