The 2016 election was as historic as President Obama’s election in 2008 but not in a good way. Ta-Nehisi Coates nailed it when he said Trump was the first white president. His analysis is a brilliant but sobering read.
In the months leading up to the election I became first angry, alarmed, then scared. I was angry because the media treated his campaign as just another campaign. It made me angry that the Hollywood Access tape, a legion of civil suits for financial dirty dealings, his creepy reference to his daughter as a “piece of ass”, “Russia if you are listening”, blatant lies, etc. didn’t phase his supporters. I was angry with the media for drawing a false equivalency between Clinton’s emails as if there was not much treated these scandals any one of which should have sunk Trump’s campaign and Donald Trump’s crimes and sleazy escapades. The closer it got to the election, my anger was replaced with alarm. Although I thought the race was going to be closer than it ever should be, hence my alarm. But I thought enough people would refuse to vote for a white supremacist, not with dubious morals but no morals, no experience and whose behavior and temperament was so far removed from presidential that Clinton would win. I watched the returns live while things got bleaker and bleaker. I stayed up until Clinton lost Florida. I did not wake up on November 8, 2016 as the same person who went to bed the night before. The election changed me.
This is painful. Up until the election I considered my self an American first, Black second. I wasn’t always this way. In my fiery youth I viewed myself as Black first and American second. But somewhere in my journey from new employee to retiree, I changed. It may have been that the closer I got to touching (not breaking) the glass ceiling, the more I identified with the people in my orbit. my peers and superiors who were pretty much and most of the time all white. It could be that as I distanced myself from my struggles earlier in life, I convinced myself that we were doing better than we were. That I was doing better than I was. It could have been that I was trying to prove that I belonged and that I deserved my place at the table. So being an America first meant being accepted and being Black first meant being rejected. Could be some combination of all of these.
A very good friend and I are at opposing ends of the question of whether our democratic institutions will survive Trump’s presidency assuming that it is only one term. After the election, he took the optimistic view that however he got there, the democratic institutions upon which our nation was founded would survive his term. After all, it survived the civil war, Nixon’s impeachment, opposition to the civil rights movement, conflict over the Vietnam War and two costly (in lives lost) world wars. I hold the view that in two years Trump in an all-out assault on these institutions has damaged them irreparably. And we are only two years into his first term!