As January 20th draws nearer, many of us who were horrified when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and are horrified still at the idea that he will soon become President of the United States, need to confront the reasons why we feel so strongly about him. Is it simply that we are "sore losers," as many of his supporters would have us believe? - That we are simply delicate, little snowflakes melting as we realize that we are not nearly as special as we once believed ourselves to be? As much as Donald Trump and his supporters would like to trivialize our anger and dismay by making it about winners and losers, the truth is that the issue is much bigger than that.
Hillary supporters and Never Trumpers mourned on November 8th because the vision of America that they hoped for - the vision that our founding fathers promised us - was shattered that night. We had spent the entirety of that election cycle believing with every fiber of our beings that America was simply too good to vote for a megalomaniac who so obviously had no concern for anyone but himself. Yet, on that night, America did just that, and that was as disappointing as it was horrifying. I take solace in the fact that although Donald Trump will be the next president, the majority of Americans did not vote for him. He lost by nearly 3 million popular votes, the first time that a future president has lost the popular vote by such a large margin since the Compromise of 1877, over a century earlier.
Despite the fact that he won the presidency, Trump has taken to Twitter to claim that the election was fraught with voter fraud, and to attack Clinton and Democrats for being "losers" and "haters." Such a shamelessly childish attitude is in direct opposition to the man whose shoes he will be expected to fill in less than a week. For eight years, we were blessed with a president who was a leader in every sense of the word. He was able to preside over the country during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and even succeeded in bringing us out of it. He is such a gifted speaker that he was able to bring the country together in times when tragedy threatened to tear it apart. President Obama was remarkable for far more than the color of his skin, and will undoubtedly become a model of presidential greatness.
Unfortunately, the greatest tragedy of Obama's presidency is that he will be succeeded by someone who is his antithesis in every way imaginable. Even before Trump's inauguration, he and his party have managed to strip away the crowning achievement of Obama's presidency. While Obama was able to help heal the country after the many tragedies that occurred during his presidency, I can only imagine that if one strikes during Trump's presidency, whatever he says or does will only make it worse. He has shown such an apparently infinite capacity for smallness and bigotry that there is no conceivable universe in which he has the ability to bring together a country as diverse and divided as the United States.
Granted, we don't know what he will do once in office; we don't know how may of his promises he will actually fulfill. All we have are the things he has said in the past, which are sometimes scary, usually contradictory, and always divisive. Given his history of racism, sexism, and homophobia, he cannot ever be a good representative of the American people.
While I understand that Donald Trump will be the next US president, and I acknowledge that he will be charged with leading this country, I will never call him my president. The POTUS is supposed to represent the American people, both at home and abroad, and he will not be able to do that - he certainly does not represent me. I hope that he is a good president, but given what I know about him, it is unlikely. So while I recognize that in less than a week, Donald Trump will be THE president, he will never be MY president - not as long as he remains the same.
