Trump was always noise: but hateful, harmful noise

THE first time I was in the same room as Donald Trump was in the summer of 2015, right after he’d begun focusing his rhetoric on how Mexicans were rapists to aid his argument that we needed a wall between the US and Mexico.

Back then no one actually imagined that the man we all knew from his hotels or reality show could be a serious candidate for president, let alone the actual president. This was made evident as I sat in the Chicago ballroom. Colleagues sitting close by were seemingly not bothered by anything he said. One reporter was even flipping through a magazine as she let her recorder run.

After his talk, he held a small press conference inside a bar area where we were all alerted of something “huge”, as he would say: he had been fired from his NBC show The

Apprentice. This time the room immediately erupted with reporters launching questions. Soon after he left the room, as mostly Latino protesters continued to chant outside the building that Trump was a racist.

For those of us who vote Democrat or live in major cities, or are even minorities, Trump was always noise — hateful and harmful noise, but noise nonetheless. Those of us who are minorities know hate exists because it’s something we battle every day. But we just didn’t think hate could win elections any more — our current black president was supposedly proof of that.

Yet on January 20, 2017, a man will take office whose biggest media endorsement was from a white supremacist paper, and the world will be changed for ever because so many of us stopped listening.

His supporters are angry that immigrants are allegedly taking their jobs for lower wages, and they still hate the reality that a black man ran the US for so long. Many of us have celebrated this fact, that we’ve forced the country to change for what we saw as the better. Obama became notorious for pushing policy through by executive order, and we only loved him more for it.

Through it all, we began to feel as if we were becoming a society that was more accepting, more welcoming, more representative of all the people — and we acknowledged we had work to do on this, even with Obama. But what this week has shown us most is that we will only fail if we continue to be so divided — even if we are right in the moment.

Currently, the US continues to be a vastly divided country beyond the election. Chicago is a place where you can notoriously almost tell a person’s race by their postcode. Varying levels of access and success within education, jobs, housing and so on are shaped by colour and gender.

Social media only amplified our divisions. Facebook algorithms did not show us material we might have disagreed with, instead actively enabling our ability to silo ourselves from one another and only engage in groupthink.

This meant that every day we spent hours perusing a digital environment that continued to tell each of us that we were right — and if we found we weren’t, we could press delete and all would be fixed. Today, we wake up realising more and more how wrong that was.

Talking with people at rallies that have erupted since the election, I have constantly heard them remark on how they feel they can only live in major cities as we prepare for the next four years. The rest of the country just does not feel safe. But this sort of “protective” approach is precisely one that we may need to reconsider.

Over the next four years, many of us will be able to decide — like the Republicans during the past eight years — if we will only slink further into our silos and not engage with one another because it’s easier.

Or we could try something different and look up from our magazines as hate is spewed and listen to it, pay witness to it as a real thing that we still need to fix. We might then see a moment when America reveals herself as she really is. We could not ignore her even if we wanted to try.

‘Those of us who are minorities know hate exists because it’s something we battle every day. But we just didn’t think hate could win elections any more — our current black president was supposedly proof of that...’