For nearly two weeks, thousands of Americans have marched in several cities to protest the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. In fact, the very first protests began only a few hours after Trump was officially declared the President-elect. Now unless you’ve already holed up inside your doomsday bunker, you probably knew about these protests already. And like many Americans, you’re probably not surprised either, given the polarizing nature of this election. But what is surprising is the reaction to these protests.
In the days leading up to the election, more people were worried about Trump supporters protesting than Clinton supporters, which makes sense for a variety of reasons. To start, Trump himself openly declared that the election was “rigged,” and urged his supporters to “watch” polling places in certain states for voter fraud. While these are only two of the many outrageously stupid statements our President-elect has made, telling supporters to distrust their country’s democratic process isn’t just stupid, it’s dangerous. How dangerous? Dangerous like Joe Walsh, a former Congressman tweeting, “On November 8, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” Walsh later claimed that the tweet was a reference for civil disobedience, which is possible considering a literal interpretation would imply he’d grab a weapon that has been technologically inferior for a couple of centuries. Now I admit, a tweet that may or may not suggest an armed insurrection isn’t necessarily “dangerous” on its own. But pair such a tweet with several militias “preparing” for the chaos that would supposedly result from Clinton winning the election, and you can see how it gets worrisome.
Of course Clinton supporters, like all the pollsters and analysts, may have been so convinced that she had the election in the bag that they never considered the possibility of Trump winning. I know that personally, I thought Clinton would crush Trump and hoped she would do so. But once Clinton started losing states that were expected to go blue or had gone blue in the past, reality began to set in. And in the face of such a shocking election result, who wouldn’t protest?
Getting to the actual point of this article (which took me long enough), I don’t understand how many Trump supporters have condemned the recent protests despite claiming that they would protest if Trump lost. Additionally, Trump supporters seem to believe that the only reason people are protesting is because Trump was elected. But that isn’t the only reason. People are protesting because Trump being elected has sent a clear message both to Americans and the rest of the world: that even a man who has incited xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, sexism and other less-than-admirable qualities can be elected President of one of the most powerful countries in the world. Now I’m not saying everyone who voted for Trump is a xenophobe, racist, Islamophobe or sexist. I have friends and family who voted for him who are none of these things. But by voting for Trump, his supporters made it clear that they are willing to ignore his incitement of these less-than-admirable qualities. I’ll let you decide if that’s a worthy trade-off.
Now to wrap this up, do I think or hope these protests will change the result of the election? Of course not, as this is both nearly impossible and would have immediate consequences equal to, or perhaps even exceeding the potential consequences of, Trump’s presidency. But I do hope that these protests will continue to bring attention to the significant flaws of our electoral system, our political infrastructure and our society in general. And by bringing attention to these flaws, we might someday be able to fix them.
