"In modern times, the casting of electoral votes has been a purely ceremonial occasion where the results in the states have been rubber-stamped. But one idea spreading on left-leaning social media circles is that electors from states Trump won should be urged to support Clinton instead. A Change.org petition to this effect has more than 500,000 [3,353,672] signatures.
Weirdly enough, this actually seems to be technically possible — the US Constitution does seem to give the electors the final say in picking the president.
But realistically, considering how big a lead Trump has, who the electors are, how their votes are counted, and hundreds of years of American democratic norms, it’s a silly fantasy that is just in no way, shape, or form going to happen."
My question is: can we ask them to pick Bernie instead?
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Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and MICHAEL BARBARO
NOVEMBER 9, 2016
Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.
The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.
The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration.
The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism.
In Mr. Trump, a thrice-married Manhattanite who lives in a marble-wrapped three-story penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, they found an improbable champion.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Mr. Trump told supporters around 3 a.m. on Wednesday at a rally in New York City, just after Mrs. Clinton called to concede.
In a departure from a blistering campaign in which he repeatedly stoked division, Mr. Trump sought to do something he had conspicuously avoided as a candidate: Appeal for unity.
“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” he said. “It is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”
That, he added, “is so important to me.”
He offered unusually warm words for Mrs. Clinton, who he has suggested should be in jail, saying she was owed “a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.”
Bolstered by Mr. Trump’s strong showing, Republicans retained control of the Senate. Only one Republican-controlled seat, in Illinois, fell to Democrats early in the evening. And Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican, easily won re-election in a race that had been among the country’s most competitive. A handful of other Republican incumbents facing difficult races were running better than expected.
Mr. Trump’s win — stretching across the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — seemed likely to set off financial jitters and immediate unease among international allies, many of which were startled when Mr. Trump in his campaign cast doubt on the necessity of America’s military commitments abroad and its allegiance to international economic partnerships.
From the moment he entered the campaign, with a shocking set of claims that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals, Mr. Trump was widely underestimated as a candidate, first by his opponents for the Republican nomination and later by Mrs. Clinton, his Democratic rival. His rise was largely missed by polling organizations and data analysts. And an air of improbability trailed his campaign, to the detriment of those who dismissed his angry message, his improvisational style and his appeal to disillusioned voters.
He suggested remedies that raised questions of constitutionality, like a ban on Muslims entering the United States.
He threatened opponents, promising lawsuits against news organizations that covered him critically and women who accused him of sexual assault. At times, he simply lied.
But Mr. Trump’s unfiltered rallies and unshakable self-regard attracted a zealous following, fusing unsubtle identity politics with an economic populism that often defied party doctrine.
His rallies — furious, entertaining, heavy on name-calling and nationalist overtones — became the nexus of a political movement, with daily promises of sweeping victory, in the election and otherwise, and an insistence that the country’s political machinery was “rigged” against Mr. Trump and those who admired him.
He seemed to embody the success and grandeur that so many of his followers felt was missing from their own lives — and from the country itself. And he scoffed at the poll-driven word-parsing ways of modern politics, calling them a waste of time and money. Instead, he relied on his gut.
At his victory party at the New York Hilton Midtown, where a raucous crowd indulged in a cash bar and wore hats bearing his ubiquitous campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” voters expressed gratification that their voices had, at last, been heard.
“He was talking to people who weren’t being spoken to,” said Joseph Gravagna, 37, a marketing company owner from Rockland County, N.Y. “That’s how I knew he was going to win.”
For Mrs. Clinton, the defeat signaled an astonishing end to a political dynasty that has colored Democratic politics for a generation. Eight years after losing to President Obama in the Democratic primary — and 16 years after leaving the White House for the United States Senate, as President Bill Clinton exited office — she had seemed positioned to carry on two legacies: her husband’s and the president’s.
Her shocking loss was a devastating turn for the sprawling world of Clinton aides and strategists who believed they had built an electoral machine that would swamp Mr. Trump’s ragtag band of loyal operatives and family members, many of whom had no experience running a national campaign.
On Tuesday night, stricken Clinton aides who believed that Mr. Trump had no mathematical path to victory, anxiously paced the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center as states in which they were confident of victory, like Florida and North Carolina, either fell to Mr. Trump or seemed in danger of tipping his way.
