Letter to my daughter: I’ll keep fighting no matter what
On the morning after the election four years ago, on an Amtrak train home from Presidentelect Donald Trump’s victory party in New York, I wrote a letter to my then12-year-old daughter, who was worried about what lay ahead.
I told her “we must try to help Trump succeed,” said we would pray for our leaders and held out hope that he might become more practical. But, I wrote, if Trump took a darker turn — prosecuting his critics, stirring up racial hatred, attacking allies — “I and many others — including many Republicans — will fight him with everything we have.”
Trump has been even worse than I imagined. My daughter, seeing signs of election deadlock, quite reasonably wonders whether Trump could remain in power. This is my new letter to her.
My wonderful daughter, We did not get the results we wanted Tuesday night. But, when all is said and done, we will get the result we needed. President Trump will be defeated. (And if I’m wrong I’ll be following this with a very different kind of letter.) He has lost Wisconsin and Michigan and is on the cusp of losing Arizona, Pennsylvania and possibly even North Carolina and Georgia — and losing only a couple of those should send him packing.
It’s not the broad repudiation of Trump I had hoped for. And it means 2016 was not a fluke: Trump may be gone, but Trumpism is here to stay, and our country has a lot of work to do to restore the virtues of civility, compassion, compromise and cooperation.
But let’s keep things in perspective. This is shaping up to be a historic victory for Biden, the first time an incumbent president has been defeated in 28 years. Biden has already broken Barack Obama’s record for votes received by a presidential candidate (69.5 million) with many ballots yet to be counted — in the highest turnout election in 120 years.
... Because our system allows a party with a minority of popular support to control the Senate (the Republicans seem almost certain to remain in charge), I expect Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, will do all he can to block progress on climate change, economic relief, pandemic recovery, taxes and health care. The next couple of years could be ugly and unproductive. But gone will be a president who daily weakens democracy with authoritarian tendencies. ...We’ll gain control of the pandemic, and you’ll return to school, safely. We’ll rejoin the fellowship of nations. We’ll care about human rights again.
America, and the world, can exhale — for now. We’ve avoided the worst outcome.
Of course, our country has big, long-term problems that Trump aggravated but didn’t create: Black vs. White, rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural. Democrats are frustrated that a third of Latinos voted for Trump despite his antiimmigrant bigotry, while non-college-educated women supported him despite his loutish, 1950s misogyny. That Trump could earn even more votes than he did in 2016 shows there are more Americans susceptible to his themes of blame and grievance than I had thought possible.
Still, one outcome from the election fills me with hope. The youngest voters, the group you will join in the next election, showed up in impressive numbers. Voters aged 18-29 formed 17% of the electorate, exit polling finds, about the same as in 2016. But because overall turnout was so much higher, so was turnout of young voters. And these young voters, your peers, backed Biden over Trump by 27 points — a much bigger margin than when young voters backed Hillary Clinton over Trump by 19 points. Your generation is huge, multicultural and progressive. It will, in time, save our country from its dalliance with racist nationalism.
I was hoping for a blowout Tuesday night, and though the outcome was so much better than in 2016, we learned that we’re still living in the same country that elected Donald Trump four years ago. Like so many others, I fought like hell against his assaults on democracy and decency. We gave it our all, but this is the best we could do, for now.
I’ll keep fighting as long as I have breath — buoyed by renewed confidence that America’s future will be safe in your hands.
All my love,
Dad