Trump supporters scoff at healing divide
At inauguration time, magnanimity usually prevails. Winners reach out to losers and a brief honeymoon ensues. But many Trump supporters say there’s little this president-elect can, should, or probably will do to mollify Hillary Clinton supporters.
Erwin Jackson, a Tallahassee, Fla., landlord, says political healing is overrated anyway: “I’m not worried about people who are disappointed. I’m excited. The Democrats are in denial. Healing is something they’re gonna have to work out on their own.”
Pat Acciavatti, a retired excavating company owner in St. Clair Township, Mich., agrees: “When Obama won, and when Bill Clinton won, I just shut up, hung my head and took my medicine. I wasn’t protesting in the street.”
Both are members of Trump Nation, an array of Trump voters in all 50 states who’ve spoken with the USA Today Network.
Although Trump inherits a more divided country than any recent predecessor, he seems less interested than any in making nice. And that’s OK with Trump Nation, which generally believes there are only two remedies to the post-election divide.
One is time. “It heals all wounds,” says Barry Fixler, a Bardonia, N.Y., jewelry store owner who opened his own local Trump headquarters last year. But, he predicts, “it’ll take the Democrats years to come around.”
The other is for Trump to do what he said he’ll do — like bring back jobs, secure the Southern border and generally make America great again.
“That’s going to promote more positive interactions between the two camps,” says Rachel Quade, a real estate agent and Republican activist who lives outside Indianapolis. “It’s hard to stay angry when there’s good news.”
Gene Dunn of Medford, N.Y., so ardent a Trump admirer that he took his son out of school last year to go see Trump announce his candidacy, says the new president also can unite the nation by “finding common ground on issues that transcend ideological lines.”
Presidents always come into office with an agenda and a mandate. As Barack Obama famously told Republican congressional leaders eight years ago, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”
But winning candidates usually make at least a show of bipartisanship.
In 2000, after Al Gore conceded the presidency, George W. Bush made a nationally televised speech from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives. “Here, in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together,” he said. “The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what’s needed in Washington.”
In 2009, Obama attended a dinner honoring John McCain, the GOP nominee, on the night before the inauguration, and he spoke warmly of McCain at a luncheon after the inauguration.
Since Trump has the lowest approval rating of any recent incoming president, it would seem logical for him to try to mend fences.
At times he has. He spoke graciously of Clinton after she conceded defeat and said “it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division.” In a “Today” show interview last month, he promised, “We’re going to have a country that’s very wellhealed.”
But for the most part — especially on Twitter, and unlike any recent president-elect — he’s stayed in campaign mode.
He’s lashed out at Bill Clinton, the cast of Hamilton, Alec Baldwin and “Saturday Night Live,” and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. He’s called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who expressed a willingness to work with him, a “clown.” Since praising Hillary Clinton, he’s regularly dismissed her as weak and clueless.
Trump supporters say making up isn’t their man’s style, and wouldn’t work anyway. “If you’re taking on the whole Democratic Party and an entrenched bureaucracy, saying ‘Please,’ probably won’t change things,” says Jackson.
And he’d better think twice before making concessions. “That would anger the hell out of me!” says Lora Hubbel of Vermillion, S.D., who describes herself as a bornagain Christian. “We’ve been ignored, put down and railroaded, and he’s slapping us in the face if he does that. Backing off is disrespectful to the people who elected you!”
Healing may be a long time coming.