At approximately 3 a.m. Wednesday, Donald Trump was announced as the 45th president of the United States of America.
There are a lot of emotions running through my mind right now, dominated by anger, fear and sadness. I’m sad that the candidate I was rooting for — the most qualified one — lost the election. I’m scared, as a bisexual woman of color, for what’s to come under the governance of a neo-fascist and his vice president. Most of all, I’m angry that we, as citizens, have let this country fall so far as to elect a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic president over a highly qualified, yet still flawed, woman.
I, like many others, am a first-time voter who was dealt some of the worst possible candidates in history. I am under no illusion that Hillary Clinton was the perfect presidential candidate, far from it, in fact. In her 35 years of political experience, Hillary has made some questionable decisions and given some problematic directives. To name one example, during her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton knowingly allowed a military coup to remove the democratically elected president of Honduras in 2009, resulting in violence and a humanitarian crisis.
Nonetheless, when I filled out the bubble next to Clinton’s name on the ballot, I knew that I was voting for the package deal, including her wavering policy stances and her worrisome past in political decision-making.
Conditionality is not an option when voting, especially not for those who don’t have the privilege of being picky with their candidates or their policies. In the 24 hours since the president-elect was announced, I’ve had three different people tell me that they only voted for Trump because of his fiscal or military policies. They went on to tell me that they were not racist, sexist or homophobic, and that they didn’t, in any way, support those aspects of Trump and Pence’s platform.
I’m going to say this once, clearly, to all of you who conditionally voted for the Trump/Pence duo: Voting for just one of Donald Trump’s policy promises is the same as voting for all of his policy promises. It is not possible to go into the voting booth, fill out the ballot and put an asterisk by Trump’s name claiming that you’re only voting for his stance on the United States military or his economic ideologies.
Essentially, by giving me justifications for your voting decisions, you’re displaying to me the true amount of privilege that you have and how you rationalize oppression. Unlike myself, or any of my fellow marginalized peers and colleagues, you will not be affected by any of Trump’s more hateful policies, ranging from mass deportation of illegal immigrants, to conversion therapy or jail time for LGBTQPIA+ identifying individuals, to open and blatant sexual harassment and assault toward women and children.
Donald Trump is not my president-elect, nor will he ever be. I refuse to stand by and watch as the epitome of straight, white, male supremacy take whatever minimal progress this country has made over the past eight years and throw it down the proverbial drain. Furthermore, I refuse to stand by as my peers at this university justify to my face why singular aspects of a candidate’s fiscal and military policies are more important than my entire life, or the lives of other marginalized populations.