Despite Trump, I still have faith in the USA

It has been impossible not to experience a terrible series of cringes, daily, while watching news from the United States in the past year. The nation’s upstart president, who ran a reckless, infantile, vicious and undisciplined campaign in 2016, has served in an unsurprisingly nasty manner.

But as 2018 dawns, I remain steadfastly thankful for his country, and for the majority of its citizens, who I genuinely believe are decent people as horrified by what they see as many non-American observers are.

Increasingly, I hear and read comments by people who say how much they hate the United States and Americans, arguing that only a nation full of foolish thugs could elect and support such a government. But we must remind ourselves that if we paint all Americans with one brush, then we are no better than Trump when he famously kicked off his campaign for president by referring to Mexicans as rapists, or when he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country “until we know what’s going on.” The vast majority of Americans are better than this, and we need to keep that in mind.

I know that’s tough to do.

After all, Trump has made boorish, thoughtless threats to North Korea’s leader, sounding less like a head of state than an eight-year-old after a Dairy Queen bender. Everyone already recognizes how high the stakes are now that North Korea has acquired the nuclear bomb. But most Americans are as fearful as any of us are about the prospect of a nuclear war and how quickly such an exchange could escalate. I have faith that most Americans are smarter and more compassionate than their president.

I know it’s hard to look at Trump’s attacks on a free press, which are stunningly hypocritical and anti-American in their spirit. The U.S. constitution has long protected as sacred the rights of a free and robust press. Without a free press, America’s founding fathers duly noted, a democracy really doesn’t stand much of a chance.

And I recognize that it’s frightening to see a government turn away from protection for the environment. But again, polls and surveys show the majority of Americans are deeply concerned about these issues and that Trump is out of step with majority opinion.

And then there’s the tax plan recently voted into law by Republican lawmakers and signed with glee by Trump. The new tax regime rewards all of the wrong people for doing all of the wrong things. It is fitting that it was passed just a week prior to Christmas; it is a policy of Scrooge proportions, one that numerous economists argue will take from the poor and give to the already-very-rich. But again, most Americans didn’t support this law and it remains unpopular.

I have read too much great literature and seen too much beautiful art made by Americans to believe Trump is a true reflection of their soul or character.

So I urge you, as hard as it is, to maintain faith in our neighbours. The United States will persevere. It shall overcome. Trump will not be the beginning of a new political movement, but rather an aberration.

America will be great again.