Words for the masses who voted Trump anyway, and the leaders who abandoned Bernie

By Isaiah Cordova

Well, the 2016 election has concluded and most of the votes have been counted. Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. Most of America would not even dream such a sentence could be written and not be a joke, myself included, but it’s happened.

But what of it?

On the night of Nov. 8, I was out electioneering at the polling place at the Evangelical Free Church in Eaton holding a sign which read “NEVER TRUMP.” In the four hours I was there, I met plenty of people. Most of them were polite and held good conversations with me. One woman even asked if she could have one of my other signs for a Clinton watch-party she was going to.

The people who stick in my mind, however, are those who could not bear to talk to me face-to-face and had to shout at me from across the parking lot.

“We’re gonna build that wall,” one man shouted at me.

“Trump’s gonna make America great again,” another yelled from his truck window.

One man flung a lit cigarette at me.

Several more gave me the middle finger as they made the turn into the church parking lot.

One conclusion I have come to is that Trump supporters, whether or not they’ve been with him since the beginning, are afraid of progress. They’d much rather have a racist, homophobic, misogynist demagogue with little to no respect for the blue-collar workers, no matter how much he says he’ll help them, over a candidate with one or two missteps (none of which have been determined to make her guilty) with a proven track record of progress and equality.

Trump will not do anything for the working class. His campaign was for personal gain and personal gain only. He only used the desperate Republicans who have been disenfranchised from their own party after the failed campaigns of Mitt Romney and whoever was before him. When he takes office January 20, Trump will immediately move on to improving the life of his family and millionaires like himself. He has stepped on the lower classes to propel himself into office.

Donald Trump has conned the low and middle strata of America into voting for him. Trump can’t and won’t get anything done, either out of sheer incompetence or out of his personal gain.

Trump can, and he will, tear everything which Obama has been working hard for the last eight years down. He is simply too incompetent to set it back up again. By the time 2020 rolls around, America will have a dysfunctional government ran by a president plagued by scandal.

Trump is a pushover. He will always bend the way Vladimir Putin wants him to, and Trump will consistently back down from challenges to his personal doctrine. It’s happened plenty of times in the campaign. His trip to Mexico to talk with the current president there was a perfect example of that. There is no way that Trump can be a powerful and intimidating force to be reckoned with as his campaign had promised. He is weak.

By the time 2020 rolls around, even the people who voted for Trump will have turned against him.

But this doesn’t excuse his supporters. They have allowed a prejudiced xenophobe into the highest office in the nation with someone who believes conversion therapy is a way to “correct” the LGBT+ community by his side.

A man with a history of sexual assault, and a history of fraud and tax evasion, a history of draft-dodging while hypocritically calling for war against Vietnam is now the President of the United States.

But, the Democratic National Convention (DNC)’s  actions in regards to the electoral race have ruined America’s chances for progress and improvement.

Bernie Sanders had the popular vote at the beginning of the primary elections, but the delegates began to vote against the popular vote. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the head of the DNC at the time of the primaries, definitely ruined the Democratic Party’s chances at a blue president by nominating Clinton instead of Sanders.

Sanders connected with the electorate more competently than Clinton, attracting a massive following of 18-25 year-olds, something that hasn’t happened in a long time.

If the final two candidates were Sanders and Trump, Sanders would have given the Republican nominee a run for his money.

The responsibility for such an abhorrent excuse of a person landing in the highest office in America falls squarely on both parties’ shoulders. The Republicans’ consistent fear of progress and actually catching up to the rest of the world in quality-of-life has caused them to elect a bigot, and the Democrats’ Clinton dynasty has caused for the progression of something which was completely preventable: the ruination of America through incompetence, scandal, and weakness.