Trump Won. Now What?
Now what? We can start by feeling sorry for many different groups of people, mostly here, but some abroad as well, who will experience terrible consequences of Trump’s re-election, either directly or indirectly.
Americans Directly Affected
Muslims
Women who may need abortions
Sick people covered under Obamacare
Immigrants and their young children escaping grave physical danger
Active duty military and their families
Those who work in industries aimed at decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors, e.g. the 300K U.S. families whose weekly paychecks come from the expansion of solar energy
Those whose jobs derive from the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act
People of color
The working class whose taxes will increase to cover further handouts to the billionaires and huge corporations
LGTBQs
Those living in poverty
People living on Social Security
Consumers of products and services that are made affordable by migrant workers who pick fruits and vegetables, work in restaurants, etc.
Those concerned about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation due to slashed EPA regulation and an increase in the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.
The growing number of parents and their children who can’t afford private schools
The future of America’s knowledge-based workforce, e.g., its engineers and physicians
Non-Americans Directly Affected:
Ukrainians, Taiwanese, and other people around the world who are under attack or threat of attack by Putin, Xi, and the growing list of authoritarians and war criminals
Europeans worried about what Putin is likely to go after once conquering Ukraine.
Indirectly Effected
Those who believe that America benefits greatly from its adherence to the rule of law, i.e., single set of laws that apply to everybody equally
People whose connection to all this is minor, but who are compassionate human beings who care about the well-being of others.
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Concerning this last group, I explained to my son when he was younger, “For you and me, involvement in politics is important, but not because it affects us personally. We’re not poor, Muslims, uneducated, black, gay, immigrants escaping danger, or women. We need to be connected to politics, but only because we care about other people and hate to see them suffer.”
Side Note – The Winners
To be fair, there are many groups whose stock just gained a great deal of ground:
Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who appeared to be headed toward expulsion from the U.S. Supreme Court
A large range of criminals who will benefit from the evisceration of the Justice Department
A few hundred insurrectionists now serving prison time
Trump’s high-level co-conspirators in his attempt to overthrow the U.S. government following the 2020 election loss
All would-be dictators around the globe who have renewed hope after seeing authoritarianism come to the most powerful country on Earth
The evangelical Christians, book-banners, and proponents of the Ten Commandments in classrooms
Fox News and other ultra-right-wing “news” sources
Corporate CEOs who will now be under less pressure to offer employees a living wage
When American actor (then called an “actress”) Katherine Hepburn made this statement in the middle of the 20th Century, it hit home with our country’s women. After all, how many females at the time could expect to live with the same rights and privileges as men?
The author of the meme needs to understand the use of apostrophes.
Perhaps the saddest single feature of our world today, and the United States in particular, is what we do with power.
Almost all Americans have a passionate interest in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but how many of us see these results as something that will be meticulously studied by historians over the coming decades?
It’s true that Trump supporters don’t care about morality, legality, or the truth. But almost half of these American voters do have things they care about very deeply: White Nationalism, the rejection of science, and the end of women’s rights.
At left is another good example of a “straw man fallacy,” one that occurs “when someone misrepresents an opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to attack and refute. The person using the fallacy pretends to be arguing against their opponent’s original position, but instead creates a distorted version of it that is easy to rebuke.”
As pointed out here, if Trump wins re-election, there will be no voices of reason and civility to prevent him from becoming just one more authoritarian dictator in our already-troubled world.
As shown here, American women have made great progress over the last century in terms of establishing their basic rights as human beings. One may think, as a consequence, women would be virtually uniform in their disgust with the Republican party as it exists today.
The cartoon here has many societal implications surrounding the idea that our planet is actually a small island on which everyone is affected by the vast damage we’re doing to our environment.
