A lot can be studied, analyzed and written for years to return about why People voted an overtly authoritarian chief again into energy in apparently higher margins than they did eight years in the past. What’s clearer and extra necessary at this second is what tens of millions of our fellow residents did by placing Donald Trump again within the White Home.
Immediately we should reckon with the tough actuality that authoritarianism has arrived in America, that it’s broadly in style and that tens of millions of our fellow residents have given it their votes. We’re getting into a darkish and harmful time. However whereas it is a second of reckoning that we should acknowledge, we must also refuse to present in to despair and proceed to say and depend on our rights and protections as People.
Over the following 4 years, the world’s strongest workplace can 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 choices based mostly on retribution and prejudice reasonably than what’s greatest for the nation. People are proper to be frightened and disillusioned by the resurgence of a person who ran on racism and sexism. Trump and his working 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 giant 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 residing, most well-liked Trump, with all his obtrusive flaws and demonstrated incompetence, to a extra certified lady of colour. His victory has us wrestling with the query of how two such starkly completely different visions of the US coexist.
Trump’s agenda is poised to additional erode lots of our rights, particularly these of girls, LGBTQ+ People and immigrants. We are able to count on him to make use of the workplace in blatantly transactional methods and be simply manipulated by opportunistic actors, international 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 need to do.”
We are able to additionally count on the weaponization of primary authorities companies, together with help for disasters reminiscent of wildfires, which Trump has mentioned he may withhold from California. He has all the time been desirous to undo environmental and local weather protections. There can 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 tens of millions of immigrants in deportation camps.
Due to a respectful Supreme Court docket, a subservient Republican Social gathering that received a Senate majority and a willpower to assemble a extra pliant administration, there can be fewer checks on his energy.
Lots of Trump’s former workers 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 democratic means.
Instances 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, but it surely bends in the direction of justice” — whilst modified by former President Obama, who added that “progress is bumpy. It all the time has been.”
However we nonetheless get pleasure from 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 position in defending particular person liberties and defending weak communities in addition to defending environmental protections. We endured Trump’s tumultuous first time period and we’ll get by the following one.
