I woke up on Nov. 6 to the realization that the unthinkable had happened. Again.
Donald Trump has been re-elected, and will return to the Oval Office, this time with his young sycophant JD Vance as vice president. I am shocked, embarrassed, and depressed.
I struggle, unsuccessfully, to think of Trump in the same terms John McCain spoke of Obama in 2008: that he is a “decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” And I seek to follow the sage advice of President Biden, who chided Trump that “you can’t love your country only when your side wins.”
But I find these admonitions extremely hard to follow, as I believe we have elected a person not just with different policy views, but someone who is so lacking in character and civility, and so determined to amass absolute power and to use it as retribution against his “enemies,” as to be a clear and present danger to our nearly 250 year experiment in democracy.
In pursuit of reducing the price of groceries, as well as blaming immigrants for their problems, Americans have put all other issues aside. While they obviously feel Trump will “Make America Great Again,” I, along with almost half the country, fear we are about to backslide into a more vitriolic, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic country that increases wealth disparity, abandons respect for the rule of law (to say nothing of common decency), reverses the progress we have made on climate change, and upends the alliances and world order that have kept much of the world relatively peaceful for the last eight decades.
For our institutions to hold and prevent our democracy from sliding into an autocracy, it will be up to all of us, but especially Republican elected officials and those who will work in Trump’s coming administration, to call out Trump’s lack of character, honesty or ethics.
We must be vigilant for the rule of law to prevail, so that when the Trump era ends, we can hopefully move forward as a country where basic rules apply equally to all, and where civility and respect for both the law and our fellow citizens once again becomes the norm and not the exception. Maybe the work it will take to get through the years ahead is just the test of character and strength our country needs to get back on the path to becoming the “more perfect union” our founding fathers envisioned.
Ira Rubinfeld, Springdale
