“The President of the Divided States of America” … that is how TIME magazine described president-elect Donald Trump after being named Person of the Year. The prestige of carrying the “Person of the Year” title has always been questionable since it is customary to give the cover of the magazine to the person who has attracted the most attention in the world; in 1938 the Person of the Year was Hitler. Many times the person chosen is the winner of the elections, but what is true is that for now we are the Divided States of America and much of the blame for that is on Donald Trump.
Trump and his transition team are behaving as if they have a mandate from the people to do whatever they please. We must remind them that millions of people voted against him and his vision for the country. So far, Hillary Clinton is winning the popular vote by more than 2.7 million votes, receiving more votes than any man in the nation’s history.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump won the election according Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. constitution, a document that has kept the nation standing for more than 200 years. Now that he is president-elect, Trump carries the weight of uniting the nation and demonstrating to all those who voted against him, with actions, that he really wants to be the president of all people. That has yet to happen.
Apparently, Trump and his team are under the impression that those who must unite the nation are those of us that renounced Trump, since we have to “accept him” like it or not. Well, that is not how things work in a democracy specially taking into consideration the 18 months of campaigning where Trump insulted and degraded our community, African Americans, Muslims and women, all this while giving a strong platform to white supremacy groups.
They can deny it all they want but Donald Trump won the election largely because of his ability to instigate the most evil emotions of Americans and manipulate them to demonize communities of color; and in this way his campaign gave a megaphone to racist extremists who usually congregate in the dark corners of the Internet. Trump and his team are blinded to this reality specially with racists like Steve Bannon’s, Trump’s chief advisor in the White House, alt-right agenda (synonymous with racist extremist ideas) finding a home in the new administration.
This week, during a segment on CNN, a Republican colleague who supports Trump exclaimed that “there are no communities of color in this country, we are only Americans,” something very easy for him to say since he is a white privileged man. The fact is that this is the thinking of most of Trump’s followers, people who deny the existence of the Latin experience, or the African-American or Muslim experience, because they will never know what it feels like to be discriminated against by their own countrymen, or their own government.
The fear our communities has towards what it will mean to live under Trump’s Divided States is real and with good reason. We are all Americans and we do not want to live in division but with every feat, Trump continues to ignore his duty to unite the country with actions and not just with words.
You can find the original article on The Washington Hispanic
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