The next president
We can hope that in two months a different Donald Trump will take the oath of office.
A day after the most stunning upset at least since incumbent President Harry Truman defeated his Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, or perhaps the most stunning upset in American political history, this nation and the world are trying to come to terms with the election of real estate mogul and TV personality Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. A man who has never held office of any kind, a man who waged a mean and divisive campaign, whose ideas for the office are a mishmash of nativist hatreds, populist economic views and barroom bloviator foreign-policy notions soon will hold the highest office in the land. If you’ve followed this editorial page for the past year, you’ll understand that we are deeply disturbed by his election.
With our vote, we have entrusted “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to a man whose authoritarian tendencies and lack of relevant experience make him manifestly unfit for the presidency. With our eyes wide open, we have taken the first step down a dark and dangerous path that could do irreparable damage to this ongoing experiment in self-government. Our friends and allies around the world are dismayed, as are millions of Americans, many of them Republican. As election results came in Tuesday night, stock markets around the world, including Wall Street, reeled. World leaders have expressed dismay.
Beginning with his string of victories over 16 Republican primary opponents, Trump defied every expectation, mocked conventional wisdom and smashed like carnival crockery long-observed standards of civility and decency in public life. His incredible success continued throughout Tuesday evening as Trump held his own and then prevailed in battleground states that Hillary Clinton was confident of winning. Riding a wave of anger, economic discontent and revulsion at Washington on a variety of fronts — as well as disdain for the Democratic candidate — Trump rolled on, his supporters giddy with shock and delight at his unexpected victories in state after state. It turned out to be a decisive victory, in the electoral college, that is; Clinton won the popular vote by about 200,000 votes.
The American people spurned a sober and experienced candidate — who, of course, would have been this nation’s first female president — for a man who spouted lies like a whale spouts seawater; who insulted women, war heroes, immigrants and the disabled, not to mention the Constitution; who boasted of sexual assaults and stands accused by at least 17 women of improper behavior; who stiffed employees and contractors and drove his businesses into the ground on numerous occasions; who has described climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese; who apparently has forged mysterious ties with Russian despot Vladimir Putin and his band of oligarchs.
This is the man we have elected president, who will be our commander in chief and leader of the free world.
We can hope that many of Trump’s claims are campaign bombast, the blatherings of a stranger to subtlety, grace and nuance. His fellow Republicans, we can hope, will see to it there’s no billiondollar border wall, no religion-based immigration restrictions, no mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, no ill-considered overtures to Russia.
On other issues, he is their champion. There will be arch-conservative Supreme Court appointments, if not necessarily the repeal of Roe v. Wade. With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Obamacare will be history, leaving millions of Americans without health insurance; we’re unlikely to see a replacement. He has said that he will walk away from the multi-nation agreement designed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, that he will repudiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Some campaign promises will be impossible to fulfill, even with Republicans in complete control. Despite the heartfelt hopes of Trump’s white working-class followers, we’re unlikely to see manufacturing jobs returning to the Rust Belt or long lines of coal trains snaking across the country out of West Virginia and Kentucky. He can’t cut taxes to the extent he has promised without ballooning the national debt.
We can also hope, prayerfully hope, that in two months a different person will take the oath of office than the one who campaigned. In remarks Wednesday morning, he struck an out-ofcharacter conciliatory tone. “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” he said. “We have to get together. To all Republicans, Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”
We will be watching, and listening. Meanwhile, we can only hope that sober and experienced heads will prevail when Trump talks wildly of war, particularly nuclear war. Unfortunately, he and his GOP allies already have vowed to ignore that other existential threat to the planet — climate change.
“I alone can fix it,” Trump has proclaimed, although we can hope that wiser, calmer and more experienced Republicans, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence, are able to exert some influence over the dangerously erratic person who soon will occupy the White House. Granted, they’ve had little influence on candidate Trump, although perhaps the enormity of the task he faces will temper his dangerous impulses and authoritarian inclinations.
No one saw it coming — not the pundits, not the polls, not newspaper editorial pages across the country. Perhaps Trump himself didn’t expect to win. The Brexit vote might have been a portent; otherwise, this nation is in uncharted territory. Minnesota survived a Gov. Jesse Ventura, California an Arnold Schwarzenegger. Texas long ago lived through Ma and Pa Ferguson and W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel. Italy still stands after years of Silvio Berlusconi. This nation, we can only hope, will survive Donald Trump, but not without changes that for now are unforeseeable.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats wrote more than a century ago in his classic poem “The Second Coming.” With this election, something has been unleashed; we don’t know what. An anxious nation, an anxious world awaits.