Mrs. Clinton watched the grim results roll in from a suite at the nearby Peninsula Hotel, surrounded by her family, friends and advisers who had the day before celebrated her candidacy with a champagne toast on her campaign plane.
But over and over, Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate were exposed. She failed to excite voters hungry for change. She struggled to build trust with Americans who were baffled by her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state. And she strained to make a persuasive case for herself as a champion of the economically downtrodden after delivering perfunctory paid speeches that earned her millions of dollars.
The returns Tuesday also amounted to a historic rebuke of the Democratic Party from the white blue-collar voters who had formed the party base from the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Mr. Clinton’s. Yet Mrs. Clinton and her advisers had taken for granted that states like Michigan and Wisconsin would stick with a Democratic nominee, and that she could repeat Mr. Obama’s strategy of mobilizing the party’s ascendant liberal coalition rather than pursuing a more moderate course like her husband did 24 years ago.
But not until these voters were offered a Republican who ran as an unapologetic populist, railing against foreign trade deals and illegal immigration, did they move so drastically away from their ancestral political home.
To the surprise of many on the left, white voters who had helped elect the nation’s first black president, appeared more reluctant to line up behind a white woman.
From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party’s lean years, shifted to Mr. Trump’s Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.
Mrs. Clinton’s loss was especially crushing to millions who had cheered her march toward history as, they hoped, the nation’s first female president. For supporters, the election often felt like a referendum on gender progress: an opportunity toelevate a woman to the nation’s top job and to repudiate a man whose remarkably boorish behavior toward women had assumed center stage during much of the campaign.
Mr. Trump boasted, in a 2005 video released last month, about using his public profile to commit sexual assault. He suggested that female political rivals lacked a presidential “look.” He ranked women on a scale of one to 10, even holding forth on the desirability of his own daughter — the kind of throwback male behavior that many in the country assumed would disqualify a candidate for high office.
On Tuesday, the public’s verdict was rendered.
Uncertainty abounds as Mr. Trump prepares to take office. His campaign featured a shape-shifting list of policy proposals, often seeming to change hour to hour. His staff was in constant turmoil, with Mr. Trump’s children serving critical campaign roles and a rotating cast of advisers alternately seeking access to Mr. Trump’s ear, losing it and, often, regaining it, depending on the day.
Even Mr. Trump’s full embrace of the Republican Party came exceedingly late in life, leaving members of both parties unsure about what he truly believes. He has donated heavily to both parties and has long described his politics as the transactional reality of a businessman.
Mr. Trump’s dozens of business entanglements — many of them in foreign countries — will follow him into the Oval Office, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest. His refusal to release his tax returns, and his acknowledgmentthat he did not pay federal income taxes for years, has left the American people with considerable gaps in their understanding of the financial dealings.
But this they do know: Mr. Trump will thoroughly reimagine the tone, standards and expectations of the presidency, molding it in his own self-aggrandizing image.
He is set to take the oath of office on Jan. 20.
An article on Wednesday about the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States carried an erroneous byline in some editions. The article was by Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro — not by Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin.
An article on Wednesday about the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States carried an erroneous byline in some editions. The article was by Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro — not by Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin.
Amy Chozick, Ashley Parker, Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin contributed reporting.
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By Jill Filipovic
I’m a feminist writer. I am inundated with sexist harassment and political ugliness more or less constantly; I know that the history of women’s progress in the United States has been uneven, and often marked with big setbacks just as we were on the precipice of real change.
This, though, I did not predict.
I’m writing from my current, and I assumed temporary, home in Nairobi, but now I wonder whether the United States — this United States, the one that just elected Donald Trump — is one to which I want to return. That sounds melodramatic. But what a clear statement of what so many of my countrymen (and the people who put Trump in power are mostly men) value: white male supremacy above all, especially over female ambition, intelligence and basic competence.
Still, abandoning the playing field is not an option. It’s hard to think about tomorrow when today is so crushingly awful. Take a day: hug your kids, drink your wine, punch a pillow, go for a run. Then let’s get to work.
For feminists, getting to work means plowing forward, not second-guessing our mission. This is a big setback — a phenomenal, shocking setback. It is not the first, and it will not be the last. The only way to change is to change, and when our project is so immense — changing no less than the foundation of our society, our very ideas of what it means to be male and female — it will take a very long time to complete. We know, now, what so many Americans think of successful, ambitious, intelligent women: They think we are a threat. They will choose almost anything to avoid putting us in charge.
