The United States presidential election is over. And while this campaign turned democracy into something you would scrape off in disgust from your shoe, one in five eligible American voters chose Donald J. Trump as our 45th president. That is less than the 25 percent of Americans who believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.
You may be part of the other 20 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton or the 30 percent who didn’t vote at all and are now expressing regret as you see Trump loading up his cabinet with an assortment of Dick Tracy villains. But don’t worry, everything is going to be a-okay.
How do I know this? Because I just wrote it and that’s how the spread of information works. I write it, it gets passed along and becomes truth.
Even Kathleen Parker, columnist for The Washington Post, wrote an opinion piece titled “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins” a few days before the election. The point of the piece was “I’m a rich, white heterosexual woman past the point of ever needing an abortion so I’ll be cool–like all of us.”
She also opined that Trump won’t do any of the things he said he would on the campaign trail. He will rise to the position. And she’s obviously right.
Yes, it’s true that Trump said he wanted to close mosques after the terrorist attacks in Paris, then called for banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., and then called for creating a Muslim registry, then called for suspending any immigration from nations compromised by terrorism, but he’s not actually going to do any of those things. I know Trump wants Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to be his national security advisor–an appointment that does not require Congressional approval–and Flynn has said “a fear of Muslims is rational” and has compared Islam to cancer. And yes, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is advising the Trump transition team and he created such a database while working under the George W. Bush administration and has said recently that Trump will be doing this. But words and actions don’t necessarily translate into words and actions, right. So it’s cool. Everything will be a-okay.
It’s like when Voldemort and the Deatheaters took over the Ministry of Magic. They became chill and worked on improving infrastructure and Muggle relations. Or I think that’s what happened, I never read the books.
I know Trump began his campaign generalizing Mexican immigrants as raping drug fiends, and in his Republican convention speech made it sound like America (i.e. white people) was under siege by murdering, marauding illegal immigrants (non-Western European people). And, true, he continued to use coded language on the campaign trail that made white supremacists swoon, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to continue that invective in the Oval Office.
Not possible.
I mean, remember how powerful it was when Trump called a pressie and announced that President Obama was born in the United States after spending five years saying the complete opposite and then blamed Hillary Clinton for starting that rumor?
That was so….presidential? Sure, let’s go with that because everything is going to be a-okay.
Sure Trump did select Steve Bannon as his chief advisor, a man connected to a news site that was a platform for the alt-right movement, a loosely connected group of white supremacists, anti-semites and men’s rights activists, among other super fun people. And okay, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, was denied a federal judgeship because of his history of racist remarks, including but not limited to, saying the Ku Klux Klan was okay until he learned they smoked marijuana. And true, if you were to ask a police sketch artist to draw a stereotypical Southern racist, the sketch artist would draw Sessions’ face–that still doesn’t mean the Trump Administration will engage in racist behavior.
See this is what happens when you are about to hold the most powerful office in the world. You do a complete 180 and change every personality trait you have held your entire life.
It’s like the quote from that guy…was it Shakespeare? Or the really calm dude who writes the Dilbert cartoons? I don’t know….I digress…..anyway, that quote: “Absolute power corrupts no one, in fact, it makes people act like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.”
See? We’re fine. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here folks.
Speaker7 