A lot might be studied, analyzed and written for years to return about why Individuals voted an overtly authoritarian chief again into energy in apparently larger margins than they did eight years in the past. What’s clearer and extra vital at this second is what hundreds of thousands of our fellow residents did by placing Donald Trump again within the White Home.
At present we should reckon with the cruel actuality that authoritarianism has arrived in America, that it’s broadly in style and that hundreds of thousands of our fellow residents have given it their votes. We’re getting into a darkish and harmful time. However whereas this can be a second of reckoning that we should acknowledge, we also needs to refuse to present in to despair and proceed to claim and depend on our rights and protections as Individuals.
Over the following 4 years, the world’s strongest workplace might be inhabited by a twice-impeached convicted felon with a historical past of flouting legal guidelines and norms — a narcissist who fomented the violent Jan. 6 rebellion and has promised to make selections primarily based on retribution and prejudice reasonably than what’s finest for the nation. Individuals are proper to be frightened and disillusioned by the resurgence of a person who ran on racism and sexism. Trump and his operating mate, JD Vance, spent the closing days and weeks of their marketing campaign spewing racist vitriol and calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “b—.”
Although massive swaths of the nation, chief amongst them California, rejected Trump’s fearmongering, it was not sufficient to beat his attraction throughout a lot of the nation. Enormous segments of American voters, some involved about immigration and the rising price of dwelling, most popular Trump, with all his evident flaws and demonstrated incompetence, to a extra certified lady of coloration. His victory has us wrestling with the query of how two such starkly totally different visions of the USA coexist.
Trump’s agenda is poised to additional erode lots of our rights, particularly these of ladies, LGBTQ+ Individuals and immigrants. We will anticipate him to make use of the workplace in blatantly transactional methods and be simply manipulated by opportunistic actors, overseas and home. He has promised to desert U.S. allies, together with Ukraine, and provides Israel free rein to, as he informed Benjamin Netanyahu final month, “do what you have to do.”
We will additionally anticipate the weaponization of fundamental authorities providers, together with assist for disasters akin to wildfires, which Trump has stated he may withhold from California. He has all the time been desirous to undo environmental and local weather protections. There might be extra assaults on science, as evidenced by his willingness to present Robert F. Kennedy Jr. management of well being coverage. And he has threatened to spherical up hundreds of thousands of immigrants in deportation camps.
Because of a respectful Supreme Courtroom, a subservient Republican Occasion that gained a Senate majority and a willpower to assemble a extra pliant administration, there might be fewer checks on his energy.
A lot of Trump’s former employees members who’ve labored closest with him have warned that he’s unfit for workplace and a grave risk to our democracy. His election doesn’t change any of that. Historical past has proven that dictators usually come into energy by means of democratic means.
Occasions like these take a look at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known phrases that “the arc of the ethical universe is lengthy, nevertheless it bends in direction of justice” — at the same time as modified by former President Obama, who added that “progress is bumpy. It all the time has been.”
However we nonetheless take pleasure in safeguards within the state and federal constitutions, the courts, the rule of regulation, the free press and democracy — even when they’re examined like by no means earlier than. We nonetheless have legions of elected officers, civil servants, advocates and journalists who will use their positions to withstand the following administration’s excesses.
California will as soon as once more play an indispensable function in defending particular person liberties and defending susceptible communities in addition to defending environmental protections. We endured Trump’s tumultuous first time period and we’ll get by means of the following one.