We fix this with more feminism, not less. And given who Americans just elected, we have to focus first on the women a Trump presidency will make most vulnerable: immigrant women, women of color, lesbian women, transgender women, women seeking abortions, women seeking asylum, women seeking protection from men. If there was ever a time to donate to your local domestic violence shelter, your local abortion fund, Black Lives Matter, your local group helping refugees apply for legal status, your local nonprofit group that shelters and assists undocumented immigrants, this is it. If there was ever a time to refuse to cower in the face of defeat — to speak louder, even in our female voices — this is it. Because what Trump wants us to do is sit down and shut up.
We should pay attention, too, to the many men whose lives are about to get significantly worse under Trump. Immigrant men. Gay men. Black men at risk of police violence. Men who rely on the Affordable Care Act for their health insurance. Men who reject traditional masculinity. And even the men and women who voted Trump to victory — white people who traded racial resentment for the kind of progressive change that would have improved their lives, too. They surely think feminism has nothing to offer them compared with a promise to restore them to their former position of unearned power; they are about to see how wrong they are.
For the many women who were surprised by this result, myself included, we need to take a good look around and quit excusing bad behavior where we see it. There’s a huge gender gap in this election, the widest since 1976: Early numbers point to women favoring Clinton by 12 points, and men favoring Trump by the same margin. Clinton’s strength with women was mostly due to women of color backing her; where Trump’s support was overwhelminglywhite, Clinton’s was incredibly diverse, and she won majorities of African Americans, Asians and Hispanics. Clinton’s base looks like America’s future, while Trump’s looks like the waning white face of American power.
It doesn’t matter: Old America won. And New America is scared: Nearly 70 percent of black voters say that they’re afraid of a Trump presidency,
But we don’t live in different worlds. Many of the same women who voted for Clinton live with, work with, date and befriend men who voted for Trump. Women have always paired off with misogynist men and have always excused bad male behavior, defending sexist men as simply “old-school,” shrugging off sexual assault as boys being boys, concluding that because a man loves them, he must not hate women.
Enough.
Misogyny isn’t the fault of women, and it’s not up to women to force men to treat us like human beings. But it is incumbent upon us to not buoy bigotry. Amajority of white women voted for Trump, disproportionately those who are older, religious and without college degrees — in other words, women who may be more steeped in, accustomed to and dependent on male authority. For these women, it seemed race trumped gender, and white supremacy was more important than broader freedoms for women. While this is disappointing, it’s also perhaps to be expected: White women in many of the states that supported Trump have historically been supporters of segregation and racism just as surely as their husbands, and have also typically opposed many of the laws that would improve conditions for all American women.
And make no mistake: A vote for Trump is a vote against women. He hasbragged on video about committing sexual assault, and nearly a dozen women have accused him of doing exactly what he claimed, though he has denied those allegations. He evaluates women not on their intelligence or good characters, but on a physical attribute scale of one to 10. Women he doesn’t like are “pigs” and “dogs.” He has said women who have abortions should face legal punishment, and he is sure to appoint Supreme Court justices who would dismantle abortion rights if given the opportunity. He has few women on his shortlists of appointments for Cabinet positions or the Supreme Court.
Women should refuse to tolerate men who would vote so clearly and aggressively against our interests — against the idea that we’re equal citizens, that we’re human beings.
Women and feminists cannot do this job alone. Many millions of American men cast their votes for Clinton in this election, and many millions of American men are just as heartbroken as I am. Women have been carrying the heavy weight of fighting sexism for a long time, but what this election makes clear is that little changes if men don’t change. This is where we need men to step in and work on one another. Even the brightest, best-qualified woman can’t win the white male vote; feminist-minded men need to convince other men that more women in power, and a more gender-egalitarian society, is in everyone’s interests.
With a Republican House, a Republican Senate and Trump in the White House, a lot could get ugly in the next four years. Supreme Court appointments will probably mean the end of safe and legal abortion access. The border with Mexico could become an even more dangerous and deadly place for people trying to cross it, and the rest of the country may grow even more hostile. Anecdotally, it seemed that sexist abuse was worse online and off during this election — I saw it for myself on social media and heard story after story of female friends being grabbed or called misogynist slurs for wearing pro-Clinton T-shirts or simply being at election-related events, often in tandem with a declaration from the grabber that Trump would win. These attacks large and small may very well ramp up now that Trump has normalized it and voters have supported him. This election is a huge blow, and it’s women and Trump’s favorite minority targets — Muslims, Latinos, African Americans — who are going to suffer first.
If you weren’t a feminist before, or if you were an ambivalent or quiet supporter of women’s rights and the rights of minorities, now’s the time to get loud. Because as much as we needed you before, we need you now more than ever.
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Donald Trump’s Victory Promises to Upend the International Order
By PETER BAKER
NOVEMBER 9, 2016
JERUSALEM — Donald J. Trump’s stunning election victory on Tuesday night rippled way beyond the nation’s boundaries, upending an international order that prevailed for decades and raising profound questions about America’s place in the world.
For the first time since before World War II, Americans chose a president who promised to reverse the internationalism practiced by predecessors of both parties and to build walls both physical and metaphorical. Mr. Trump’s win foreshadowed an America more focused on its own affairs while leaving the world to take care of itself.
The outsider revolution that propelled him to power over the Washington establishment of both political parties also reflected a fundamental shift in international politics evidenced already this year by events like Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union. Mr. Trump’s success could fuel the populist, nativist, nationalist, closed-border movements already so evident in Europe and spreading to other parts of the world.
Global markets fell after Tuesday’s election and many around the world scrambled to figure out what it might mean in parochial terms. For Mexico, it seemed to presage a new era of confrontation with its northern neighbor. For Europe and Asia, it could rewrite the rules of modern alliances, trade deals, and foreign aid. For the Middle East, it foreshadowed a possible alignment with Russia and fresh conflict with Iran.
“All bets are off,” said AgustÃn Barrios Gómez, a former congressman in Mexico and president of the Mexico Image Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting its reputation abroad.
Crispin Blunt, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Britain’s House of Commons, said, “We are plunged into uncertainty and the unknown.”
Many linked Mr. Trump’s victory to the British vote to exit the European Union and saw a broader unraveling of the modern international system. “After Brexit and this election, everything is now possible,” Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United States, wrote on Twitter. “A world is collapsing before our eyes.”
The election enthralled people around the world on Tuesday night: night owls watching television in a youth hostel in Tel Aviv; computer technicians monitoring results on their laptops in Hong Kong; and even onetime oil pipeline terrorists inNigeria’s remote Delta creeks, who expressed concern about how Mr. Trump’s election would affect their country.
It is hardly surprising that much of the world was rooting for Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, who characterized his foreign policy as “America First.”
He promised to build a wall along the Mexican border and temporarily bar Muslim immigrants from entering the United States. He questioned Washington’s longstanding commitment to NATO allies, called for cutting foreign aid, praisedPresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, vowed to rip up international trade deals,assailed China and suggested Asian allies develop nuclear weapons.
Polls indicated that Mrs. Clinton was favored in many countries, with the exception of Russia. Last summer, the Pew Research Center found that people in all 15 countries it surveyed trusted Mrs. Clinton to do the right thing in foreign affairs more than Mr. Trump by ratios as high as 10 to one.
Mr. Trump’s promise to pull back militarily and economically left many overseas contemplating a road ahead without an American ally.
“The question is whether you will continue to be involved in international affairs as a dependable ally to your friends and allies,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat now teaching at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. “If you stop doing that, then all the European, Middle Eastern and Asian allies to the United States will reconsider how they secure themselves.”
In Germany, where American troops have been stationed for more than seven decades, the prospect of a pullback seemed bewildering. “It would be the end of an era,” Henrik Müller, a journalism professor at the Technical University of Dortmund, wrote in Der Spiegel. “The postwar era in which Americans’ atomic weapons and its military presence in Europe shielded first the west and later the central European states would be over. Europe would have to take care of its own security.”
Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliamentary committee for foreign policy and a member of the ruling party, said Mr. Trump was “completely inadequate” to his office. “That Trump’s election could lead to the worst estrangement between America and Europe since the Vietnam War would be the least of the damage,” he said.
Perhaps nowhere was Mr. Trump’s win more alarming than in Mexico, which has objected to his promises to build a wall and bill America’s southern neighbor for it.
“I see a clear and present danger,” said Rossana Fuentes-Berain, director of the Mexico Media Lab, a think tank, and a founder of the Latin American edition of Foreign Affairs. “Every moment will be a challenge. Every move or declaration will be something that will not make us comfortable in the neighborhood — and that is to everyone’s detriment.”
With about $531 billion in trade in goods last year, Mexico is America’s third-largest partner after Canada and China. Supply chains in both countries are interdependent, with American goods and parts shipped to Mexican factories to build products that are shipped back into the United States for sale. Five million American jobs directly depend on trade with Mexico, according to the Mexico Institute.
The Mexican peso immediately fell 13 percent after the election, its biggest drop in decades. Mr. Barrios Gómez, the former congressman, predicted a short-term peso devaluation of 20 percent and a Mexican recession “as supply chains across the continent become sclerotic and investments dry up.” The business community, he said, was “freaking out.”
The economic fallout will probably reverberate farther. Izumi Kobayashi, vice chairwoman of Keizai Doyukai, a Japanese business group, predicted a drop in foreign investment in the United States as executives skeptical of Mr. Trump wait to see what he does.
“He has been focusing on the negative side of the global markets and globalization,” Ms. Kobayashi said. “But at the same time it is really difficult to go back to the old business world. So how will he explain to the people that benefit and also the fact that there is no option to go back to the old model of business?”
The uneasiness with Mr. Trump’s victory overseas ranged far beyond the country’s traditional partners. Abubakar Kari, a political-science professor at the University of Abuja, said most Nigerians believed a Trump administration would not bother with issues outside the United States.
“If Trump wins, God forbid,” Macharia Gaitho, one of Kenya’s most popular columnists, wrote on Tuesday before the votes came in, “then we will have to reassess our relations with the United States.”
One of the few places where Mr. Trump’s victory was greeted enthusiastically was Russia, where state-controlled television has been feasting on the circuslike elements of the American election. Not since the Cold War has Russia played such a big role in a presidential election, with Mr. Trump praising Mr. Putin and American investigators concluding that Russians had hacked Democratic email messages.
“Trump’s presidency will make the U.S. sink into a full-blown crisis, including an economic one,” said Vladimir Frolov, a Russian columnist and international affairs analyst. “The U.S. will be occupied with its own issues and will not bother Putin with questions.”
“As a consequence,” he added, “Moscow will have a window of opportunity in geopolitical terms. For instance, it can claim control over the former Soviet Union and a part of the Middle East. What is there not to like?”
Others tried to find the upside. Mr. Blunt, the British lawmaker, said he was heartened by Mr. Trump’s selection of Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate and thought that Britain might be the exception to the new president’s hostility toward trade deals.
Israel was another place where Mr. Trump enjoyed some support, mainly because of the perception that he would give the country a freer hand in its handling of the longstanding conflict with the Palestinians. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and commentators worried about a broader disengagement from a Middle East awash in war, terrorism and upheaval.
“Decisions cannot be postponed,” said Yohanan Plesner, a former member of the Israeli Parliament now serving as president of the Israel Democracy Institute. “The situation in Syria is very chaotic. The unrest in the region is continuing. America has to decide whether it wants to play an active role in shaping the developments of the region.”
And even some countries that might expect to see some benefits from an American retreat worried about the implications. Counterintuitive as it might seem, Chinawas concerned about Mr. Trump’s promise to pull American troops back from Asia.
“If he indeed withdraws the troops from Japan, the Japanese may develop their own nuclear weapons,” said Shen Dingli, professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “South Korea may also go nuclear if Trump cancels the missile deployment and leaves the country alone facing the North’s threats. How is that good for China?”
For American voters, that was not the point. After decades of worrying about what was good for other countries, they decided it was time to worry about what was good for America. And Mr. Trump promised to do just that, even if the rest of the world might not like it.
Reporting was contributed by Jaime Yaya Barry and Dionne Searcey from Dakar, Senegal; Stephen Castle from London; Melissa Eddy from Berlin; Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi; Yufan Huang from Beijing; Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow; Motoko Rich from Tokyo; and Elisabeth Malkin, Kirk Semple and Paulina Villegas from Mexico City.
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What a Trump Presidency Means to Civil Rights
Last night, America’s “silent majority” defied political scientists, expert pollsters and what many would regard as common decency in electing Donald Trump president. When faced with a choice between arguably the most qualified presidential candidate we’ve seen in the modern era of electoral politics and … well, a bigot, America felt safer with the latter. Indeed, white male privilege remains alive and well.
But what does that mean for communities of color in the arena of civil rights? Under a Trump presidency, the Supreme Court will almost undoubtedly shift toward an über-conservative tilt; and with a Republican-led Congress, many institutions, like affirmative action and equal voting rights, are likely to move from their last legs to a death knell. If Trump’s stump speeches are even half of his real blueprint for his administration, here are a few predictions for what we are likely up against in key areas of importance:
Immigration
Perhaps the single largest concern for a Trump presidency rests in the area of immigration. Many of us are skeptical about Trump’s ability to “build that wall.” Alas, many of us were equally skeptical about his ability to win an election. Unsavory deportation policies and practices may very well be on the horizon. To combat this, we need to keep the path to citizenship as clear and accessible as possible. This may mean volunteering to help those seeking citizenship to prepare for the test, or considering sponsoring an undocumented person to assist in the already exorbitant costs associated with becoming a naturalized citizen.
Equally disconcerting is the metaphorical wall Trump has already built against immigrants using xenophobia and toxic rhetoric. This requires us to remain vocal and vigilant in speaking out in the presence of attitudes that reflect an unwelcomeness of others within a nation ironically “founded” and made great by immigrants themselves.
Criminal Justice
Trump prided himself on being the “law and order” candidate. His level of understanding regarding race relations during the election cycle led him to insult the black electorate by painting a more than dismal picture of American life for blacks that is wrought with violence, poverty and overall despair. His solution? Stop and frisk. Based on his statements about Muslims, we know that Trump has little to no aversion to profiling. We can expect the rhetoric regarding criminal justice to resemble the “tough on crime” code speak used to justify harsher policing in urban communities, with draconian sentences for minor offenses.
Our solution to this must be multifaceted and will require a combination of accountability from local law enforcement and elected district attorneys, and the increased use of citizen journalists to help tell accurate stories as they happen and to control narratives in a fair and honest way. Social media is a weapon that we have in our arsenal, and our proper wielding of that weapon will be a key element in ensuring that an inevitable wave of over-policing does not result in widespread unchecked abuses by law enforcement. Finally, in this vein, we must fulfill our civic responsibility to perform jury duty in record numbers to serve as a backstop to a system that has historically never been kind to our kind and only threatens to get worse.
Voting Rights
This was the first presidential election since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and it showed. Since the Shelby v. Holder ruling in 2013, 868 polling places that served mostly communities of color were closed in that time. Early voting—a practice that is particularly popular among African Americans—was curtailed across the country. And although some of the stricter voter-ID laws in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin were defanged by the courts, signs of voter suppression were extremely high.
This situation is unlikely to improve under a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled House and Senate. In fact, based on Trump’s speeches in which he called on his supporters to “watch” the polling sites in communities of color, don’t be surprised if policies are proposed calling for even more restrictions on voting rights. It’s going to be even more critical that organizations and activists that fought strict voter-ID laws become even more vigilant in combating these restrictions as they come up.
Women’s Rights
This is obviously an area for grave concern with a president-“Grab ’em by the you-know-what”-elect. But the concern may be more about principle than about practicality or policy. We must be on guard against Trump’s use of his bully pulpit to (not so subtly) promote or condone rape culture in ways that threaten to make America not so great again for women. The push for equal pay may very well be on hold, since it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the radar.
The solution here is that we must publicly speak with our dollars by refusing to support businesses and other institutions that refuse to promote or support the protection, inclusion and fair treatment of all women. Realistically, we cannot depend on a GOP-led government to do it, so there must be a deliberate effort from all of us to wield our collective economic power to the furthest extent possible. This cannot be a discussion simply about equal pay but must extend to maintaining women’s reproductive rights and other areas where women, despite being a majority, remain a vulnerable demographic. Especially black women.
We must face the reality that the results of this election could have a peculiar effect on our rights and civil liberties while disparately affecting already marginalized groups to a frightening degree. We must also understand that, now more than ever, intersectionalism is a nonnegotiable imperative and that all of our allies need to be represented at the table.
There is still a light at the end of this tunnel. The network of organizations that has been established through the Movement for Black Lives and other groups has already built the infrastructure needed to weather any storm that might result from a Trump presidency. However, the effectiveness of these organizations will depend on our level of support and engagement. Trump’s presumptive victory is a deeply unfortunate affirmation of myriad oppressive systems: racism, white supremacy, patriarchy and xenophobia, to name just a few. Withstanding any attempts to “take America back” with respect to our civil rights will require a grassroots, strategic and continuous effort from all of us.
We may not have won this battle, but our struggle rages onward.
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